by Unknown
The muscles in Cal’s jaw pulse. “Okay,” he says finally, breaking eye contact. He stands, pushing up with palms on thighs, then slaps his thighs once with finality. He’s not looking at her at all. “Okay,” he says, and then he’s gone.
Amadeo marvels at his daughter’s ease with his uncle. Tío Tíve now delivers groceries to their house, once or twice a week, batting away Amadeo’s thanks, setting them before Angel like offerings. At first he brings the same cans of beans and beef stew and packaged tortillas that he buys for himself, until Angel intervenes.
“This is so nice of you, Tío. To help you next time, I made a little list of things that we specially need. Like, vegetables and stuff.”
Angel kisses his cheek and starts putting the food away. Outside, Tíve’s dog Honey waits patiently by the door, her head on her paws.
“You want some juice, Tío?” Amadeo offers. Tíve seems glad to linger, sitting with Yolanda, if she’s up, or with Angel as she cooks and bounces the baby. Amadeo joins in, too, and they all talk while his mother withdraws into some perplexed corner of her mind. Tío Tíve steals looks at her: she, who was always dashing about, is now suffused with stillness. Her face is even thinner, the skin creased around her bruised eyes. She stares at a spot on her lap and works her mouth silently around a word.
One day, when Tíve drops the groceries by, Amadeo’s mother is up and lucid and sitting at the kitchen table.
“Please, Tío,” she says, drawing her purse to her, “I need to pay. I get . . . debility?”
Amadeo looks away. He can’t stand the search for words.
“Disability, Gramma?” Angel asks. She makes furtive eye contact with Tíve. She’s at the counter, holding the baby, forming pink hamburger patties on a cutting board with one hand.
“Dizzabilty.” She picks slowly through her purse. Tío Tíve watches in alarm as this thin, erratic woman fumbles with her wallet.
“Take,” Yolanda says, pulling out bills. Her hair beneath her cap is fine and dull gray except at the still-dyed tips.
“No, Yo. I’m not gonna.”
Yolanda shakes her hands, upset. The bills drop to the table. One flutters to the ground. Amadeo retrieves it and places it before her.
“Can you call my mom to get me?”
Tíve opens his mouth but does not speak.
“Gramma,” says Angel, “your mom can’t come now. But we’re here with you.” Connor lunges toward the raw beef, open palm swiping, and Angel jolts back, dropping a patty on the floor with a smack.
“Give him here,” Tíve says, taking Connor, who objects and then quiets. “Can I take him outside to see Honey? She’s gentle.”
Angel hesitates. “I guess that’s okay. Just keep him above her head. And get his coat.” She catches Amadeo’s eye. Go with him.
“She’s losing things every day,” Amadeo tells his uncle in a low voice.
Tíve takes the concrete steps one by one, balancing precariously, and it’s all Amadeo can do not to grab Connor from his arms. “That idiot Anthony never put a railing out here. For years he said he would. All you kids climbing up and down them on your hands and knees. Your poor mom. The things she put up with.” Tíve sighs. “Your dad was a good friend to my Elwin.” Tíve eases himself down to sit, and Amadeo sits beside him.
Amadeo thinks of that photo of the two young men. He can’t reconcile that smiling young face with his shadowy sense of his father. He remembers navigating cautiously around him, afraid of setting him off.
Honey gets to her feet, grinning her frilled black-edged lips and wagging her tail nub. Her coat gleams auburn. Connor regards the dog sternly and then looks to his grandfather and great-great-great-uncle and breaks into a laugh. “Stay down there,” Amadeo tells Honey, and her nub wags more enthusiastically.
“I never knew my boy when he was this age.” Tíve says. “In those days the men worked for their families. Most days the baby was asleep by the time I got home for dinner.”
“I try to help.”
“You gotta do better than your dad.”
Amadeo’s face heats. The piñons are glazed in the low autumn light.
Honey noses the baby’s fat legs in their striped pants, leaving smudges of damp. Connor looks to Tíve in wide-eyed apprehension. He whimpers, but doesn’t commit to distress. “Hey, you’re okay,” the old man says, waving the baby’s hand. “She’s a nice doggy. You ever meet a doggy-woggy?”
Until his mother said it that night, Amadeo had no idea his father wanted to get him a dog. He doesn’t remember at all. For his father to want a dog for him—companionship, affection—he must have cared. Perhaps he knew he wouldn’t be around long.
“I should have been there more for your dad. But after Elwin—” His uncle cuts off. “I didn’t know how to help nobody.”
“I can’t think of anything sadder.” Losing Angel: the thought is unimaginable.
His uncle doesn’t answer for a long moment.
“The night before I left for basic training in 1942, my dad took me out walking, up to the old morada.” Tíve nudged his chin in the direction of the town. “My whole life my dad limped—in the war, he got mustard-gassed and his leg never healed. Even back then the morada was just a pile of dirt. He told me, ‘My dad held every office at some point: Hermano Mayor, rezador, sangrador.’ Told me he wished he’d kept it going.”
Amadeo thought of his uncle, so young, standing with his own father in the adobe ruins, plaster-cracked and doorless. Maybe he’d been thinking of the meal his mother and sisters were preparing for him back at the house, or of the inconceivable journey across the ocean that lay ahead of him. Perhaps Tíve’s father rolled a cigarette and handed it to Tíve, rolled a second for himself, then dropped the match and scuffed out the red glow.
Tíve shifts Connor’s weight. “My dad told me, used to be the morada was the heart of our village. He told me, ‘Make sure you come home, son. Las Penas isn’t dead yet.’ Maybe now it really is.”
Amadeo imagines the village as it was in those long-ago days, vibrant with fiestas and matanzas, weddings and bailes. If he strains, he can almost hear the ghostly whoops and accordion and stomping feet from some long-ago dance.
Dog and baby strain toward each other. Connor frowns, reaching, and Honey grins, breathing excitedly. When Connor makes contact, he closes his fingers around her wet nose, gives her whole snout a good shake. Honey submits, but twitches her pale eyebrows with worry at Tíve. At the sound of Connor’s happy, gurgling shriek, the old man laughs.
Amadeo smiles, but he’s troubled. “We’re still here, Tío. We’re still in this town. Connor’s growing up here.”
“It’s not right. I should go before your mom. I should have gone before all of them.”
Amadeo cannot formulate a response because behind them comes the sound of uneven steps, and the screen pushes out. “Dodo.”
They turn to see his mother swaying in the doorway above, watching them with a strange intensity. Amadeo thinks she’s about to reprimand them for letting the baby play with the dog.
“Yeah, Mom?”
Tíve clambers up unsteadily. Alarmed, Amadeo stands, too, his hand hovering under his uncle’s elbow. He can almost see gravity claw at the old man, sees in his mind the moment he tips down the concrete steps into the gravel with Connor, but then Tíve is on his feet. Connor wriggles to reach down for Honey.
“Can I take him, Tío? Let me take him.”
But Tíve grips the baby, watching Yolanda. The screen is between them, his uncle on the top step, his mother pushing out.
So Amadeo cups his uncle’s elbow and braces the handle of the screen door, because he doesn’t want to throw either his mother or his uncle off-balance. “Let’s go inside, Mom. Let’s all go inside.”
“No,” she says, and shakes her head fervently like a toddler. The cap has come askew, revealing pale scalp beneath her thin hair. She doesn’t budge from the doorway. Her fingers against the doorjamb are tense and gripping, purple. She pushes
the screen against them.
“Dodo.”
Amadeo wants everyone inside. He wants his uncle to put down Connor’s squirming weight. He wants everyone settled on solid ground.
She seems to be struggling to get the words out. “I loved your dad, Dodo.” Her lips tremble. “No matter he was gay.”
“Gay?” His mother has deteriorated so much. Carefully he says, “Oh, Mom. Dad wasn’t gay. He just had a hard time.”
Amadeo lifts his grandson from his uncle’s arms, and Tíve catches hold of the baby’s shirt to steady himself. Amadeo then eases the door open, takes his mother by the upper arm, and guides her backwards into the house.
THE HOUSE is submerged in a midmorning quiet, the windows sealed against the birdsong outside. Except for an occasional faintly echoing tick, like a fingernail absently grazing a duct deep in the house, the heating vents are still. It’s an empty quiet, although the house is not, in fact, empty.
Amadeo stretches across his rumpled bed with his shirt off while his mother dozes in her own bedroom. Connor was up all night screaming in teething pain. Around one, after Angel fed him again and rubbed his gums with numbing ointment, her face pale, voice drawn and cranky, Amadeo got up from playing Thorscape, took the baby, and sent her to bed. Until four in the morning, he paced the hot living room with his grandson, narrating everything the way Angel taught him—“There’s the lamp. See the light? See the light on the window?”—Connor’s eyes getting glassier and glassier, his whimpers getting weaker and more widely spaced, until finally he dropped off and Amadeo could deposit him in his crib in Angel’s room, where his daughter was a smoothly breathing mound under the blanket.
The thermostat has been set at seventy-seven, but even so his mother is buried under layers of sweaters and quilts, time seeping out of her. He stares at the pebbled stucco on his ceiling, trying to accustom himself to the idea of her absence, but like a plant angling itself imperceptibly toward a sunny window, Amadeo is aware of his mother’s pulse across the hall, its quiet determined effort to keep her alive.
His mother is dying—she will die. Why is it so difficult to wrap his head around this simple, immutable fact? He feels the tug of both this inevitable future and of the past, when his mother was in her true form: quick and purposeful and smiling, with warm brown eyes, hair lush and long and evenly dyed.
For now, she is herself and not herself—stick-limbed, gray-skinned, the curiosity in her eyes receding, her voice both high and gravelly—an unwelcome version of herself that he nonetheless clings to. When she slips into light, permeable sleep, he can’t stop checking on her, longing for her to jolt awake and reassure him.
His mother, who saved them all from their father, who fed them and buoyed them, who—why does he only now understand this?—was the font of all strength, is withdrawing, becoming small and peevish and disoriented. Amadeo can feel his memories of her being written over by this new, inferior version.
Now he’ll never nap. He smashes his face into his sweaty pillow. The sense of quiet has fled, replaced by hot, jittery anxiety.
When his phone chirps, he startles, blinks stinging eyes. Brianna. How are you?? Then, a moment later: Would you want to hang out sometime soon?
From his dresser, beer cans emit their yeasty funk. He must dispose of them before Angel gets home, or be subjected to her tight disapproval. His bedroom is chaotic with strewn clothes. His sheets smell grungy—his mother hasn’t, for obvious reasons, been washing them of late.
His thumbs hover over the phone. Amadeo hasn’t seen Brianna in weeks, not since before his mother’s seizure, and he feels unfairly caught out.
Angel must not have told Brianna about Yolanda’s diagnosis, otherwise surely she would have reached out to Amadeo with sympathy. With a pang, he wonders who his daughter is talking to about her troubles. Angel is probably frowning into her social studies book while, fifteen feet away, her teacher taps her phone, setting up an assignation with her father.
Since he met Brianna, everything had been going so well for him, and he’d begun seeing his every move—his interactions with Angel, his grandfathering, Creative Windshield Solutions—through her eyes. Under Brianna’s imaginary attention, Amadeo felt more virtuous: patient, selfless, a good father and grandfather. More of the man that other men seem to be effortlessly, more of the man he always imagined he truly was, in his purest state.
But then that double punch of Monica’s car and his mother’s collapse undid his entire life. Failure upon failure. He couldn’t call her.
His phone chimes. It would be great to see you. He can sense her anxiety, which makes him anxious, too, and vaguely guilty, and resentful that he’s being made to feel guilty, because hasn’t he been doing the right thing, caring for his mother?
Things have been crazy, Amadeo types, but instead of sending it, he calls her, not examining his reasons. His pulse throbs in his temple.
“Hey,” she says, voice low and cautious. “How have you been?”
“Okay. Busy. Things have been crazy.” He’s trying to think how to tell her about his mother, but then she breaks in.
“It’s just kind of weird that you haven’t been in touch. I mean, I’m not saying we’re in a relationship or anything, it’s just pretty weird. Like, we were seeing each other every week. Texting all the time. We”—and here she drops her voice still lower—“slept together.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“And then you disappear. Like, what am I supposed to think?”
Amadeo should want to comfort her or explain himself, but instead he’s furious. His heart hops, ready for a fight. Who does she think she is, ambushing him like this? He called to tell her about his mother.
“I don’t know what you think this is,” he starts, then falters.
“Listen. I’ve taken real professional and ethical risks to be with . . . to spend time with you.” She’s whispering harshly, and he has the uneasy sense that tears are around the corner. But then she takes a deep breath. “Sorry,” she says, voice clearing. “Okay, using my words. I guess I just thought you’d call and was bummed that you didn’t.”
Her frankness sets Amadeo at a disadvantage. “Well, sometimes you’re not the most important thing going on.”
A beat. “Okay, then. What is going on? Can we at least talk about it? About what’s happening with us? It seems like we should talk about it.”
Amadeo has the sense of losing ground. “Listen, you’re a great girl and all, but there’s a lot of shit happening in my life right now.” This is a breakup script, he realizes.
“So what, you’re ghosting me?”
“No, because if I was ghosting you, I wouldn’t be calling, would I. My fucking mother is dying, okay? So get the fuck over yourself.”
He hangs up. It was a slam dunk, an absolute, unassailable win, but the rush of vindication doesn’t come. My fucking mother is dying. Stupid. He should have said, My mother is fucking dying. He punches the mattress. It’s so damn hot in here. “Argh!” he yells, then stops. He listens for his mother’s croaking, plaintive voice, for a breath. But all is quiet.
Angel’s life is split in two. The first part is home, where she’s always cooking or tending or rushing to do her homework, where, each day, her grandmother and her son display new behaviors, new changes to their bodies.
Connor almost crawls now, rocking back and forth on his hands and knees as if he’s about to launch himself across a ravine, before splaying flat and dragging himself army-style across the floor. His bare chest squeaks on the linoleum, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
For her part, Yolanda is becoming vague, hesitant in her speech and movements. She’s misshapen, too, simultaneously too thin—breasts and belly deflated—and, from the steroids, swollen. Her cheeks have puffed; her skin is the color of dust. Her wrists, which were always narrow and graceful, have thickened, so that the silver bracelet she’s worn Angel’s entire life is a tight band.
One afternoon Angel comes across he
r grandmother standing before the bathroom mirror, smoothing the hair at her temple, smoothing, smoothing. Each time, it springs up, wiry and unruly.
“You okay?” Be careful, she wants to tell her grandmother. At the back of her head, the skin is stapled shut, the bone still not closed over.
Her grandmother frowns. “I don’t feel like that.”
“Like what, Gramma?”
She flaps her hand at the reflection. “Not inside. Inside me I’m cute.”
“You’re cute,” Angel says. “You’re still cute.”
Her grandmother catches sight of Angel’s troubled expression and smiles, skin creased around her mouth, teeth bared. “Can you call my mother?”
At Smart Starts!, every part of the day is designed to support Angel and to keep her mind on other things, and a smile or a stray touch from Lizette can, for up to half an hour at a time, wipe away her sadness.
The trouble starts midmorning one Wednesday in early October, when, twenty minutes into GED workbook time, Jen announces that she is selling raffle tickets to raise funds for her church’s trip to Honduras. “It’s the last day. I keep forgetting to tell you guys.”
“Not the time, Jen,” Brianna says, looking up from her laptop.
“They’re only five dollars apiece.” Jen waves her roll of paper tickets. “The prize is a spa day at Ojo Caliente.”
“I’ll buy one,” says Tabitha, digging her wallet out of her purse. “I could use a spa day. What do they do, like massage you and paint your nails?”
“How’re you going to get to Ojo Caliente, Tabitha?” asks Ysenia. “In your pumpkin chariot? You don’t got money to waste on no raffle.”
“It’s not a waste,” says Jen. “It’s to benefit people in need.”
“We got people in need right here,” says Ysenia. “In this very room. We even got people from Honduras in Española. You want to encourage more to come over here where everyone’s all strung out and there’s crap for jobs?”
Jen sighs. “I don’t know why you’re complaining. You get food stamps. Plus you have a free lunch every day and—”
“Every weekday,” cuts in Ysenia.