by Unknown
One afternoon in August, Amadeo practices on a tiny last divot on his truck’s windshield, and then decides it’s about time to change the oil and filter. He’s allowed to work on his truck, after all. The birds are noisy in the trees. Across the road, the leaves of the corn in the Romeros’ little plot droop in graceful resignation and the feathery tassels tickle the breeze. He pauses every once in a while to check for texts from Brianna, despite the fact that she’s told him she tries not to text at school.
Amadeo has been in good spirits, hasn’t had anything to drink since that first date, and doesn’t even miss it, or not so much anyway. When he needs to unwind, sink away from himself, or to celebrate, he remembers that he’s closest to being the person he wants to be than he has ever been before.
What he’s doing isn’t necessarily a betrayal of his daughter. After all, things might work out with Brianna. They might get married, and Angel would get her idol for a stepmother. Angel loves her! Still, he’s listed Brianna in his phone as DWI Class Teacher.
When he’s with Brianna, he forgets about his other life completely. The world vibrates with possibility. This morning at dawn, for instance, the air fresh and dry and chilly, making him feel clean despite the sticky aftermath of sex. Riding home beside Brianna along the empty blacktop with a light heart, the quiet easy between them, they watched the mountain’s shadow recede as the sun rose behind it, everything painted in the brightening pale wash of morning. He took Brianna’s hand, and she smiled as if she understood his elation.
He’s draining the old oil into a cut-open milk jug when Angel comes out, stomping across the gravel.
“Hey,” he calls to her sneakered feet.
“Dad.” She doesn’t squat to peer under at him. “Ryan Johnson wants to come meet the baby.”
“Who?” Amadeo wriggles out, lifting himself painfully over the gravel, and squints up, wiping sweat from his face with his bicep. His hands are slick with oil.
Angel looks at the sky. “His father.”
Fear scissors through him. “Whose father?” Amadeo is aware that he’s playing dumb, and playing it badly, because he doesn’t want Connor’s life to open up to include people he doesn’t know and hasn’t vetted. Somehow he’d allowed himself to forget that there is a father.
Amadeo is curious, too, however. Because who was this guy who managed to get his daughter naked? He pictures a charmer, a thick-lashed handsome boy.
“He’s coming in twenty minutes, so could you just be here?”
“You told him where we live?” He sits up. Angel tears the skin edging her thumbnail. She seems almost afraid. “Is he dangerous? Do you think he might—” Hurt her, he means, but not just that. Did this guy force himself on her? At the thought, a queasy fury passes through him, sharpening at the prospect of an actual target. He would kill this guy.
“No,” says Angel, catching his expression, and her face screws up in annoyance. “Just be here, okay, Dad? Like, in the room?”
Amadeo scrubs his hands and face. He’d like a shower, but he wants to be in position when this kid shows up. So he waits, smelling of body odor and engine grease, while Angel gets ready.
She looks no less nervous when she emerges in her maternity jeans and a tank top, the fat white straps of her nursing bra digging into her shoulders. She reeks of perfume, Yolanda’s Shalimar, a middle-aged lady smell. Across her cheeks the foundation is thick and matte like clay. Her lipstick is shimmery pink and sticky.
“You look good.”
“I look like ass,” she says bleakly. “Nothing fits.”
“Hey, no. You’re losing weight already.”
“Whatever. I can hide behind Connor.” She lifts the baby from his bouncer by his upper arms and swings him over to her lap. “Could you at least change your shirt before he gets here? And don’t you dare start drinking.”
He doesn’t even defend himself, just goes to put on a shirt that won’t shame her.
Ryan Johnson shows up in a beat-up dark green minivan. They watch in silence from the window. The kid looks around as if he doesn’t understand how he got here. They wait for him to approach the house, hunt for a doorbell, then squeak open the screen to knock.
Angel gestures impatiently for Amadeo to answer the door.
Ryan is not the handsome vato Amadeo pictured, but a skinny curly-haired blond with a yellowing whitehead swelling his nose. It seems like a character flaw that he hasn’t popped the pimple. “Hi.” The kid flashes an anxious smile at Amadeo and, behind him, Angel, revealing a lot of fleshy, pink gum. His teeth are small and a little thin-looking, as if he didn’t get enough calcium during some critical years. But it’s a sweet smile, and Amadeo is relieved that this kid is a harmless dork.
“Hey.” Angel starts bouncing Connor industriously on her hip as if to quiet him, except that he’s limp and asleep.
Amadeo reaches for the baby, but Angel elbows him away. She fiddles with the orange feet on Connor’s suit, straightening, smoothing. There’s always something to adjust on a baby.
Angel doesn’t offer him a seat. Ryan smiles again, this time more of a joyless grimace. He tugs at the misshapen hem of his blue T-shirt. Amadeo imagines that the boy’s mother chose it to match his eyes.
Amadeo watches Ryan watch the baby. The kid has the pallor and posture of an egg noodle. “I can’t believe it,” Ryan says. His eyes are wide with feeling.
“Can’t believe what?” Angel’s voice is surly, and no one replies.
“I would have come before,” he tells Amadeo, “but Angel”—he darts a worried look at her—“I only just found out last night. I swear I would have come before.”
“That’s great,” Amadeo says encouragingly.
Everyone’s eyes are on the baby, as everyone’s eyes always are, but it’s particularly pronounced now, when no one can bear to look at anyone else.
“Want a Coke?” Amadeo is already filling cups with ice, welcoming the grinding clatter of the ice maker. He pours soda over the crackling ice, passes the glasses around.
Angel sips, and Amadeo remembers too late that she no longer drinks soda.
“Oh, here.” He reaches for her glass. “I forgot. Let me get milk for you.”
Angel waves him off. “It’s cool.”
“I didn’t know you had a dad,” says Ryan. “For some reason I thought he was dead.”
Amadeo starts. “You thought I was dead?”
“He’s not dead. Obviously. I just don’t talk about him much.”
“Gee, thanks,” says Amadeo, ready to joke. See? He’s not reading insult into every little thing. He chuckles gamely.
“School’s pretty good this year,” Ryan says.
Silence.
“You like school, Ryan?” Amadeo has got to quit watching television. The scene he’s in now is Father Meets Daughter’s Boyfriend, and the role calls for him to be cheerful, hapless, well-meaning. Except that Amadeo is no television father and this kid is not Angel’s boyfriend.
“I like it okay. I play basketball.”
“JV,” says Angel.
“How do you know I haven’t moved up?” He clutches his knobby wrists. “You weren’t at school for practically all year last year.”
“I know you’re not on varsity.”
Amadeo begins to feel bad for the kid. “Here, sit,” he tells them.
Angel obeys, but when Ryan sits next to her on the couch, she scoots away so she’s wedged against the armrest.
“Why is his head like that? So bumpy.”
Offense flares in Amadeo, but Angel just shrugs. “His skull bones are still moving around.”
Ryan extends a long finger, lets it hover over the black curls, but then thinks better of it, and touches Connor’s red fist instead. “Hi, little dude.” He sits back against the cushions, but his eyes don’t stray from the baby.
Amadeo peers at Connor, trying to see a resemblance between him and Ryan. Connor did not get Ryan’s long face or weak chin, certainly not his coloring. But there is
something in the shape of his mouth.
“Can I hold him?” Ryan asks.
“He’s your kid, too.” Her tone is bitter, but then she says, more softly, “Sure.” She places Connor in Ryan’s arms. The maneuver requires her to get near him, but once the baby has been transferred, she retreats to the corner of the couch again. She drags her legs up.
Ryan draws Connor cautiously toward his skinny chest. He seems relieved when Angel takes the baby back.
“So how did you two meet?” Amadeo immediately regrets asking, because the question seems just a hair away from asking how Connor was conceived.
“Geometry,” Angel says flatly. “Mrs. Esposito.”
“Angel’s really good at geometry. Was. I called her Angle. Obtuse Angle. For, like, a joke.” Ryan laughs, a dweeby, breathy laugh. Amadeo pictures him powering through a clumsy flirtation, maybe yanking a braid or two. He wouldn’t have expected a math joke to work on his daughter, but maybe that just shows how little he knows her.
Angel’s face has reddened. “I hated that class.”
“It wasn’t bad. I have her again, third period.”
Angel stares down at the baby angrily. A long silence, before Amadeo asks, “So what are you learning in math now? Maybe you could help fill Angel in.”
His daughter flashes him a furious glance.
Ryan stands and wipes his hands on his jeans. “I guess I should go.”
Later, Amadeo ventures, “Weird that Connor is half white.” Then, when Angel doesn’t reply, “He doesn’t seem like a bad kid, Ryan.”
Yolanda still isn’t home. Angel has just changed and fed Connor, and now he’s sprawled asleep on the couch. Connor screws up his face, irritated in his sleep, and thrusts his dimpled chin up. The scowl loosens.
“Good for him for coming by. Not all guys would.” Amadeo is thinking of the moment at the very end of Ryan’s visit that neither he nor Angel has mentioned. Ryan stepped toward Angel, pressed his lips against the baby’s forehead, and didn’t remove them for a long time, the seconds ticking by while Amadeo and Angel watched him, aghast. Finally, he looked up and said quietly, “It’s crazy, but I love him.”
Angel appeared not to have heard Ryan then, and she appears not to hear Amadeo now. She inspects her thumbnail.
A scary thought occurs to Amadeo, the kind of thought that would have occurred months ago to a responsible adult. “Wait, his family, they’re not going to try to take him away, are they?”
“He’s not going to tell his mom. She’d be pissed. I shouldn’t’ve even told him about it. I guess I wanted him to feel like shit, since I did. I think he did, too.”
Amadeo is troubled by the implication: that it wasn’t obvious to Ryan and everyone else at Angel’s school who the father was, that there were other boys in the mix. Amadeo also doesn’t believe anyone could keep a secret this big from his own mother, especially not someone as basically sweet as Ryan appears to be.
“I wish I hadn’t told him. I don’t want him coming around. I don’t want him holding him again.” She stands with effort and scoops up the baby. “I’m putting him to bed.”
Before lunch, Angel stops by the nursery to feed Connor. It takes longer than usual—he is distracted and keeps pulling away to babble at her—so she is last to come out to the patio. On the horizon, purple clouds are mounding. The other girls have already crowded around the first picnic table, spread their sandwiches and string cheese and carrots. The wrappers flap in the wind. Angel looks skeptically at the second picnic table, where Jen sits alone, eating an apple and texting one-handed.
“Scooch,” Lizette orders Ysenia. She doesn’t look at Angel, but indicates with her thumb where Angel should sit beside her, and takes another bite of her sandwich.
“I was here,” Ysenia protests, but she moves down nonetheless, pulling her lunch with her.
Angel squeezes in, puzzled and pleased, because it’s the first time since her falling-out with Priscilla last fall that anyone’s saved her a place for lunch, and she’s forgotten how good it feels to be awaited. “Hey,” she says to the table at large, but mostly to Lizette.
Lizette nods in curt acknowledgment. Angel, aware of Lizette and Ysenia pressed on either side of her, their warm thighs and upper arms, opens her lunch bag carefully so as not to bump them.
“Don’t get too excited. It’s just turkey.” Lizette brandishes her own floppy sandwich, the pale wheat bread damp and smooth from the plastic wrap.
After that, at lunch and in the classroom, it’s understood that Angel’s seat is beside Lizette, and the other girls make way for her, just as they make way for Christy and Trinity.
Angel isn’t sure why Lizette picked her, and certainly Lizette never indicates that she has reasons—Lizette’s attention is like grace: unasked for, undeserved, and, Angel suspects, sometimes terrible.
AT COMMUNITY MEETING on Friday, Brianna announces that, in pairs, they’re going to do research projects on the culture and parenting practices in a country of their choice. “So I want you to find a partner and let me know Monday what country you want to research. Think about places you’re curious about. You can consult the library or the internet. This is your opportunity to take a kind of trip to a part of the world you’ve never seen.”
Angel thinks about African babies nursing as their mothers pound roots, of South American babies strapped to their mothers’ backs with colorful cloths, of fancy English kids singing and dancing along with Mary Poppins.
Lizette raises her hand, a single lazy flap. “Me and Angel are going to do Finland.” She says it as though they’ve discussed it already, as though they knew anything about this project to begin with.
Brianna starts. “Finland. Okay,” she says slowly. “Anyone else have ideas?”
Jen looks around the room. “Anyone want to do China with me? My pastor did missionary work in China, so we’d have a head start.”
Lizette is hunched over her desk, her chin almost touching the Cosmo lying open before her, her sleeves pulled over her hands. She seems intent on Community Meeting. It was nice of her to decide to work with Angel, though it would have been nicer if she’d consulted Angel. And Finland? Angel is aware that Finland is a country, possibly in Siberia or Europe, but has no image at all of Finnish children. She thinks they must be either very blond or very dark and dressed in polar bear skins.
The typed outline is due at the end of next week, full ten-to-twelve-page reports and presentations—with visual aids—a week after that. “You are encouraged but not required to cook a native dish for the class to try.” Brianna consults her notes. “Okay. Any other issues that have come up for you this week? Trinity, spit out the gum.” She taps Respect the classroom and equipment. “You know better.”
Trinity spits her gum into her hand. “Sorry, miss.” She shakes her hand over the trash until the wad unsticks from her palm.
Angel considers bringing up Ryan Johnson and her quivery feeling that she made a dreadful mistake in telling him about Connor, but she isn’t sure she wants her class knowing about him.
She doesn’t even know why she told him. “Hi, Angle!” he’d chirped. He’d called out of the blue to see “what’s up,” without mentioning the baby or her pregnancy, as if it might embarrass her. “You’re not missing much at school. I have Mrs. Esposito again, so that’s cool.” Angel had been furious that Ryan could be so cheerfully oblivious to his part in her exile. Listening to him go on about the basketball team’s win against Los Alamos, she’d felt so desolate she had to say something to stop him in his tracks. “The baby’s yours, too, so you can quit being so proud of yourself. I’m not the only one who fucked up.”
“Wait, are you for serious? It’s mine?”
“He is yours. Don’t act so surprised. You know how babies are made, right? You heard why I dropped out and you didn’t even wonder?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m, like, on the honor roll.”
She’d hung up on him, but an hour or so later he call
ed back, and didn’t quit until she agreed to let him come over. In the last few days, he’s texted constantly, just to say hello and to ask about the baby. He hasn’t threatened to take Connor away from her, but she still has the sense that with Ryan on the scene things are even more out of her control.
“Hey, miss,” says Ysenia. “I pick Paris for my country report. Their kids never sass, and they’re all fashionable. I saw that on Good Morning America.”
“Yes!” says Jen. “And Paris moms never gain weight.”
“Paris isn’t a country, dumbass,” says Lizette.
“Out,” Brianna tells Lizette. Her response is so swift and cutting that the breath freezes in Angel’s chest, a cold sealed cavity. “Get out now, Lizette. You may not speak to another person that way in my classroom.” Brianna jabs the air.
Lizette’s eyes flash wide in fear. Then her face smooths, and she flips her hair. “All right.” She gathers her purse and magazine. “See y’all,” she says to the students, lips pursed sardonically. Angel watches, dismayed. Lizette winks.
“Now, Lizette.” Brianna is still pointing at the door. She lowers her hand as if it’s an alien object and puts it in her pocket. “Wait for me in the hall.”
Christy starts giggling, her face turning red and unhappy. “Chris, stop it,” Trinity whispers.
“Any other issues for Community Meeting?” Brianna asks. “Well, then. Adjourned. You can spend the last twenty minutes until dismissal reading silently.” She follows Lizette to the hallway, and though Angel strains to hear, she can’t even pick up murmurs.
Later, on her way out, laden with Connor and her backpack and diaper bag, Brianna calls to her from the classroom door.
“Could I see you for a moment, please, Angel?”
“Sure.” She approaches Brianna’s desk with the uneasy feeling that she’s done something wrong.
“I noticed that Lizette volunteered you to be her partner for the foreign country project. Are you okay with that?”
“Yeah,” Angel says. “Course.”
“I just wanted to check. I remember being your age and getting saddled with partners who didn’t pull their weight. I know how frustrating that can be for a good student.” Brianna’s forehead creases as if she’s very troubled. “I’m glad Lizette has you as a friend. It’s good of you. And maybe you can help her. But listen”—Brianna tugs a strand of Angel’s hair gently, and Angel flushes and steps back, remembering about boundaries—“unhappy people, they can try to bring you down.”
