by Unknown
Ryan murmurs. He lifts her shirt, then takes it off, and she allows this, allows him also to unhook her bra, still with the sense that she is performing for Lizette. She turns her back to him and peels the nursing bra off, sweaty and sour. She tucks it under her shirt on the cushion, then turns back, supporting her heavy breasts with her forearm. Her nipples are alarming: eager, wrinkled things, and she covers them, embarrassed.
But when his hand is in her underwear, his crooked finger digging around, she tenses. Angel lies against the couch, watching the light shift on the pebbled plaster ceiling. She wonders if she can feel any pleasure from this, and then, when she decides not, takes his bony wrist and removes his hand.
“You don’t want it?” he asks, disappointed.
“No.” She arches her back to zip up her jeans, then pushes herself up and away from him. “Sorry.” She puts on her shirt, balls up her bra to deal with later, and crosses her arms.
“I want you so bad,” he says, but not wheedling, just a statement of fact.
“Oh.” Angel tries to think of the kind thing to say.
Ryan sits up, too, and smooths his hair. The skin at his throat and chest pulses. He looks straight ahead. They both do, at Yolanda’s doll cabinet: the big-headed little blondes in their dirndls, the porcelain Princess Di with the satin wedding dress and gruesomely painted teeth, the dead-eyed Victorian girl with her elaborate velvet hat. Angel realizes she has no idea what those dolls meant to her grandmother, doesn’t know which were Yolanda’s when she was a girl, which were Valerie’s, why Yolanda bought the rest. And now, of course, it’s too late to ask.
“Is this going to be weird?” Ryan asks bleakly.
“How much weirder can it be?”
Ryan untangles his shirt, pale shoulders hunched for modesty. After he puts it on, they sit, side by side.
“Should we check on Connor?” Ryan asks.
“I don’t want to wake him.” But after a moment, as if the baby knows his services are required, from down the hall and behind the closed door comes a string of babble.
She’s happy to see him sitting up in the room’s dimness, turning toward her, eyes bright as he raises his arms. Out in the living room, he torques his body, reaches for Ryan.
“Oh, he loves me!” Ryan takes him onto his lap. Baby and boy regard each other with broad grins, and though she knows it’s absurd, knows that when it comes down to it, Connor prefers her to anyone else on the planet, she still feels a stab of betrayal. He’s never been like this with Lizette, and Lizette has never shown much interest in him.
She needs to see her. “Listen, why don’t we go into town?” She makes her voice light and flirty. A plan is forming in her mind. They’ll go to Lizette’s—she isn’t due to move for another couple days—just friends casually stopping by to say hello. Angel’s mistake was being too available, and Angel needs to demonstrate that she is desired. Lizette will glean what has transpired between Angel and Ryan, and if she doesn’t, Angel will tell her, and when Lizette truly understands what she is about to lose, she’ll come back to her.
“Hey, yeah!” says Ryan, his normal voice restored, the awkwardness behind them. “I’ll take you guys to dinner.” He flushes. “Not, like, a date. Unless . . . ?” He trails off. “Have you even left the house, since, you know, your grandma?”
“No,” she admits, aware that, although this is the truth, she is making use of it. “Sure, okay. Can we go to Lotaburger?” Lotaburger is quick, and it’s right around the corner from Lizette’s. Angel feels empty and light, as if she is shaping her own life, and she feels powerful, too, because somehow Ryan thinks this is his idea.
“Yes! It’ll be so fun!”
“And then I want you to meet my friend.”
“Really?” Ryan’s eyes are shining.
Angel dismisses the pang of guilt. “You guys will like each other.”
She buttons Connor into his puffy winter jacket and checks the supplies in the diaper bag, which Ryan takes from her hands. Outside, he cranes to watch as Angel straps the car seat into the back of his minivan. “Oh, I get it, you put the belt through that thing?”
While Ryan drives, Angel texts Lizette. You home? Can we stop by to say hi? It’s just another in the long series of unanswered texts.
At the restaurant, Ryan wets napkins under the water spigot on the soda machine, then scrubs dried ketchup from the table like an old lady. When they call his number, he retrieves the tray and arranges the table with warm paper-wrapped packages and baskets of fries and sweating cups of soda.
Lizette still hasn’t answered. The smell of fries and cooked meat is delicious, and the inside of the restaurant is cheery, strung with limp Christmas garlands, but Angel doesn’t think she can eat a bite. “I’m really not hungry.” She’s nervous now, afraid her plan won’t work. She’s afraid to see Lizette.
“Well.” He nudges a burger closer to her. “In case you change your mind.” Pointing at a cheeseburger, he says, “This one is for Connor. The green chile is on the side.”
On her lap, Connor strains toward it, but she pushes it out of his reach. “You got him a hamburger? He’s seven months old. He eats, like, a pinch of bread, maybe. An arrowroot cookie. I brought his pears in the bag.”
“Oh.” Ryan bites his lip.
She unwraps her burger and takes a bite, then sets it down again. Outside, the concrete tables are abandoned in the cold. The early-evening light is a crisp blue; Angel wonders if it might snow.
She thinks she can sense Lizette nearby, across the road, the street obscured by the big sign for Selmo’s Muffler Services, but the distance might as well be a thousand miles. The buildings of Española are low under the darkening sky, and everything is suffused with a sad, wintry desolation. Ache spreads behind Angel’s breastbone.
What if Lizette just sees Ryan as a loser and isn’t jealous at all? What if, after all, Lizette is completely indifferent? What if Ryan is the best she can ever do?
She hands Connor a fry, which he gums into oblivion before flinging it away. Ryan hands him another.
“Don’t give him no more. I don’t want him getting a taste for fat and salt.”
Angel takes another bite of her hamburger. Connor reaches up and bats it, and she swivels out of his reach. His dimpled chin shines with drool.
“Here, let me hold him.” Ryan places his burger on the wrapper and lifts Connor from her arms. “So you can eat.”
He bounces his leg and Connor laughs, and reaches up to grab a handful of Ryan’s patchy facial hair. Ryan laughs and gently pries away the hand. “You slimed me with French fry, little guy.”
Swallowing the last bite of her burger, Angel sees them as a stranger might: a family sitting together over a meal, a beautiful laughing baby and his two young parents. Too-young parents. Despair floods her. So as to crowd out the quivering nervousness in her stomach, she finishes her fries, then Connor’s, then starts in on his burger.
“So, what’re you going to do now?” Ryan asks. “When are you going back to your school?”
Angel doesn’t answer. With difficulty, she swallows. She’s beginning to feel sick.
“Seriously,” Ryan says, animated. “Did you ask if you can go back? Did you ever talk to the principal?”
“There’s no principal. It’s not that kind of school. There’s just the president. Eric Maxwell.”
“Well, talk to that guy, then. You have to. Get your mom and dad to. Like, when I skipped a grade, it wouldn’t have happened if my mom hadn’t driven the principal nuts. They want to keep parents happy.”
“You skipped a grade? So wait, how old are you?”
Ryan flushes. “I just turned fifteen.”
“God,” says Angel.
“Don’t worry, I’m legal to drive you guys on my learner’s, because he’s my immediate family.” Connor clenches Ryan’s nose and squeals. “You got me!” cries Ryan. To Angel: “He got me!”
Angel doesn’t even fake a smile. The fact that it didn’t occur
to her to challenge her expulsion—didn’t occur to her mother or her father, either—is galling.
“Why don’t you just say you’re sorry you were chewing gum?” Ryan asks. “If it’ll get you back into the program. You don’t have to mean it. People say crap they don’t mean all the dang time. Like, on my application for media camp I said I had leadership qualities. I don’t actually have too many leadership qualities.”
Angel folds the burger wrapper carefully, matching up the corners, pressing the crease flat. “But then Brianna will think it’s okay to push people around. She’ll think it’s okay to sleep with my dad and the dads of all the other girls and to be mean to this one girl who’s got the hardest life of anyone. It’s messed up.” Ryan’s gaze is steady; he’s really listening. The intensity of his attention is making her talk more, and with this awareness, she falters. “I don’t want her to win.”
He keeps looking at her, though, with kind eyes, like those of some understanding, wise animal. “Win what, though? It’s not a war. It’s not a game. It’s your life.”
Angel’s eyes well, and her left one overflows. The tear runs fat and hot down her cheek, and she swipes it away. Yes. It’s her life, her one life, to be treasured and tended and protected. How has she never seen it like this? How has it taken Ryan, this pale, zitty teenager, to show her this?
But then Ryan says, “You gotta just ask for what you want.”
Angel looks at him in disbelief. Just ask for what you want. Of course he thinks he can just ask for what he wants. He’s a guy, white, the precious only child of a mother focused entirely on him. He’s got a minivan and a college fund. He’s every bit as culpable for Connor’s creation, yet being a parent hasn’t cramped his style any. He’s still in school, acing English and kissing up to teachers. He goes to fucking media camp. What even is that? Where he learns to be a newscaster? Angel would like to do that, why not? She thinks of how in geometry, he always raised his hand, regardless of whether he knew the right answer. At the time, she thought his willingness to be so publicly wrong stemmed from a kind of misplaced, witless courage, and she’d been almost touched, but now she sees it for what it is: pure entitlement. She thinks of her own grandmother, greeting him with such obvious pleasure, praising him for stopping by. Oh, what a good boy! As if, for the simple gesture of not completely ignoring his own infant son, he’s in the running for a Nobel.
“I mean it,” he says earnestly, bouncing Connor. “The future is yours.” He’s proud of himself, she realizes, truly thinks he’s helping someone less fortunate, buying her a hamburger dinner out of his allowance and giving her an inspiring little heart-to-heart. He thinks he’s doing his part to encourage her. He’ll probably put it on his college application: mentored a teen mother.
Now he’s staring at her, puzzled. He can’t even guess at how little he understands.
A rage rises in Angel so vicious she can’t stand it. She wants to leap up, but holds herself motionless. “He’s not yours, you know,” she says.
Ryan’s knee stills, and the smile drops from his face. Connor’s shrieks last a beat longer, and he rocks on his butt, trying to get Ryan’s knee to bounce again.
Ryan’s mouth actually drops. “What do you mean?” The words sound as if they’ve been squeezed from him.
Satisfaction washes through Angel. She half thought he’d be relieved, then realizes, no, of course she knew he’d be hurt, and that’s why she said it. “I lied to you.” Her voice is airy, as if it’s coming from some other person. “Look at him. He doesn’t look nothing like you. You were just too stupid to figure it out.” She despises him for taking her at her word, for his kindness to her and to Connor. Doesn’t he know she’s a slut? Didn’t he ever think to wonder if the kid was his? She hates his awful uneven facial hair, his pale skin, his lank curls, the frankness of his vulnerability.
“You’re not the only guy I’ve fucked,” she says kindly, cruelly, and is pleased when he flinches at the word. “You’re not special.”
“I don’t think I’m special.” On Ryan’s lap, Connor leans forward at the waist, grabbing at a napkin and giving it a thrashing.. Ryan holds onto Connor’s other hand. “Can I still hang out with him?”
Angel looks at him, astonished. “No,” she says, afraid of herself. “I can’t trust you with him.” She is Connor’s mother, and if she doesn’t want someone to see her child, they can’t see him. Who knew she had it in her, this authority?
“I keep forgetting that you don’t like me. I don’t know why I keep forgetting that.”
Angel is abashed, but why? She doesn’t like him. And then she’s angry again, because it isn’t Angel he’s sorry to lose, anyway, but Connor.
She stands. She thinks about plucking Connor from Ryan’s arms, detaching Connor’s clinging fist from Ryan’s finger.
“You know what? You want to be his father? Fine. Be his father. You can take care of him for once.” She swings her purse onto her shoulder.
As she pushes through the glass door, she looks back at them. Connor isn’t even watching as his mother strides away: he’s riveted by Ryan’s stricken face. He stands unsteadily on Ryan’s thighs, bucking, his greasy fist tight on Ryan’s collar.
Pain is jagged in her chest, and she crosses the parking lot and then the street. The sky is low and deep blue with the cold dusk.
ANGEL MANAGES TO make it all the way to Lizette’s street, her phone shoved deep in her pocket, fingers clenched around it, before she checks her messages. Ryan hasn’t texted. Fuck him, she thinks, each word punctuating a step. Fuck him fuck him. But already, through her jumpy anger, her worry for Connor reasserts itself. Remorse descends like a sodden woolen cloak, itchy and claustrophobic and intolerable.
Her mother, Priscilla, Brianna, and now Ryan. It is so easy to cut people out, to make permanent rifts. She hadn’t known this. She’d always thought there was room for fights, for cruelty, that things would work themselves out, given enough time, given enough honest conversation. She hadn’t ever really wanted to push any of them away—she was only asking them to draw her close again, testing to see whether they’d let her go. And always, always, they’ve let her go. The only person who wouldn’t let her go is her grandmother, but her grandmother is dead.
Ten minutes from home. Amadeo has spent the day out driving, making up errands in Española to be out of that empty house: gas station, Walmart for diapers, Dollarland for zipping sandwich baggies that don’t seal too well, but are fine for crackers. Thank god he can drive again. The stores are frantic with Christmas cheer, tinsel and cardboard cutouts shiver above the aisles. Now it’s dusk, and he’s climbed out of the flat sea bottom of Española, the lights smeared in his peripheral vision, into the safety of the trees.
He’s on the tight road that will lead to his door, and the closer he gets, the higher his anxiety creeps, until he’s actually quaking.
It’s Angel who does it to him, snapping, putting him in his place, withholding. She’s been angry since his mother died, since before, since forever. Just occupying the same room with her is torture, waiting for her to turn on him with righteous condemnation.
Amadeo pulls onto the shoulder, fishes a mini of vodka from the plastic bag on the passenger mat. The metal top comes off with a pleasing little crack, and just the sound calms him, even before the vodka washes over his tongue and down his throat, clean and hot. He needs to still that incessant jitter.
He’s not stupid. He’s not flouting the law, not really, not endangering anyone. There are no cops up here on the twisting mountain road, especially not now, early on a Tuesday evening, hardly any cars at all, and certainly no pedestrians. It’s okay to drive on one drink. Plus, it takes time for the alcohol to enter his bloodstream, won’t even hit him until he’s home. He knows this from his DWI class, the PowerPoint slides on Blood Alcohol Concentrations and Impairment Over Time.
He’s relieved to find his mother’s car—Angel’s car, now—safe in the drive, the light in the living room. He’ll lift
the baby from Angel’s arms, give her a break, and even if she doesn’t show it, she’ll be grateful. Amadeo will be grateful, too, for the wriggling, forceful heat of the baby. They can play on the carpet, build a tower with blocks that the baby will demolish, or Amadeo can read to him, holding that sleepy, trusting weight against his heart.
He grabs the plastic bag, bottles clinking, tucks it into his jacket. He’s doing nothing wrong, but he doesn’t need Angel’s disapproval. The liquor is working already. He takes a deep breath, holds the cold purple air in his lungs. One click to lock the truck, that comforting beep, up the steps, screen door pressing against his backside as he puts the key in the lock.
The light shines on an empty house: table clear, Connor’s toys in the basket, the clock with flowers instead of numbers ticking.
“Hello?” he calls, but terror grips him, outsized and certain, because he knows that what he’s feared has finally come to pass: he’s been abandoned.
He drops the bag with a clatter and lurches down the hall, pushing doors, flicking on lights. Angel’s room, his own, the bathroom, and—terrible, terrible—his mother’s room, the mattress bare on her canopy bed, still pushed against the wall, the blank space where the hospital bed was.
The smell of her sickness is gone; her old smell remains, the mild scent of perfume caught in a scarf, as if the room she inhabited for nearly forty years is not yet ready to give her up.
Amadeo spent so little time in here when his mother was alive. He always felt uneasy in her bedroom: the close, feminine intimacy of this space where his mother dressed and undressed, where, sleeping, she breathed undefended into the dark. Yet he was here, beside her, when her soul unmoored itself from her body. He held her bony hand as she breathed those last breaths: each slow and gasping, with that long suspended pause in between, until finally all that was left was pause.
