“No one’s here,” Angel said, dismayed, when her mom pulled into the empty driveway.
“So what, you want to stay or go home? I’m not waiting around for your dad to get back from wherever the fuck.” Marissa’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Didn’t you call? You haven’t been here in how long and you didn’t even call?”
Angel heaved herself out of the car and tried knocking, leaving the car door open wide so her mother couldn’t pull away. She texted both her dad and her grandmother, but no one replied. How hard was it to have one single damn thing work out in her favor?
“I’m staying.” Angel retrieved her duffel from the backseat, then leaned in the passenger side, but Marissa didn’t look at Angel. When she spoke again, she couldn’t keep the desperate hitch from her voice. “Bye, Mom.”
“Bye,” Marissa said, shifting into reverse, waiting for Angel to shut the door. She hasn’t even called to make sure someone eventually came home and let Angel in. For all Marissa knows, Angel could have been kidnapped that afternoon. Murdered. Her womb scooped from her belly like the seed from an avocado.
When Angel was in middle school, she and her mother used to have big weeping fights about who should vacuum or who was responsible for the clutter on the kitchen table. Sometimes, after, they would lean against each other on the couch, exhausted, her mother gently scratching Angel’s head with her nails, but mostly the fights left Angel feeling alone, disturbed to see her mother so destroyed by emotion, as destroyed as Angel herself felt.
But this silence is worse. She wonders whether her mother intends to teach her a lesson or if she truly hates Angel or if she’s already completely forgotten Angel’s existence.
Now here she is in Las Penas, with only a duffel bag. Angel used to be a collector: Beanie Babies, plastic pigs, little pom-poms with hats and googly eyes stuck on. She liked arranging her collections on shelves, liked having the manufacturer’s checklist before her, ticking off the ones she had, circling the ones she didn’t. She liked the search for completeness. But just before she announced she was leaving, Angel bagged up all that stuff and shoved it in the green trash bin outside. Better to be unencumbered. Better to be light and free, so she can, if need be, jump and fight and run.
Partially she trashed it all to wound her mother, who encouraged these collections. Marissa herself collects Disney stuffed animals. Angel imagined her mother pausing in the doorway, her shock at the bare walls and cleared shelves. Angel knew from posters at school that one of the warning signs of suicide was giving away treasured belongings, and Angel liked the idea of her mother’s distress. Probably, though, Angel thinks now grimly, her mother isn’t even aware of the warning signs of suicide. Probably her mother can’t wait to move in her hoard of Disney characters, let them colonize Angel’s bed and shelves with their creepy grins and plastic eyes and solid, oversized heads. Or worse, give Angel’s room to Mike for a home office, let him turn it into an altar to his own anal-retentiveness, with his rolls of blueprints and fussy metal protractors and the expensive Japanese pens that no one’s allowed to use even to take one tiny telephone message.
The road makes its gentle curve, and now the village is in sight. Las Penas consists largely of abandoned buildings, blank sockets where windows used to be. In front of the locked church, there are a few nearly intact squares of sidewalk stamped WPA. All around is evidence of better times and failed enterprise: boarded-up windows, painted letters barely visible on the broken plaster. Grocery. Cash Store. Hamburger.
Las Penas in the Ass, her mother calls it, but she means Amadeo and not the town itself. Even on the full-sized New Mexico state map her grandmother got from AAA, Las Penas is marked in the tiniest font imaginable. Most everyone works in Espa?ola or Los Alamos or, like her grandmother, in Santa Fe. Anything that needs doing can be done better elsewhere.
Angel hasn’t spent much time here—usually when she sees her grandmother they get dinner in Espa?ola—and most holidays are spent with her mother’s parents, Ramon and Lola, who have been so disapproving of Angel’s situation that you’d think they’d forgotten that their own daughter was once in the same boat. Rather, Grampa Ramon has been disapproving; Gramma Lola is so out of it, she doesn’t even recognize Angel. Angel has been avoiding them because, frankly, she doesn’t need that kind of energy in her life.