Angel smiles through tears. “More than my dad?”
Yolanda chuckles. “All my babies. I love all my babies with my whole heart.”
Angel is silent, plucking at the satin of the duvet. Finally she says, “I’m scared, Gramma.”
Me, too, Yolanda nearly says. Instead she grips her granddaughter’s hand. “Oh, hijita. The baby blues pass.”
Amadeo’s business model is simple. He drives around the Espa?ola Valley—rather, Angel drives, and Amadeo directs, while Connor blows raspberries with merry imperiousness from the backseat—searching for windshields in need of repair. Angel has thrown herself into the endeavor with surprising zeal. She insisted on being made full partner, which isn’t exactly fair, since Amadeo is doing all the work and will be getting his license back in four months anyway, but his hands were tied.
“I’m a skilled worker. It takes skill to drive.” Angel makes a big show of keeping track of her hours on a table she printed out at school and keeps in the glove compartment. Inexplicably, her mood has improved. Angel is a good driver—cautious, yet willing to make up time on long, straight stretches—which pleases Amadeo.
Everywhere they go, sunlight flashes off windshields, catches in the cracks and divots, and from his place in the passenger seat, the cracks seem to Amadeo like scattered diamonds waiting to be gathered. In his rear-facing car seat, Connor, who is so well behaved Amadeo sometimes wonders if there isn’t something amiss, babbles and flaps his arms, batting at the plush rattles that dangle before him.
They circle parking lots of shopping centers, supermarkets, casinos, as far north as Taos, as far south as Santa Fe. Whenever he sees a crack or a divot or bull’s-eye in a windshield, he slips his card under the wiper, along with his photocopied note—Hi! I see you have a crack! I can help! Remember: cracks spread and cracks are dangerous. Let me save your life!!!!!!! All cracks fixed, cheap. This is what is known as targeted marketing. All he has to do is wait for the calls to pour in. They haven’t yet, but he has faith. Amadeo is pleased with his flyer—it seems he has struck the perfect balance between friendliness and stern paternalistic care. He imagines it must make his customers feel good, knowing that Amadeo is in the world, looking out for them.
For him, this isn’t just a profit thing. Amadeo truly is concerned for these would-be customers. He’s haunted by images of people for whom he is too late: the woman turning left into an eighteen-wheeler obscured by a crack, or the small child dragged under the wheels of a sedan, tricycle sparking across the blacktop. He pictures himself arriving on the scene, kit in hand, just in time to prevent an accident.
Angel sits as upright as a debutante, gripping the wheel. When a song she likes comes on, her scowl breaks and she sings along, shimmying and bopping intently. Amadeo is reminded of Angel as she was when she was a little kid; she has that same intensity of being. Angel so entirely inhabits her own life. Amadeo can’t remember ever feeling that he belonged entirely to his life, not when he was sixteen or six or twenty-six. It seems to him that he’s always been hiding out in his mother’s living room, waiting for his true existence to find him. Now, though, as his daughter taps her thumbs on the wheel to the music, it occurs to him that life has started. This is it, here.
He has his daughter, and he has a job. And there’s another bright spot: Brianna, with whom Amadeo has been texting. They met up again two nights ago, and she fell asleep on his chest, her hair across his shoulder. He cuts a look at Angel again, uneasy.
She grins. “What?”
“Keep your eye on the road.”
Today, on their third afternoon out, Amadeo and Angel return to the parking lot of the Golden Mesa Casino, which, at eleven in the morning, is already filled with sedans. Angel allows old people to pass in front of her as they hobble across the blacktop toward the automatic doors and the dim air-conditioning inside. Among the squashed paper soda cups and food wrappers, Amadeo sees his flyers blowing around the parking lot, which might explain why he hasn’t gotten any calls yet.