Angel loves leaving her classroom to feed Connor. It feels at once wonderfully decadent and justified. Once in third grade, her mother picked her up from school at ten in the morning to take her to a doctor’s appointment, and before she went back, they stopped for lunch. It had felt like a marvelous treat, eating her baked potato （extra bacon bits） from its paper boat, chatting with her mother, while back in the school cafeteria, her classmates were lined up at sticky tables that smelled of mop water and bologna. Each time she gets up from her desk to find Connor, Angel misses her mother.
Connor flips over and now squints at a fluorescent panel far above him.
“Hey,” Angel says to Lynne and Gail, the women in their fifties who watch the kids. At the sound of her voice he cranes his head toward her and flaps, mouth open in a gummy smile.
Lynne, hunched cross-legged on the mat near him, looks up from her phone. “There’s your mom,” she tells him mildly.
“Connor’s already had two BMs,” says Gail, gesturing to the bulletin board covered in Daily Logs. She’s eating yogurt at a tiny table, her big bottom engulfing the dinky wooden chair. Across from her, Ysenia’s baby, who has the wrinkled, squashed face of a pug, carries Cheerios to her mouth one by one, inspecting each gravely.
Before Connor was born, she admired Gail and Lynne’s adept, no-nonsense approach to child care, their easy, unsentimental, and democratically cheerful way with the babies. But now, seeing them handle Connor without any special affection, she finds them suspect. She sweeps Connor into her arms with a sense of rescuing him from their indifference. Her joy at having his little face close to her own is so complete that she can’t even be annoyed with them.
“I missed you, I missed you,” she chants quietly into his shoulder.
For weeks Angel has waited in dread to be overtaken again by darkness, but, thank heavens, she hasn’t. She can’t even imagine, now, where that madness came from. Everything in Angel’s life seems lighter and more possible. Even the sting of Brianna’s rejection has lessened.
The nursery is outfitted with eight cribs. Connor’s, with its fleecy yellow blanket and turtle crib sheet, is the second-farthest from the door, which makes him the second-least-likely to be kidnapped, unless the kidnapper is basing his selection on looks, in which case her child is in trouble. The babies are never, of course, left unattended, but disastrous scenarios constantly arise in Angel’s imagination.
In the corner is a folding screen painted with Japanese cranes, and behind this is a padded rocking chair, where Angel nurses her baby. She rocks them both into drowsiness, listening to Connor’s rhythmic snuffling, to the babbling and cries from the other side of the screen, the squeaking of toys and rattling of blocks. Ysenia’s baby whacks her spoon on the table, and Lynne and Gail chatter about the patio furniture Gail is considering buying. Angel cups her son’s foot in her hand, gazing down into his little red shell ear and his half-closed, black-lashed eye. His fontanel pulses.
Every once in a while, driving around after school with her dad, she needs to pull over to feed Connor. She circles the truck, gets in the backseat, and pulls him toward her. Each time, her dad gets out of the truck and stands a few feet away. Occasionally he checks his phone, presumably texting Yolanda or one or another of his friends, guys he went to school with or has met at the car races he likes to go to a few times a year, in Albuquerque or Bernalillo, but mostly kicking at the gravel and squinting into the bowl of the sky. Angel feels pleasantly sleepy in the afternoon, the baby kneading her breast, the sun warming the cab, the breeze lifting her hair from the roots.
Occasionally she’ll call something out to her dad, but if the wind carries her question away, he’ll say “Huh?” without coming closer, afraid, she knows, to see her breast.
He’s not so bad, her dad. She can see the effort he’s making. In parking lots, while she stays with the baby, he jogs from car to car, moving purposefully, clamping windshield wipers over his flyers. She has her doubts about the viability of this enterprise. It’s been three weeks, and they still haven’t gotten any calls. She can’t get past the fact that this was a kit purchased from the television, that this same kit was presumably sold to hundreds of other lonely men awake and drinking in the middle of the night and hoping for another shot at a career. She wonders if it’s generational, this trust in television, and she pities her dad for being taken in. The fact is, she doesn’t see a whole lot of pocked windshields. In the whole Family Foundations parking lot, which can have up to twenty cars parked in it—more if the liquor store customers park there—there are only four cars with tiny dings, and though they’ve left flyers, no one has called. The fact is, dings just aren’t that big a deal.