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.