Angel is heartened by the specter of this brother, house-proud and fussy. Surely Mercedes and Lizette are in good hands.
“What we really need is to toss shit all over the yard.”
Inside, the drawn curtains glow yellow with the afternoon. The air is mossy from the swamp cooler. Angel steps cautiously after her friend, as if a dog still might leap out at her from the shadows.
Any tidiness seems to have remained outside; as Angel follows Lizette to the back of the house, she gets the general impression of stuff: piles of laundry, boxes of Pampers, and loose rolls of toilet paper, bags of chips and shoes and dishes on every surface. It’s the result, Angel supposes, of people who are basically kids living together unsupervised. Her real concern, Angel realizes, isn’t attacking dogs or falling motorcycles, but the uncle. He served a prison sentence—just a few months, though. She doesn’t think he comes by, but still.
“They let him out?” Angel asked, dismayed, when Lizette mentioned this at lunch a couple weeks ago.
“He’s on parole. It’s not like I see him. Just barely one time at my cousin’s.” Her brother went with him once to the mud bog races. Lizette didn’t even seem upset when she related this. “Joe feels bad for him. His life is shit, which, good. My cousins won’t even talk to him, but they barely talk to me either, so.”
Angel had wanted to ask why Lizette didn’t have an abortion, but suspects that arranging a procedure would have been tantamount to admitting what had happened to her. The logistics were scary and impossible enough for Angel, and Angel wasn’t raped. Plus, it feels obscene to ask such a question in front of Mercedes, who is so adorable that to imagine her never existing is sad.
“Do you like your brother’s girlfriend?” Angel calls now over Mercedes’s cries.
“Selena’s cool,” Lizette says. Angel strains to hear her, because, as if unwilling to concede anything to anyone, she doesn’t raise her voice over the baby’s screams. “She’s, like, obsessed with Mercedes, always telling Joe she wants one. But I think they’re going to break up soon. They don’t say it, but they’re always fighting. She’s gotten into chiva. Not bad or nothing, but it bugs my brother. He won’t touch it ’cause that’s how our mom died.”
“God.” Angel wants to offer sympathy, but doesn’t know how Lizette will react. She hopes the girlfriend does leave, and soon, taking all her drugs with her.
Lizette pops a finger in Mercedes’s mouth, and the baby quiets for a moment, then pushes it away. “I really hope they don’t break up.” Angel is surprised by the note of vulnerability in her voice.
“Yeah.” Angel reminds herself that Lizette is motherless and alone, and that this girlfriend of Lizette’s brother is family, some of the only family she has left, and retracts her wish. In her own arms, Connor whimpers, irritable, arches his back.
At the end of a dim hall, Lizette pushes open her door. The room is crowded with furniture: unmade single bed with faded black sheets, torn brocade armchair, heavy wood bureau, and, jutting into the middle of the room, a crib. A black beanbag slouches in the corner. On the walls are Kanye and Jay-Z posters, and, incongruously, given what Angel knows of Lizette’s tastes, a quilted pink L. Angel thinks of Lizette’s dead mother, choosing that pink L for her little girl, taking it home and hammering a nail in the wall. She wonders how much later that mother died.
“If they do break up, which one’ll stay here in the house?”
Lizette sinks into the sagging armchair and maneuvers under her shirt, exposing a fold of belly. She grabs a pair of sweatpants off the floor to cover herself, and, almost without looking, gets Mercedes positioned. The crying ceases. “I don’t ask. The only good thing is they got four more months on the lease, so I’m not homeless yet.”
At that word, homeless, Angel misses a breath. “But even if your brother leaves, you’re going to move with him, right?”