The clouds behind her grandmother’s house are blush pink, reflecting the sunset. Deep blue shadows gather under the juniper, and in the falling light, everything seems very defined and clear and sad. Through the barred window, Angel can see her father moving around the kitchen. If she’s alone for one more second, she’ll cry, so Angel jogs down the driveway toward him.
Amadeo is on the couch with a Coke and the remote balanced on his thighs when his daughter comes in. Her cheeks are flushed and she’s sweating at her temples.
“Hey, don’t worry about me,” she says lightly. “I got a ride home from school.”
“It’s a busy time, Angel. I told you that.” Amadeo chews his lip. “Did Tío Tíve say anything about me?”
“Like what?”
“Did he mention anything about—” He glances at her stomach.
Angel widens her eyes pointedly. “So I’m guessing you had work and that’s why you couldn’t drive me? Where you working now?”
“It’s slow.”
Angel drops beside him, then scoots down so her neck is cricked and her belly high.
“Huh.” Her disapproval sounds remarkably like Marissa’s.
“It’s called a recession, Angel. Besides, I’m getting together a business. Windshield repair. I have a kit and everything.” The truth is he doesn’t have the kit, not yet. He saw it advertised on a late-night infomercial and has been waiting for his mother to get home to help him buy it. For $1,199.99, there are enough supplies for four hundred repairs. Amadeo has done the math: if he charges fifty bucks a repair—and that’s a bargain, people would easily pay twice that to not have to replace their windshields—he’ll make twenty thousand. Twenty thousand from an eleven-hundred-dollar repair kit.
“I’ve always been an entrepreneur,” he tells his daughter. He loves the early stages of creating a business.
“Yeah? Like your Amway?”
Mostly he’d sold to his mother and his mother’s friends. If Amadeo’s stint as a salesman didn’t last long, though, the industrial-sized bottles of product did. Even now he’ll occasionally come upon an old blue bottle of window cleaner or shampoo tucked under a sink or at the back of a cupboard. The truth is that the products aren’t very good. One acrid-smelling shaving cream gave him a rash over his entire face.
Then there was the time he started outfitting cars for the races down in Albuquerque with his friend Charlie Vigil. Amadeo enjoyed working with Charlie, and was good at it, re-boring the engine, replacing the metal front and sides with fiberglass, removing what wasn’t essential, making what was essential as light as possible. Yolanda hadn’t been happy about the prospect of fast cars, but she was glad Amadeo was “getting involved” and had offered to give them what she could afford to start them out. But in the end Charlie partnered with his cousin. “No offense, man, but in a business you got to know your partner’s going to show up.”
“Windshield repair is where it’s at,” Amadeo tells his daughter. “Look around: this whole state is rocks and dirt. I got to be my own boss.” Amadeo imagines windshield repair is a trade Jesus might get behind. It is, essentially, carpentry for the twenty-first century. “It’s about showing people a clear way forward, about helping them get to where they need to go.” It’s about repairing shattered lives. There’s a possibility Amadeo is overthinking it, but he’s pretty sure he’s not.
“Windshield repair.” Then, after a moment, Angel asks: “You still sing ever?”
“Nah.” Not for years, though at one time he’d thought he could actually go somewhere with it. He’s grateful to Angel for remembering. Amadeo offers her his Coke.
She shakes her head. “It’ll dissolve his baby bones.”