“Wait,” she says. “How’s stuff with you? I mean, like with your brother and his girlfriend? Are they . . .”
“My brother’s living with this new chick.” Lizette’s voice is steady. “She’s okay. I don’t know her that good.”
“Oh my god, Lizette. What are you going to do?”
“Figure it out. Get a job. I’m staying with Selena until the lease runs out in December. He’s paying my part until then.”
“But where will you go? Do you have family you can stay with?” She doesn’t, Angel doesn’t think, except those cousins. “Who will you stay with?”
“Will you quit?” Lizette turns on her, almost savage. “I said I don’t know, Angel.”
“Sorry.”
They sit for a long time, listening to the pipes and distant voices passing in the hall. Again she thinks of asking Lizette to move in with them, but it’s not her house, not her place to ask, and where would Lizette sleep? In Angel’s single bed? She almost laughs to think of her father’s and grandmother’s reactions to that. Soon, of course, there will be room, a whole empty room. Angel can’t bear to think of it.
“Hey, sorry ’bout your grandma.” Lizette wraps one arm around Angel and pulls her head to her shoulder. It’s not comfortable, and the gesture isn’t anything more than what a regular friend might do, but Angel allows her eyes to fall shut. A tap dribbles, and the funk of disinfectant is all around them.
“So,” says Lizette, waggling Angel’s ear not very gently. Angel catches her breath. She wants, wants, wants. Her breastbone could nearly crack with longing, her nerve endings straining, her very marrow pressing to the edges of her bones toward Lizette. She lifts her lips to meet Lizette’s. Lizette places a single finger against Angel’s chest and pushes her back. “If you want, we can go to story time.”
“Can I go to your house?”
“We’ll see.”
Lizette kisses her, then hoists herself up and bangs out of the bathroom.
News spreads, and Yolanda receives cards and calls and visits from old friends and second cousins, some of whom she hasn’t seen in years. Yolanda feels for them; no one knows how to talk to the dying. She sits for as long as she can force herself to, but she’s so tired, and she wonders what, really, she means to them. They laugh, rehashing old stories—the time she leaned against the punch table at the fiesta and the whole thing tipped, the time the cashbox at Willard Romero’s grocery was stolen, and the culprit turned out to be someone’s seventy-year-old grandma—and that feels good, but there’s a seed of resistance rooted in her chest, a little piece that has already said goodbye to these extraneous people.
She assumed that it was only a matter of time before Cal showed up, but as the weeks pass, it becomes less clear how he’d hear the news. They don’t have mutual friends—the few times they went out with others, it was with his friends and their wives, not people likely to hear about Yolanda’s diagnosis. And he’s been so thoroughly respectful of her wishes that he hasn’t called.
Still, she waits for him, and is, frankly, surprised to find herself waiting.
When she finally picks up the phone, her hand shakes with nervousness. She sits at her dressing table, back to the mirror because she can’t bear to look at the skinny creature with the comical bandage on her head. As she listens to the ringtone, Yolanda pictures him in his kitchen, spare but for a flourishing potted Christmas cactus on the table, gazing at her name on his phone, considering before silencing it. It’s what she deserves, leaving him like that, giving him the laziest possible explanation—I need time—but she can’t help feeling piqued: Cal never screens her calls.
“Yolanda.” His voice is gravelly and warm from cigarettes. “It’s you.”