Angel kisses his cheek and starts putting the food away. Outside, Tíve’s dog Honey waits patiently by the door, her head on her paws.
“You want some juice, Tío?” Amadeo offers. Tíve seems glad to linger, sitting with Yolanda, if she’s up, or with Angel as she cooks and bounces the baby. Amadeo joins in, too, and they all talk while his mother withdraws into some perplexed corner of her mind. Tío Tíve steals looks at her: she, who was always dashing about, is now suffused with stillness. Her face is even thinner, the skin creased around her bruised eyes. She stares at a spot on her lap and works her mouth silently around a word.
One day, when Tíve drops the groceries by, Amadeo’s mother is up and lucid and sitting at the kitchen table.
“Please, Tío,” she says, drawing her purse to her, “I need to pay. I get . . . debility?”
Amadeo looks away. He can’t stand the search for words.
“Disability, Gramma?” Angel asks. She makes furtive eye contact with Tíve. She’s at the counter, holding the baby, forming pink hamburger patties on a cutting board with one hand.
“Dizzabilty.” She picks slowly through her purse. Tío Tíve watches in alarm as this thin, erratic woman fumbles with her wallet.
“Take,” Yolanda says, pulling out bills. Her hair beneath her cap is fine and dull gray except at the still-dyed tips.
“No, Yo. I’m not gonna.”
Yolanda shakes her hands, upset. The bills drop to the table. One flutters to the ground. Amadeo retrieves it and places it before her.
“Can you call my mom to get me?”
Tíve opens his mouth but does not speak.
“Gramma,” says Angel, “your mom can’t come now. But we’re here with you.” Connor lunges toward the raw beef, open palm swiping, and Angel jolts back, dropping a patty on the floor with a smack.
“Give him here,” Tíve says, taking Connor, who objects and then quiets. “Can I take him outside to see Honey? She’s gentle.”
Angel hesitates. “I guess that’s okay. Just keep him above her head. And get his coat.” She catches Amadeo’s eye. Go with him.
“She’s losing things every day,” Amadeo tells his uncle in a low voice.
Tíve takes the concrete steps one by one, balancing precariously, and it’s all Amadeo can do not to grab Connor from his arms. “That idiot Anthony never put a railing out here. For years he said he would. All you kids climbing up and down them on your hands and knees. Your poor mom. The things she put up with.” Tíve sighs. “Your dad was a good friend to my Elwin.” Tíve eases himself down to sit, and Amadeo sits beside him.
Amadeo thinks of that photo of the two young men. He can’t reconcile that smiling young face with his shadowy sense of his father. He remembers navigating cautiously around him, afraid of setting him off.
Honey gets to her feet, grinning her frilled black-edged lips and wagging her tail nub. Her coat gleams auburn. Connor regards the dog sternly and then looks to his grandfather and great-great-great-uncle and breaks into a laugh. “Stay down there,” Amadeo tells Honey, and her nub wags more enthusiastically.
“I never knew my boy when he was this age.” Tíve says. “In those days the men worked for their families. Most days the baby was asleep by the time I got home for dinner.”
“I try to help.”
“You gotta do better than your dad.”
Amadeo’s face heats. The pi?ons are glazed in the low autumn light.
Honey noses the baby’s fat legs in their striped pants, leaving smudges of damp. Connor looks to Tíve in wide-eyed apprehension. He whimpers, but doesn’t commit to distress. “Hey, you’re okay,” the old man says, waving the baby’s hand. “She’s a nice doggy. You ever meet a doggy-woggy?”