She seems to be struggling to get the words out. “I loved your dad, Dodo.” Her lips tremble. “No matter he was gay.”
“Gay?” His mother has deteriorated so much. Carefully he says, “Oh, Mom. Dad wasn’t gay. He just had a hard time.”
Amadeo lifts his grandson from his uncle’s arms, and Tíve catches hold of the baby’s shirt to steady himself. Amadeo then eases the door open, takes his mother by the upper arm, and guides her backwards into the house.
THE HOUSE is submerged in a midmorning quiet, the windows sealed against the birdsong outside. Except for an occasional faintly echoing tick, like a fingernail absently grazing a duct deep in the house, the heating vents are still. It’s an empty quiet, although the house is not, in fact, empty.
Amadeo stretches across his rumpled bed with his shirt off while his mother dozes in her own bedroom. Connor was up all night screaming in teething pain. Around one, after Angel fed him again and rubbed his gums with numbing ointment, her face pale, voice drawn and cranky, Amadeo got up from playing Thorscape, took the baby, and sent her to bed. Until four in the morning, he paced the hot living room with his grandson, narrating everything the way Angel taught him—“There’s the lamp. See the light? See the light on the window?”—Connor’s eyes getting glassier and glassier, his whimpers getting weaker and more widely spaced, until finally he dropped off and Amadeo could deposit him in his crib in Angel’s room, where his daughter was a smoothly breathing mound under the blanket.
The thermostat has been set at seventy-seven, but even so his mother is buried under layers of sweaters and quilts, time seeping out of her. He stares at the pebbled stucco on his ceiling, trying to accustom himself to the idea of her absence, but like a plant angling itself imperceptibly toward a sunny window, Amadeo is aware of his mother’s pulse across the hall, its quiet determined effort to keep her alive.
His mother is dying—she will die. Why is it so difficult to wrap his head around this simple, immutable fact? He feels the tug of both this inevitable future and of the past, when his mother was in her true form: quick and purposeful and smiling, with warm brown eyes, hair lush and long and evenly dyed.
For now, she is herself and not herself—stick-limbed, gray-skinned, the curiosity in her eyes receding, her voice both high and gravelly—an unwelcome version of herself that he nonetheless clings to. When she slips into light, permeable sleep, he can’t stop checking on her, longing for her to jolt awake and reassure him.
His mother, who saved them all from their father, who fed them and buoyed them, who—why does he only now understand this?—was the font of all strength, is withdrawing, becoming small and peevish and disoriented. Amadeo can feel his memories of her being written over by this new, inferior version.
Now he’ll never nap. He smashes his face into his sweaty pillow. The sense of quiet has fled, replaced by hot, jittery anxiety.
When his phone chirps, he startles, blinks stinging eyes. Brianna. How are you?? Then, a moment later: Would you want to hang out sometime soon?
From his dresser, beer cans emit their yeasty funk. He must dispose of them before Angel gets home, or be subjected to her tight disapproval. His bedroom is chaotic with strewn clothes. His sheets smell grungy—his mother hasn’t, for obvious reasons, been washing them of late.
His thumbs hover over the phone. Amadeo hasn’t seen Brianna in weeks, not since before his mother’s seizure, and he feels unfairly caught out.
Angel must not have told Brianna about Yolanda’s diagnosis, otherwise surely she would have reached out to Amadeo with sympathy. With a pang, he wonders who his daughter is talking to about her troubles. Angel is probably frowning into her social studies book while, fifteen feet away, her teacher taps her phone, setting up an assignation with her father.
Since he met Brianna, everything had been going so well for him, and he’d begun seeing his every move—his interactions with Angel, his grandfathering, Creative Windshield Solutions—through her eyes. Under Brianna’s imaginary attention, Amadeo felt more virtuous: patient, selfless, a good father and grandfather. More of the man that other men seem to be effortlessly, more of the man he always imagined he truly was, in his purest state.