“See you tomorrow,” she says, almost fleeing to the hall. Immediately, though, Angel regrets leaving—her job, after all, is to help Lizette. Why is she so afraid of Brianna? She clenches her fist in frustration. In the nursery, she recaptures her resolve, but by the time she gathers Connor, the classroom is empty. Brianna is talking to Raquel in the front office.
Angel pauses outside the door, but they’re going on and on about quarterly reports, so she gives up. “Come on, baby,” she mutters. “We’re going home.”
In the parking lot, though, she wavers again. She can’t stand the thought of going home, of facing the long afternoon and evening with this important thing left undone. So instead of going to her grandmother’s car, she crosses the parking lot to the Jack in the Box. She’ll get a milkshake, let Brianna finish up her meeting with Raquel and get some distance from the school day and from the other girls’ reproachful silences, then try again. “Please call Lizette,” she’ll say. “I’m worried about her.”
She’s thrown away her cup, changed Connor’s diaper on the grubby plastic changing table in the bathroom, and is pushing through the glass door to the parking lot outside, when she sees Brianna and her father. They are leaning against Brianna’s green car, their heads bent together. Her father’s hand is on her shoulder, and whatever they’re discussing, it’s obviously more intimate than anything they have any business discussing.
Later, Amadeo will scroll through the minutes before Angel approached them, ask himself what exactly they were doing at what point, and whether Angel could have seen them touching. He doesn’t think so.
It’s true that when he first rushed up to Brianna, he drew her in for a kiss and she responded and then pulled away. For a moment she kept her hand in his, and it felt good and right, but then she pulled her hand away, too. All of this—kiss, hand—lasted for no more than a couple seconds—no time at all, really, given the length of a whole life, say, or even the length of a single day. They stayed leaning against the car, not touching, while many long minutes passed—seven or eight or even nine maybe—long enough for Amadeo to apologize again, and for Brianna to say that he shouldn’t have sworn at her and none of this was a good idea, and for Amadeo to ask her to tell him honestly, to seriously just say it, that he doesn’t matter to her, and for Amadeo to consider pulling her in for another kiss, then to decide against it because he was afraid of how she stood there, the bridge of her nose white, the wisps of her hair flying around her face in the dry afternoon wind. Long enough for Brianna to repeat that this was all a bad idea, and she never should have slept with a student’s father, and for Amadeo to tell her that his mom is doing bad, really bad, and Brianna has to understand just how much he’s going through, it’s crazy, like, actually the hardest time in his life. They stood there long enough for Amadeo, panic rising, to make argument after argument in favor of a relationship—don’t they like each other? Don’t they owe it to each other to try?—and she listened to all of this, her throat and face flushed, and he touched her shoulder to make her look at him—
There was time after the kiss for all this to occur before Brianna raised her head and murmured, “Shit.”
At the time, however, Amadeo simply registers Brianna’s curse and elaborates on it, thinking only, oh shit, oh fucking shit, he’s been caught. Also Angel shouldn’t even be here—he and Brianna arranged to meet here, now, precisely because Angel should be home—and why isn’t she home? Shouldn’t she be looking after his mother?
As Angel approaches, Brianna steps away from Amadeo, putting a decorous distance between them.
Angel’s expression is still questioning, uncertain. Her eyes flick from one to the other, wary.
Amadeo is struck by how sapped his daughter looks, weighed down by the infant and by all of the infant’s accoutrements. Her hair is escaping her ponytail. Connor is also out of sorts; he glances at his grand-father before grabbing a hank of his mother’s hair and smashing it against his cheek. He drops his face against her shoulder in a gesture that looks very much like despair.