There was talk about moving Yolanda to Valerie’s in Albuquerque, where she’d be closer to hospitals, but Yolanda wept. “My house.”
So they’ve pushed Yolanda’s canopy bed against the wall, taken out the bureau and dressing table, all to make room for an ugly hospital bed that rises and falls. And a commode with a removable gray plastic pan. Yolanda is now unable to do things that she could manage even a week and a half ago: walk with assistance to the bathroom, for example.
Yolanda drifts, she mumbles, she counts to herself, brow furrowed. She sips most of her food through a straw: apple juice, thick vitamin shakes, chocolate milk made with half-and-half for the calories.
It’s beyond Angel’s comprehension how something in the brain can cause her grandmother to lose so much weight in just a few short weeks. Nonetheless, it’s physical work, helping Yolanda onto the wheelchair or commode. When her grandmother stands—lurching, unsteady—her buttocks and thighs under her nightgown are so emaciated that the elastic on her underpants slips.
When it becomes clear that Yolanda can no longer clean herself, she submits to Angel, her face pinched with humiliation. They buy plastic boxes of baby wipes in bulk. Angel holds each wipe in her hands to warm it, whether she uses it on Connor or on her grandmother.
“Well,” Yolanda says, resigned. “I guess I’ve wiped your button. Batten.”
Once, to her eternal shame, Angel grouches, “Why can’t Dad ever help?”
“No!” cries Yolanda, and Angel is shocked by the look of alarm that crosses her grandmother’s face.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
The caretaking is all-consuming. Angel doesn’t know what they’d have done if she hadn’t been expelled. Yet she mourns her time at Smart Starts!, and goes over and over the events of that morning. She wanted to spit the gum out, she really did. The wad was stale, and as she chewed the sour mass, jaw aching, nausea rising, her mouth filled with saliva. Her teacher was unmoved by Angel’s sorrow, completely without sympathy or kindness or love, and Angel wasn’t so caught up in her sobs that she didn’t register the distaste in Brianna’s expression.
Driving to school that morning, Angel had thought about how it would be when she and Brianna finally talked about everything—Lizette, her father. She was scared of the conversation, yet also looked forward to it. Angel would explain that her feelings were hurt, and Brianna would apologize. Or if she didn’t apologize, she would at least explain to Angel that actually it was fine, totally normal, that she’d slept with Amadeo, that they were adults and it wasn’t actually the betrayal Angel felt it was. There was never any question in Angel’s mind that she would forgive her teacher. She expected, after all, that people would mistreat her—that people in general mistreat other people—and though she minded, really, really minded, what she wanted was the time after, when they could be closer for it. Even if Brianna and her father had lied outright and told her that nothing had ever happened between them, Angel would have believed them. Even in the face of glaring evidence, Angel would have believed them, because she needs them.
Her whole life, Angel has tiptoed around adults, trying to be good, then all at once this anger poured out of her, all of it directed at this woman Angel loves—loved, she realizes now. The crazy thing is that Angel even once dreamed of Brianna being her stepmother. Now, she feels actual hatred toward Brianna, who is not at all the person she pretended to be, the person Angel needed her to be.
Her grandmother is all Angel has left, her grandmother and her son.
THANKSGIVING IS SUBDUED, without arguments or the smell of cooking. Valerie brings most of the dishes already prepared in plastic containers, which they reheat, without even putting out platters. Yolanda sits quietly in her wheelchair, eating nothing, gesturing as if punctuating a silent conversation with someone not there. Tíve steals glances at his niece and then looks away, Adam’s apple bobbing. Lily’s eyes keep welling up, but she swipes the tears away, no-nonsense.