“You never asked me why I came here,” Angel says.
“You told me. You and your mom got in a fight.”
“You never asked about what.”
Amadeo is suddenly afraid. “Was it about me?”
She stares at him. When she speaks again, her voice is strained. “I thought you’d care.”
“Of course I care. Tell me. I just assumed it was some girl thing.”
“Some girl thing. I guess.” Angel turns to the door.
As he watches it shut behind her, the longing that wells in him is so intense he must touch the wall to steady himself. At the front of the room, Jesus hasn’t moved, wholly absorbed in his own pain.
Amadeo switches off the light, checks the lock on the morada door. Angel heaves herself into the cab of the truck, looking like a kid in her too-large jacket. She gazes out the window all the way home.
“I want to know, Angel,” he says.
She smiles at him sadly. “Tomorrow’s a big day. Thanks for showing me the place.”
Her ability to wrong-foot him is staggering, and he can’t even tell if she means to. Long after she’s gone to bed, after he’s returned to the morada for the vigil, then come home again, he stays up, clicking through online videos, guilt and unease sloshing in him. One beer, then five.
THEY GATHER AT the base of Calvario. A mile to the top, and Amadeo will walk barefoot, dragging the cross. He trembles and his upper lip sweats, though the morning air is cool. The hermanos help Tío Tíve unload the cross from the bed of his Ford. When the pito sounds three times—the cock’s crow—Tío Tíve steps forward, Pontius Pilate giving his sign, and the hermanos seize Amadeo. Tío Tíve places the crown of thorns on his head, and tears leap to his eyes. Amadeo turns and hoists the cross onto his right shoulder, stooping under the weight, and the procession starts. The hermanos walk in two lines behind Jesus and begin to whip themselves. Then the women and children, the bright clattering colors of them, so distinct from the neat dark and white of the hermanos. Amadeo cannot see her, but he knows Angel is there.
He feels like a star: he is young, he is strong, he could carry this cross all day. The sky is the deep blue of spring, the air still cool and spiced with the smell of pi?on. The fluting notes of the pito sound thinner up here, competing with the breeze and the birds.
Soon, though, the cross grows heavy. He tries to get into the part. He was up all night, he tells himself, in the garden, crying out to God. He remembers to stagger: his first fall. The crown of thorns is pulled tight, so it pierces the skin at his temple, the stinging sweat slides down, but Amadeo is just not feeling it. He is still himself, leaden and slow, his brain hungover and filled with static.
Angel comes up alongside him on the right, panting in her sneakers and tank top. “Shoot. I should get two stickers today. I can’t believe I’m hiking up a mountain at eight months. This must be a record.” She pats her belly. “Your mama’s breaking the Guinness World Record, baby.”
“Get to the back,” he tells her. “You can’t be up here.”
She swigs water, holds the bottle out to Amadeo. Her cheeks and arms are rosy. “Want some water?”
Amadeo shakes his head fiercely, panic rising, and heaves the cross up the slope after him, wishing she’d leave him alone, wishing she hadn’t come to ruin his performance with her pregnancy and personality. He needs to concentrate!
When the lashes come, Angel clamps her hands over her mouth. She looks like she might be sick, and Amadeo is glad.
He scrapes his shoulder under the edge of the cross, wincing when the wood breaks skin. The hot blood rises, his own blood, his own heat. He must leave his body, become something else. Behind him, the hermanos sing the alabados.