Beside her, the baby monitor winks its red light. They’ve moved the transmitter from next to Connor’s crib to Yolanda’s bedside table; now it picks up her thin cries as she sleeps. She sleeps almost as much as Connor did right after his birth. “Mama,” they sometimes hear. Or, “Wait, please.” Mostly it’s garble, delivered with conviction: “Forty eighty I says trespasses.” Once, horribly, she called, “Stop! You’re hurting me!” Her voice through the monitor is somehow both reedy and gravelly, unlike her waking voice, which is unlike her old, healthy voice. Sometimes she just moans.
Now, beginning to retch, Yolanda tries to pull herself up. Angel stands swiftly, helps her lean over the mixing bowl—the same mixing bowl with the dent that Yolanda used when she taught Angel to make tortillas. She holds the back of her grandmother’s head in her hand as if she were an infant, careful with her soft spot under the knit cap. Yolanda vomits, a watery, foul-smelling green fluid. It seems impossible that a body so frail can be wracked so violently. Yolanda drops back against the pillow. Her eyes are more dimensional, the closed lids translucent and shiny.
“Here, let’s get you cleaned up.” Angel uses one of Connor’s terry washcloths to wipe her grandmother’s trembling chin.
Her grandmother’s eyes flutter, but remain shut. “I’m a mess.”
Each time her grandmother tries to speak, Angel tenses, praying for lucidity. Today she’s been sharp. Angel takes her grandmother’s hand. It is warm and smooth, the skin loose over the delicate bones. “Your hands are always so soft. Why are they always so soft?”
Her grandmother’s eyes open slightly and she laughs, a low weak chuffing. “I’m not doing dishes no more.”
For a time, they lie there, watching the shifting pattern of the sunlight on the ceiling.
Her grandmother pats her hand. “Glad you’re here, hijita. Right with me.”
“I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad we’re here together.”
“You’re good girl.”
All at once, tears slide from Angel’s eyes. “No I’m not.”
“Yes.” Her grandmother’s lips barely move. “Hijita, promise. Get a kind boyfriend.”
Sadness presses like a knuckle against her throat. “Yeah,” she says. “Okay.”
Her grandmother takes a deep breath that Angel can feel all along the length of her body.
The room is quiet, a night-light glowing in the corner. Yolanda wakes in a panic. She’s forgotten something. She cannot sit up, but she searches the shadowy room, gasping, oppressed, terrified. She has no memory of the faces that had crowded close to assure her of their love, no settled feeling of reconciliation or resolution. Just pure disorientation, immense and intolerable, untethered from reason or cause. There is a shape there in the dark beside her. Anthony? she asks, but the word means nothing to her, and she’s not sure she spoke it.
“Mom? I’m right here.” Amadeo touches her hand, and, just like that, the terror is gone. Yolanda sinks back against the pillow. She is aware of being awash in love, love flowing from the world toward her, and she is afloat on it. She is in the bottom of a boat rocking on a serene ocean, gazing up into the depths of stars, anchored safely to the dock by her son’s hand. Somewhere she can hear the water lap against pilings.
And then Yolanda is dancing in the arms of a very ugly man. The room is light and Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris are singing about highways. It’s an incredible song, she realizes now, and wonders why she never noticed before. Her body is filled with the music, and the man’s arms around her are steady and pliant, guiding her across the floor. Tang of barbecue and beer, the easy give of the boards under her feet, the clean scent of his shaving cream and soap. She feels sated, afloat on the music, steady on her feet. The man says something to her, and though she doesn’t hear, she laughs and nods. Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels.