What also feels shitty is her inability to make herself comfort her father, who seems to be having no trouble at all accessing his tears. He’s spent the last two weeks sobbing and casting plaintive looks at her from across various rooms.
“I feel so bad,” he whimpers, his red eyes imploring.
“Yeah,” she says, and returns to wiping mashed peas from Connor’s chin. His face is chapped. The house is hot and dry, and outside the air is cold and dry, snow bunched like squeaking dirty Styrofoam. Angel’s knuckles crack and bleed.
Yolanda’s death should have drawn them closer, but it hasn’t. Instead of compassion for her father, she feels resentment, because he made her do so many punishing jobs, jobs no kid should have to do, and now he wants her to comfort him? Worse, he stays up late every night, drinking, tears running down his cheeks, as if he’s the only one who lost anything. In the morning, she gathers the bottles—and not just beer now, vodka, too—and puts them in the recycling. He doesn’t keep the beer in the fridge anymore, not after she poured them all down the sink two days after the funeral, so he’s stashing them somewhere else, out back or in his room （is she supposed to search for them?）， drinking them warm, which is all the more pathetic. Just looking at him slumped at the table, eyes red and lips trembling, makes her so mad she wants to spit or smash a window or stomp a hole right through the kitchen linoleum.
Hard little bitch.
To her credit, Marissa has been by every couple days, bringing lentil soup and Angel’s favorite homemade tortillas from the lady with the cooler in the Superette parking lot and a double batch of green chile mac and cheese.
“Thanks,” Angel says, pulling away from her mother’s tight embrace too soon.
“God,” Marissa says, turning in a slow circle around the living room while Angel scrubs at a baking sheet from the entire frozen pizza she ate for lunch. Angel has been starving since her grandmother died, a sucking black nothingness. She’s been gorging on the food neighbors bring; just last night she ate an entire Frito pie casserole, standing joylessly over the dish with her fork at the counter, then, after, lay in bed, heavy and sick and sleepless.
“I can’t believe Yolanda is gone. Like, really gone.”
“I know,” Amadeo says from the couch, his plate heaped with Marissa’s food.
“Well, believe it.” Angel’s voice is as dry as her eyes.
“I mean, she was, like, my mother-in-law,” Marissa says, turning her tear-glossed gaze on Angel.
“No she wasn’t.”
“Well, closest thing to.” A note of stubbornness has come into her voice.
“She liked you,” Amadeo says, and both Angel and Marissa turn to him in surprise.
“Really?” Marissa sits beside him on the couch.
“Yeah, of course. She thought I was an idiot for breaking up with you.”
Marissa laughs. “You didn’t break up with me. That would’ve been the mature path to take. You were just a dick and then quit calling until I got the message.”
Angel puts down her scouring pad and listens in amazement. She’s never heard her mother and father talking to each other like this, with kind directness, has so rarely ever even seen them in the same room.
“Well, yeah. That was my mom’s point, too.”
There was a time, when Angel was seven or eight, when her dearest wish was for her mother and father to get back together. “Never gonna happen,” her mother said brusquely the one time Angel brought it up. “That’s a mistake you don’t make twice.”
Now Marissa’s voice softens. “Remember when we were in high school and Yolanda used to buy us those frozen hash brown patties and after school we’d make green chile and bacon sandwiches, with them as the bread? Still when I have hash browns I think of being pregnant and hanging out at your house. Remember how Val would be so mad about all our dishes in the sink, but she’d do them anyway before your mom got home?”