In the corner, a skinny tecato with patchy facial hair clutches himself, shivering and moaning, his eyes squinted as if under full sun. “I’m hurting so bad,” he mumbles to no one. He smells like he’s shit himself. He extends his legs and then draws them in again, shifting on his skinny butt, as if he can’t find a position that doesn’t cause him agony. He’s got las malias, heroin withdrawal, and Amadeo turns away. He thanks God that he can’t stand needles.
Amadeo hurts much worse than after the cutting of the sellos on Ash Wednesday, worse than after those lashes. Earlier, on Calvario, he seemed to have risen to some heightened space that pain didn’t penetrate. He was cloaked in grace, he supposes.
But now he really, truly hurts, and Angel is giving him neither the praise nor the sympathy that he deserves. The pain clusters in his palms, shimmering, ever-changing. The blood is messy, coagulating thick and black, ruining his white pants. He wants, suddenly, to put his daughter in her place. “Don’t you even got a boyfriend?”
Angel turns and looks at him like he’s stupid. “What do you think?”
“Didn’t your mom never teach you not to sleep around?”
“All the girls in my parenting class, not one of them has a guy that matters. Not one. You think you mattered?”
“You shouldn’t have come. You think you have a right to just barge into my house and make yourself at home.”
Angel’s eyes widen, and then she narrows them. “It’s my grandmother’s house. You don’t have a house.” She turns back to her magazine, resolute.
At long last the girl and her mother are called. Amadeo looks at them piteously, and the girl looks back at him with interest, but the mother gathers their things and walks away, refusing eye contact.
“Hey,” he says, ready to reconcile. “Why are you so mad at me? I did good today.”
Angel finally sets the magazine on her lap and turns to him. “So,” she says deliberately, “tell me: What was that? You never said anything about actual nails. You never said anything about actually getting crucified. What good is that to anyone?”
Her words are like a slap. “What’s it to you, Angel?”
Her voice thickens and lowers. “In three weeks, I’m due. Three fucking weeks.” She swallows and turns away, and her eyes rest unseeing on the television. For a moment Amadeo thinks Angel is going to cry. When she turns back, however, her eyes are dry, her face splotchy, gaze shuttered. Very quietly, so quietly he has to lean toward her to hear, Angel says, “How’re you going to hold the baby? Or didn’t you even think of that?”
It’s Easter Sunday, the day of the Lord’s Resurrection, and in honor of that, and of her own return home, Yolanda is going to gather her children around her, feed them the perfect Easter dinner, and break the news that she is dying of a malignant brain tumor.
When she pulls in front of the house and cuts the engine, Yolanda thinks, So this is what it looks like: her home without her. She’s lived here her entire adult life, and has been away for less than two weeks, but somehow the house seems lower and drabber than she remembered it, crouching among the dusty juniper. It’s an adobe-style house, soiled pink with iron bars on the windows that her daughter Valerie says will trap them all in a deadly inferno should there ever be a fault in the wiring, but that make Yolanda feel safer just the same.
Anthony built it in the first year of their marriage, while the two of them shared her childhood room at her parents’ house. “You’ll have a washer and dryer, babe,” he told her. “Dishwasher, picture window, any color carpet you want.”
She remembers bending over the plans with Anthony and her parents after dinner, clutching his hand under the table: the three little bedrooms, the dining nook. At his happiest, Anthony could be genial and loving, laughing too loudly at family parties, keeping up affectionately with old aunts. She’d grown up with him—he’d been her cousin’s best friend—and she’d loved the clarity of his vision of their future together. Finding the land had been so easy it had seemed fated: four beautiful acres surrounded by hills, just outside of Las Penas, the asking price five hundred dollars under what they’d decided they could manage. Each day, while she went to answer phones and sort paperwork at the legislature in Santa Fe, thrilled with the importance and glamour of her first job, Anthony drove out to the land with the bed of his truck filled with cinderblock and cement. Yolanda sometimes forgets how competent and hardworking her husband could be—talented, even, she thinks, looking at the flagstone steps he fit together with geometric precision—and she feels sadness—less at his absence, than that all those good memories were overwritten by what came after.