“My question is, what’s the point?” Angel says. “Life doesn’t suck enough?”
Amadeo’s hands, thick in their bandages, don’t fit in his pockets; he can’t think what to do with them. He wishes his uncle were here to explain. They take it seriously coming from Tío Tíve. His mother’s proud of her uncle’s role in the tradition. In Tío Tíve, it’s noble, authentic. He’s heard both his mother and sister bragging to people, usually other women, usually Anglo transplants, people from their great wider worlds of college and the legislature. They brag about it the same way they brag about their Spanish blood, about having been in America for four hundred years, about the fact that they still live in their ancestral village （Valerie’s term）。 But somehow, in Amadeo, they can’t believe the feeling is genuine. Somehow, in their eyes, his participation tarnishes the tradition, degrades it from the romance of sepia to garish cereal-box color, from true religious conviction to pathology. “I thought you were glad I was in the hermandad.”
“Oh, hijito, I’m very proud of you.”
“It’s cool you’re keeping the tradition alive—I mean, it’s our family history. And community is great.” Valerie eyes his bandages. “Just maybe don’t go overboard. Do you have to do physical therapy or anything?” She shuts the cupboard, then crosses the living room. She settles herself into an armchair, tugging the fabric at her boobs. “I don’t know, I could never believe in a God who wanted me to hurt myself.”
God doesn’t want it, Amadeo longs to explain. It’s something you want to do for God, if you care enough. He’d like to argue with Valerie, but knows that she, with her college degrees and intro religious studies classes, can out-argue him. “No one’s telling you to believe nothing,” he says. A familiar sense of drowning helplessness fills him, and he kicks a stack of catalogs waiting to be recycled. They slide smoothly across the carpet.
For Christmas Valerie gave Amadeo a hardback book called Mastering Ares: Breaking Free from the Prison of Male Rage. This is why he isn’t speaking to her. The cover—fiery splashes of red and orange—features the naked, muscled god of war looming over an exploding volcano and looking pissed, with a little smiling cartoon man in a business suit stepping out of a doorway in his chest. “The author is very well-regarded,” Valerie told him primly, as he sat there turning the thing in his hand. Thanks to that book, Amadeo has discovered new depths of male rage. He will never forgive his sister, ever.
“Yeah, that’s not a great present,” his mother conceded when Amadeo cornered her in the kitchen. Amadeo had, for a moment, felt vindicated, until she paused, hands motionless in the dishwater, and ventured, “It’s maybe worth thinking about, though.” That was a terrible night, that Christmas Eve, and Amadeo is glad Angel wasn’t there. He only hopes Valerie hasn’t told her about it.
Now, they’ve all turned their attention smoothly away from him so as not, he supposes, to set him off.
From the kitchen doorway, he watches his sister and daughter on the couch uneasily. The house is itself once again—vacuumed, table extended and set with a plastic lace tablecloth, femininity reasserting itself. He wishes things were right between him and Angel; it makes him nervous to have no one on his side. Angel and Valerie laugh.
“Oh!” Valerie leaps up. “I brought you some stuff.” She drags the bags across the carpet. “It’s from when Lily and Sarah were babies, but you know babies, they grow so fast they never wear anything out.”
“That’s really nice!” Angel looks truly touched, her smile slow and big and clear. Amadeo is surprised to find that he’s envious; why did it never occur to him to buy her baby things?
Valerie starts dumping the bags on the living room floor, and the females converge on the pile like zombies, rendered powerless in the presence of tiny pants.
“And,” says Valerie, “I found Sarah’s old car seat in the garage.”