Angel kneels beside the bounty. In spite of himself, Amadeo leans over the breakfast bar to watch. Stained onesies and shorts, misshapen little Tshirts, individual peanut-sized socks floating around everywhere. When she speaks, Angel’s voice is muted. “Thanks, Aunt Val.”
“This stuff was mine?” asks Sarah, digging. She sticks a fist out of the neck of a yellow smocked shirt and waggles it like a head. “Hello!” she squeaks. “I am a shirt mouse!” She turns to her mom. “Hey. What if I want to keep it?”
Lily is the only one not interested in the mound of stuff. She has tucked herself into a corner of the couch under a crocheted afghan where she’s been scowling into the pages of a fat young adult novel. Now, though, she withdraws her thumbnail from her mouth and informs her sister, “Actually, most of it was mine. So.”
Middle school isn’t easy for Lily. Last year there was a scandal when she reported several classmates for sexual harassment to the president of the school board. The boys had, it seemed, been rating the girls, with separate scores for body, face, and overall fuckability. （“What was Lily’s score?” Amadeo made the mistake of asking, and his mother just narrowed her eyes at him.） The firestorm ended, predictably, with Lily’s complete ostracism from the seventh grade. She was featured on the evening news in a segment called “KAQB Celebrates Kids Who Can,” and the family gathered to watch as Lily explained with unnerving monotonic eloquence to a reporter that a middle school that isn’t safe for one girl isn’t safe for anyone. If Lily had been cuter or less self-righteous or less articulate, she might have come through the ordeal all right. But as it was, she cut a singularly unsympathetic figure, a pint-sized nag pushing her glasses up her nose, and it hurt Amadeo to think of his sister allowing his niece to expose herself like that. When, at the commercial, he suggested that maybe Lily shouldn’t have gotten involved, Valerie turned on him. “This is why I fought tooth and nail for full custody and a lifetime restraining order.” She jabbed a finger at Lily, who sat hunched against the armrest. “She’s growing up to be a powerful woman, and I’m proud of that,” Valerie declared, and Lily, powerful woman, picked miserably at the thicket of her eyebrow.
“Technically,” Lily tells her mother now, lowering her book with forbearance, “you should have asked us before giving away our stuff.”
“Angel’s baby doesn’t have a lot of nice things. And since we do, we’re going to share.”
Angel scratches at something crusted on a miniature UNM sweatshirt, then folds it into a teensy square. She picks up a lavender pinafore and folds that, too. There are several dresses in there, Amadeo sees now, frilly floral pinks and purples. It seems Valerie just brought the whole lot of crap from her house without even bothering to go through it, as though his home were a Goodwill dumpster.
“You know she’s having a boy, right?” Amadeo cracks open another beer. He’s getting better at maneuvering around the bandages.
“I thought I’d let Angel choose from all of it.” Valerie grabs a fistful of hair and winds it over her shoulder into a long glossy rope, her old nervous gesture. “Babies don’t understand gender, Amadeo. They don’t know what they’re wearing.”
Angel’s cheek and neck are flushed, and, watching her, Amadeo is seized with an urge to defend her. “Did you even wash it?”
“No, no,” Angel insists. She won’t look at him. “It’s really nice of you, Aunt Val.” She smiles bravely across the pile.
Valerie narrows her eyes at Amadeo’s beer. “Haven’t you already had one tonight? Aren’t you on Percocet?” She points to the prescription bottle on the breakfast bar. “You have to be really careful with that stuff. I’m amazed they prescribed it to an alcoholic.”
His daughter’s lips part, pale.
“You’re lucky I never got into chiva.” His voice is louder than he intends.