Amadeo holds up his beer and realizes that he’s a little drunk. “To role models.” He throws it back and tosses the empty across the room and into the trash. He makes the shot and looks to each of them, grinning, but they’re all staring at him like he’s committed a felony.
“Do you need to belittle her experience?” Valerie asks the question sincerely.
This isn’t who he is! he wants to protest. These women are putting him on the defensive, and it isn’t his fault, it just isn’t. He’s afraid Angel will cry, clinch the case against him.
“I’m sorry.” The apology startles him, startles them all. Yolanda’s face smooths. “You’re doing great,” he tells Angel softly. Goodness swells in him, and the feeling is intoxicating. The feeling is a fuck you to Valerie.
Angel raises her head, and now her eyes fill. “Yeah?”
Amadeo isn’t seeing Valerie, isn’t seeing his mother. Just Angel. It takes so little to make her happy, and he can do it. He’ll make his daughter happy, he pledges. “Yeah,” he says. “Really great.”
AFTER A TENSE, quiet dinner, Valerie reluctantly agrees to allow her girls to watch one show, so they’re on their bellies, blank-eyed before some sitcom. They munch on the contents of the plastic Easter baskets Yolanda produced, slurping the gunk from Cadbury Creme Eggs, crunching on candy-coated chocolates, while Angel sits above them on the couch, doing her math homework.
All night his mother has been quiet, rubbing her forehead. But now, at Valerie’s urging, she retires to her own bedroom to watch her stories, while Amadeo and Valerie clean up, Valerie having volunteered for both of them. “We’ll have dessert after, then,” his mother says. “I want us to talk.”
“Fine. I’ll help, but I can’t really use my hands.” He pops a Percocet, because it’s time, and also to remind his sister of his injuries. She says nothing.
While he’s putting away leftovers, Amadeo takes the opportunity to get himself another beer. It’s number four maybe, or five. He gropes at the tab under his shirt to muffle the pop and fizz and swigs fast, blocked by the refrigerator door from Valerie’s critical eye. And because he needs to keep up his strength if he’s going to be enclosed in the kitchen with his sister, he tosses back another, placing the empties in the crisper.
“I am so impressed with Angel,” Valerie says over the running water.
“Yeah.” Amadeo wipes his mouth on his sleeve and starts scraping plates into the trash.
“She seems like she’s got a solid head on her shoulders. She’ll need that. She’s got a tough row to hoe.” Valerie laughs. “It just shows how long it’s been since I’ve seen her, but, god, she’s grown up.”
Amadeo looks over the breakfast bar at the girls in the living room. Angel seems absorbed in her homework. He is entering that stage of intoxication where everything is hazy and bearable.
“Some of the girls I work with in the schools are so unrealistic. They think being pregnant makes them special, like they’re one of these celebrity pregnant teens and should get their own shows just because they had unprotected sex. But Angel seems to be engaged in her classes and taking it all really seriously.”
Blabbity-blab-blab. The woman doesn’t stop. Her forehead is shiny with steam or sweat or both, her black sideburns damp.
“I guess she turned out pretty good.”
Valerie shuts off the water and turns to him. She pokes his chest gently with a wet finger, looking up into his face with moist earnestness. The water spreads through his T-shirt and a few tiny bubbles of dish soap collapse into the fabric. “And I’m proud of you, too, brother. You’re stepping up. I have to admit, I didn’t think you would.”
The fuzzy sense of well-being washes away completely, replaced by blurry rage. Amadeo palms his scalp and pulls it toward his shoulder, cracking his neck. First one side, then the other. “I have to admit, Valerie, I didn’t think you’d make it through tonight without being a bitch.”