And Yolanda will have to comfort him. “I know,” she’ll say, patting his head. “But she’s right. In this case, she’s right.”
Ah, well. The cycle won’t last forever. She imagines her tumor as a mass of wires, snapping electricity from the raw ends, sending little shocks into her bloodstream.
All night she’d worried about how to tell them about her diagnosis. She watched them squabble, waiting for an opening. As the night progressed, she even began to look forward to her announcement. She enjoyed the thought that with a single sentence, she could blow the whole gathering apart.
But then, as usual, Amadeo took the stage. And Yolanda, who ought to have been surrounded and petted, wept over and adored, was once again backed into the same tired role of defending the indefensible. What does Valerie want her to say? Yes, Amadeo is a disaster. He’s a failure. And Yolanda has failed, too, for raising him to be this way.
Poor Valerie. When Valerie was a child, she’d strain over her homework, scowling and nail-biting and breathing fierce taurine breaths, until she was nearly done, just a problem or two from the end, and then she’d burst into tears, melting over the worksheet in anguish, ready to give it all up. Every night, she’d be nearly across the finish line when she’d fall apart, and every night Yolanda would have to come to her rescue, lift her up, praise her and reassure her and promise her that she was smart and capable. And Valerie would argue, because what did Yolanda know about fractions or the Revolutionary War?
Valerie has never forgiven Yolanda for making Anthony move out, has never stopped missing her father. She all but stopped speaking to Yolanda in that time after the separation, whereas little Amadeo would climb into her lap and pat her cheek anxiously, asking, “You okay, Mama?” Valerie baffles Yolanda, moving as she does through the wider world, grasping hold of projects Yolanda doesn’t understand. She knows the girl feels hurt by Yolanda’s closeness to her brother, but the fact is that Amadeo, for all his malefactions, has been easier for Yolanda to mother, his needs so much clearer.
Yolanda had liked Valerie’s ex-husband, had been impressed by his job as a network specialist, and grateful her daughter had found a man who knew computers and had a steady job, and at the UNM law school, no less. She liked his easy flirtation with Yolanda herself, the way he never failed to kiss her cheek and always helped bring dishes to the table. Yet all the while, he’d been hitting her daughter, and Valerie, proud Valerie, so intent on being the family’s success, hadn’t said a word until the bruises had already been documented and charges pressed, when divorce proceedings were already underway. It had chilled Yolanda to realize that her instincts were so blunted, that she’d been so susceptible to that charm.
Yolanda should have known better. For the eleven years of her own marriage, Anthony teetered on the brink of destruction or self-destruction—both options seemed equally likely. When he was really bad, she hid the guns in her uncle’s garage, and refused through tears to tell Anthony where they were. She still remembers retrieving them from closet and drawer, toolbox and shed, working quickly, while Anthony was at a job site, placing them all on the floral bedspread: both handguns, three rifles, the BB gun he’d been given as a boy. She remembers their terrible weight, their dull metallic gleam, the sense, as she packed them carefully into a cardboard box, of their killing potential, each one heavy and wound tight, ready to explode. For months at a time, when Anthony was in his dark moods, weeping and raging about matters large and small, threatening to kill himself, Yolanda would drive to work with her trunk filled with every sharp object in the house.
For those months, she was unceasingly aware of skin: her children’s skin, Anthony’s skin, her own, so thin and easily torn, so unequal to the threat of blade and bullet. To let her children out of her sight was like a physical wound, even to send them on the school bus. Now, Yolanda can’t believe she allowed herself to live like that, and for so long. Every evening, she’d run out to the car, retrieve a paring knife from the trunk, chop the onions or trim the pork with furtive haste, then wash and dry and stow the knife before Anthony got home. She wonders now whether she was overreacting or underreacting. Yolanda can never be sure if her responses are appropriate to the situation, which is maybe a result of living in fear for so long. She used to catalog those knives religiously, but now it is obvious how misplaced her efforts were. As if Anthony couldn’t pick up a knife or a box cutter at any hardware store. As if he couldn’t borrow a gun from any one of his friends. As if he didn’t have others tucked away that she didn’t know about.