Her biggest fear is that her son will get sucked down this same road, a fear compounded by the fear that her very fear makes it inevitable, and this is why she’s done everything she can to shield Amadeo, to provide a buffer against the consequences of his own bad choices. She can’t do otherwise.
How little they know her, her children. They are incapable of seeing her as anything but strong and nurturing and living only for them. Yolanda, a terminally ill cancer patient? Whose every thought must center on her own survival? No; it would be far too great a strain on their imaginations. They would never guess she was capable of such dark thoughts. This understanding makes her so angry she has to sit up.
She won’t tell them about her tumor, not until they have to know. She’ll buy herself as much normalcy and privacy as she can.
The decision comes as a relief. It’s for their own good—this crosses her mind, less a thought than a reflex, and she knows it’s a lie.
I don’t care, she thinks. I don’t care. Finally, mercifully, her mind slows and sleep pulls her under.
Long after her aunt left and her grandmother took her sleeping pill and kissed her good night, Angel sits on the floor against the couch, her homework on negative numbers abandoned beside her. She scratches a pimple at her jawline and glares at Valerie’s car seat.
The baby is active tonight. He is active every night, which doesn’t bode well for Angel’s postpartum sleep. For now, his ruckus is more or less muffled, but still when she drifts off, he kicks her awake, demanding even at age zero—age negative 0.075—her constant attention. Tonight he’s throwing punches and turning tense flips, as if he, too, is on the point of angry tears.
It was nice of Valerie, bringing these baby things—of course it was nice of her—but Angel glowers at the car seat with hot eyes. It reclines among the piles of baby clothes, sticky and encrusted with sand and lint and grime. There are still Cheerios caught in the crevices between the blue velveteen pads. Just because she’s sixteen and jobless doesn’t mean that she doesn’t deserve nice things. These disadvantages should mean she deserves them even more.
She understands now that no one will be throwing her a baby shower. Sure, once the baby is born, Angel will get the little party at Smart Starts!, with hummus and lemon poppy-seed muffins from the grocery store and paper towels from the bathroom dispenser for napkins. Everyone will go around the circle telling her what they value about Angel and their wishes for the baby, the same predictable things. I value that you’re a good friend. I hope he is happy and smart and goes to college. At the end they’ll present her with a brochure on early literacy and a wrapped board book donated by Ready Readers, either Goodnight Moon or The Carrot Seed or If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the only titles they have.
But Angel wants a baby shower. She wants a duck-shaped cake with Welcome baby! spelled out in frosting and silver balls, wants laughter and a sunny room filled with ribbons and streamers and flowers. She wants piles of pastel-wrapped gifts—fleecy footed sleepers, gauze receiving blankets, baby toys that rattle and crinkle and squeak. Angel wants games, too—Pin the Pin on the Diaper, nursery rhyme bingo, that one where they swing the wedding ring in front of your stomach to determine the sex—and she wants to pass around her sonogram to laughing, photogenic, mimosa-drinking friends, the whole thing orchestrated by her dearest friend of all, a busy, effusive, adoring friend, the friend who is also her baby’s godmother. But Angel doesn’t have a wedding ring, she already knows her baby’s sex, and she doesn’t have friends anymore, not really, and certainly not a best one.
It pains Angel that she is thirty-seven weeks pregnant and still hasn’t found a suitable godmother for her baby. Angel needs someone affectionate, competent, and supportive, someone who will be a good influence when, inevitably, Angel isn’t.
She’s run through the possibilities: her mother and grandmother are already grandmother and great-grandmother, her old best friend Priscilla hates her, and wouldn’t have been up for the job anyway. All her friends from school have been distressingly easy to fall out of touch with. The girls from Smart Starts! offer support and understanding, but they are not godmother material. Take Lizette, for example. She’s full of bluster and brassy humor, and pretty, too, but she got pregnant because she was raped by her uncle. And she smoked weed pretty much her entire pregnancy, except for one weekend when she did meth—actual meth!—with some guy she met on the Rail Runner. So it’s no wonder, really, that Lizette managed to crap her baby out, because Mercedes was underweight.