Her father swoops down and Angel is briefly and irrationally afraid that he is going to claw her with the fingers that emerge from the bandage, claw his nails down her face and throat and belly, but instead he grabs the lavender pinafore and shakes it in Angel’s face. “Dresses? She thinks a boy is going to wear dresses?”
Angel snatches it from his hand, shoves it in the bag. “It was nice of her,” she mutters.
“She’s a fucking bitch.”
Suddenly Angel is so angry at him the surprise catches in her throat. She staggers to her feet. “Valerie’s right. You’re a drunk.”
“Angel,” he says, reaching for her upper arm. “Listen.”
She twists away. “Don’t touch me.” She jerks back and stumbles down the hall.
For a long time, Amadeo holds his head in his hands. He has sobered considerably, but still the room rocks and rotates into place when he opens his eyes. The living room is still scattered with the detritus of dinner. On the counter sits an untouched lemon meringue pie, the meringue collapsed and the filling shrinking from the crust.
The house is so unchanged he almost can’t believe that the last several hours happened. But they did. Just two days after enduring the nails, Amadeo has his second DWI and spent three terrible hours in jail.
Well, at least it wasn’t as bad as Christmas Eve. Then he had to spend a whole night in jail, because, his mother claimed, she didn’t get his voicemail message. Yolanda had been out driving, looking for him, worried, she told him later, that he’d hurt himself on the icy roads. Amadeo suspects that she left him there overnight to teach him a lesson. Why else have a fucking cell phone, if not for crises like that? He still doesn’t forgive her.
That night in jail was awful beyond words—smelly and dirty and the cops spoke to him like he was scum, and he’d had to puke in that seatless metal toilet and they wouldn’t even give him toothpaste to rinse his mouth, though one of the cops did give him a Quarter Pounder and even paid for it himself.
Tonight, when the cop asked him which number he wanted to dial, Amadeo hesitated. In the end, he called his uncle, who’d picked up on the second ring, despite the hour. He expressed neither anger nor surprise, just said, after a pause, “All right. I’m coming.”
The moment Amadeo caught sight of his uncle, he flung himself at Tíve, sobbing, clinging tighter the more Tíve tried to shake him off. “I wasn’t even that drunk.” The unsmiling lady police officer shook her head contemptuously and left them in the tiny windowless lobby, which smelled of disinfectant.
On the way home, Amadeo waited for his uncle to reprimand him. The old man squinted myopically at the dark road, driving fifteen miles under the speed limit. Amadeo’s hands lay in his lap, useless, the bandages filthy.
The silence stretched, itchy and intolerable. Finally Amadeo said, “I know what you’re thinking. I’m not like my dad. I’m not like Elwin.” The words were lumpy and malformed in his mouth.
His uncle lifted his foot from the gas and looked at him. Even in the light of the dashboard, Amadeo could see the hurt that flared across the old man’s face. “Don’t be,” Tíve said. “Your mother don’t deserve that.” He straightened, accelerated again, and was silent until they reached the house.
As Amadeo was about to open the door, his uncle said, “Tonight you make a change.” He gazed into the pool of the headlights.
Amadeo was surprised by his tears, which seemed to have sprung from some new source. “Yeah,” he said, and for a moment, the word swelled in him, a bubble of possibility, then deflated, because just a few hours ago he’d promised himself he’d be worthy of his daughter, and already he’d let her down.
From where he stands, Amadeo can see Elwin and his father on the living room wall, aged eighteen, in the only picture his mother will display of her husband. It was taken not long before Elwin died. They’re sitting close together on the steps of his uncle’s house: wide smiles, disturbing black mullets. Amadeo steps closer. His father’s face is round and dark, his hair gelled and wet-looking, curling at the nape. Amadeo used to stand before this younger iteration of his father, trying to reconcile the smiling boy with the man who scared him with his rages and his silences, and scared him more with his bouts of desperate affection. Amadeo remembers his father grabbing him and whirling him around, that terror and exhilaration.