With a cold flush, Amado is reminded that his father was thirty-three when he died, the same age that Amadeo is now.
Amadeo looks at the time above the stove. Four o’clock on a Monday morning in April. The house is silent. Outside, a coyote howls, and it sounds like a woman crying out in pain. It’s been hours since Mass concluded, since the church emptied itself into the bright day, and children and adults alike returned to their homes to glut themselves on Peeps and cheap grainy jelly beans. The austerity of Lent is past, the countless lapses and broken promises forgiven, Christ’s sacrifice forgotten.
His mother and his daughter are enclosed in their rooms at the back of the house, unreachable. Amadeo’s hands ache. He picks up the bottle of Percocet, rattles it, then, with difficulty, twists off the lid. Before he can stop himself, he pours them down the drain and switches on the garbage disposal.
Part II
ORDINARY TIME
The mission of Family Foundations is to improve outcomes for at-risk children in the greater Espa?ola Valley. Smart Starts! is the teen parenting and high school equivalency program, now in its third year, and, thanks to both a federal and a foundation grant, it is the jewel in the agency’s crown. The year-round program accommodates eight students, eligible from pregnancy through their nineteenth birthdays, with on-site child care. When BriannaGruver was interviewing for the teaching position last year, the application included a fill-in-the-blanks component.
“There are no wrong answers,” the administrator assured her, which made Brianna nervous, because in her experience “no wrong answers” really meant that the range of possible wrong answers was unimaginably broad. After all, the questions on her dating profile were also supposed to have no wrong answers, but hers couldn’t have been right because, apart from some dick pics, they have gotten her exactly nowhere.
Families should_____.
I get angry when_____.
I fear _____.
Brianna majored in biology precisely because in biology nothing is subjective. There were cell functions to memorize, complex neural pathways to map. When Brianna assisted in a lab studying chromosomal mutations in fruit flies, the procedures were clear and invariable. But these vague fill-in-the-blanks? What was she supposed to do with them? Be original? Be truthful?
There are a lot of things that make Brianna angry that she didn’t want noted in her HR file. Being talked over, being mistaken for a high school student, being subjected to couples making out in movie theaters when she’s trying to pay attention. In the end she settled on bland earnestness, which is more or less her default around people in authority. Families should focus on the needs of the children. I get angry when children are hurt. I fear not being able to make enough of a difference. So much of adult life, Brianna was discovering, was about pretending to be the person people wanted you to be.
Brianna was particularly proud of her last answer: I believe _____. I believe every young person is capable and precious and can change her life regardless of the circumstances she was born into. She’s pretty sure this answer is why she got the job. And it wasn’t just pious posturing, either. Brianna did believe this; if she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been interviewing for jobs at nonprofits in Espa?ola. The whole country is suffused with hope: smiling, kind-eyed Obama is in the White House, progress unspools all around them, the bad old years of struggle and war and intolerance are, if not gone for good, at least on the wane.
Brianna is proud of her first year at Smart Starts! When she toured the classroom during her interview, the atmosphere was one of utter airless boredom. Eight teenage girls slumped at their desks, with their push-up bras and lip liner, paging hopelessly through their workbooks. She was surprised by how closely they resembled her own high school classmates, except that some had to squeeze pregnant bellies behind their desks and others had babies in the nursery down the hall. The walls were bare. Bookshelves in the back were filled with GED workbooks and nothing else, not even a dictionary. Above the whiteboard in the front was a single tiny American flag.