“Oh, definitely,” said Priscilla. “I’m totally going traditional. Next time I’ll bring my magazines and we can plan it!”
Angel loved this new, delighted version of her mother and also felt repulsed, because now she had to think about her mother and this Mike character having sex. A region between her stomach and her pelvis quivered, as though a dozen flashing silvery sardines were flipping around there in the dark.
Angel frowned. “Why doesn’t Mike see his kids?” This seemed to be a warning sign.
Marissa shrugged. “His ex-wife’s kind of a control monster. And Stockton is far.”
The first time Marissa introduced them, it was at Serafina’s, a nice restaurant just outside of Santa Fe. “It was Mike’s idea,” Marissa said, looking around the patio strung with white lights while they waited for him at the table. “He wants to do things right.”
Her mother was stunning in a burgundy dress with a deep neckline. Angel had also dressed up for the dinner, in a flattering sundress and the shoes she’d worn to the eighth-grade end-of-year dance; Serafina’s wasn’t the kind of place she and Marissa frequented. The sun had set, though the sky was still bright, and Angel felt glamorous, here among other well-dressed people, sipping her ice water.
“Can I get you a drink while you wait?” the waiter inquired, but Marissa shook her head tightly, as if afraid that Mike might not show.
But he did show, looking round and tidy in a V-neck sweater and khakis. He pulled Marissa in for a kiss on the mouth and extended a confident hand to Angel.
“The famous Angel. You look just like your mother. And that is a compliment.”
When the waiter came again, Mike took charge, urging Marissa to get a drink and then ordering guacamole, which, to Angel’s astonishment, was made fresh from a cart, right there at the table. The waiter sliced and scooped avocados into a molcajete with quick, practiced motions, squeezed limes, then mashed it all up and served it to them with a bowl of hot, salty chips. It was the most delicious guacamole she’d ever tasted.
Angel felt shy, but she answered Mike’s questions about school and hobbies with the pleasant carefulness she used when addressing teachers. To her relief, he soon turned his attention to her mother, and Angel was allowed to sip her lemonade and watch them laugh.
Her mother was a fresher, more alive version of herself with Mike, Angel decided that first night. The tension that sometimes made Marissa’s face rigid at the nostrils and along the jawline, as though a complex network of wires were stretched just beneath her skin, had gone. She looked soft and radiant, and Angel saw her as she’d been when she was young, as Marissa still must see herself. “You don’t know what it’s like, always doing things alone,” she’d once told Angel, looking up from an impossible spread of paperwork, but Marissa was wrong. Angel knew exactly what it was like. Hadn’t she been coming home to an empty house since she was seven? Also, her mother didn’t do things alone. What about Angel, who took on fully half the chores and did her best to be a friend to her mother?
But that night at the restaurant as they ate their enchiladas and fajitas, Marissa laughed and joked, and her jokes seemed more sophisticated than Angel would have given her mother credit for. When Mike started complaining about the Republicans for blockading some bill or other, Marissa joined right in, adding facts and perspectives of her own, though Angel hadn’t known her mother followed the news or cared much about politicians. They’re all assholes, she’d once told Angel.
“I shouldn’t have had a second one,” Marissa said, tapping her empty margarita glass. The straw was waxy with lipstick and most of the salt had been licked off, but still, Marissa extended the tip of her tongue shyly to the rim.
Mike laughed. “Better for me. I get to enjoy your company until you sober up.”
So Marissa and Mike each had a third, and Angel tamped down the flare of worry as she watched her mother sip, and they ate their dinners slowly and then ordered sticky flan and creamy chocolate cheesecake and the fanciest, most delicious pile of churros, chewy and crunchy, with cinnamon sugar that spilled on Angel’s dress. On the side of each dessert plate was mounded whipped cream so thick it was almost cheesy, and Angel, imitating her mother, ate the whipped cream one delicate and distracted half-spoonful at a time, setting the spoon down after every creamy, dreamy bite, as if each extension of the spoon was singular and decadent and they had no intention of gobbling the whole mound, though Angel knew they both did.