“Taste it,” Angel urged Mike, but he patted his stomach.
“Alas, no. I have genetically high cholesterol.”
Finally all the dessert plates had been scraped clean and the cappuccino cups stood empty but for some drying foam on the rim and the thick dark circle in the bottom （Angel had never known her mother to drink coffee after dinner）。 It hadn’t felt as though they were biding their time until Marissa’s tipsiness faded. They’d had so much fun that, in the end, they were nearly the last to leave.
Mike slid his credit card into the folder without even looking at the bill—Angel had hoped to catch a glimpse of the total—the dinner must have cost a fortune. After he’d signed the slip, he walked them to their car and opened the passenger door for Angel, handing her in.
Then he went around to the driver’s side, where, aware of Angel watching, he and her mother shared a laughing, awkward kiss that melted into something longer and less awkward.
Sitting there, Angel was embarrassed by how dingy their car was—twenty years old, stained upholstery, used napkins in the cup holder, the dirty floor mats worn bald. She wished Mike didn’t have to see it, but he wasn’t looking. His hand was deep in Marissa’s hair, Marissa’s head tipped back.
Finally they pulled apart and Marissa got in, giving a single self-conscious giggle and then falling silent.
“Do you like him?” Marissa asked worriedly once they were on the highway, her nostrils tensing, the wires already beginning to tighten below the surface of her face.
“Definitely,” said Angel, and Marissa had looked over at her and flashed a sudden radiant smile, and Angel was so lifted by that smile that she didn’t ask her mother if she was okay to drive.
“I’m really glad. It’s important to me that you like him.” Marissa paused. “We were thinking he might move in with us. At the end of the month.”
And Angel had been so happy about her mother’s happiness that she hadn’t even minded that the plan had already been made and that she hadn’t been consulted.
The first few months Mike lived with them, things were great. Angel felt that they—she and Marissa—were rising, occupying a more stable position in the world, even if their actual circumstances hadn’t really changed. They still lived in the same house, but it felt tidier, and with the second income, the rent didn’t feel like such a burden. Marissa had never fallen seriously behind in rent, but the worry that she might preoccupied her and sifted like sand into Angel’s sense of home, a constant itchy grit.
There was more money for dinners out and movies and little spontaneous gifts from her mother—a lip gloss here, a new outfit there. On Angel’s fifteenth birthday, Marissa and Mike presented her with a laptop computer. “You have to have one now that you’re in high school,” Mike said.
He didn’t ignore Angel, as some of her mother’s boyfriends had, as if by ignoring her she’d simply disappear and they’d have Marissa to themselves. And he never seemed creepy, either, like these guys who seemed to regard a single woman with a daughter as a twofer. That’s how one of them actually put it, joking about his “girls,” when Angel was eleven. Marissa had turned on him savagely. “That’s fucked up. Never, ever say that.”
No, Mike was a good guy. He seemed like a dad, cracking corny jokes, chiming in on whatever subject her homework was about. He was well educated, he subscribed to boring thin-paged magazines with lots of news and commentary and not many pictures. And he seemed to care for Marissa. He was always slipping his arm around her waist, commenting on her sexiness, grabbing her boob, and Angel would avert her eyes or hang out more with friends. He supported Angel when she lobbied to be allowed to go to parties. “She needs her freedom.” Marissa agreed, flushed and happy and, after fifteen years of single-parenthood, relieved to give up some of the burden of parental responsibility to someone else—someone older, with kids of his own, a man.