“Well, I’ll duck away now that your dad’s here,” said the receptionist.
Angel looked up in alarm. “Tell Brianna I’ll keep up with my journal. Tell her I’ll call the minute the baby comes.”
The receptionist laughed. “Catch your breath first.”
“And tell her there’s no way I’m missing the Open House! I’ll be there, and so will my dad. Right, Dad? You’re coming? So you can meet Brianna?”
“Relax. You’re good, Angel,” Amadeo said. “You’ll be good.” Of course she would be good: her father was here. But then the receptionist shook his hand and passed through the automatic doors, leaving Amadeo horribly in charge.
“Brianna’s like my personal hero.”
He pictured a competent, gray-haired woman with a shelf bosom. She’d be a hugger. “Hey, what about me?”
Angel laughed, full-throated. “Oh yeah. You, too.”
Now, she groans.
“You’re okay, hijita,” says Yolanda.
Amadeo peels the hefty Band-Aid off his left hand. Maybe a nurse can check out his injuries, wrap them up professionally. They haven’t healed entirely, but it’s clear that he’s not permanently wounded. Now he can more or less do the things he used to do, though his writing looks like shit. He’s forever knocking the back of his hand into things and making himself yelp.
“Weird that we’ve both been to the hospital lately,” Amadeo remarks to his daughter. “Who’d have thought?” He pushes the Band-Aid back on, but the stick is ruined.
“Huh,” says Yolanda.
She pats Angel’s hand, the hand Amadeo can’t bear to look at because of the IV needle pushed under her skin. A piece of curling tape keeps it from getting wrenched loose, but, Amadeo thinks, the needle must shift around in there. Woozily, he imagines the tip grazing the thin walls of the vein, scraping bone.
From the television mounted in the corner, Judge Judy snaps at bedraggled defendants who don’t even have the wherewithal to pick a nicer sweatshirt for their televised court appearances.
“Where’s my mom?” Angel asks her grandmother with a little whimper. “I thought she’d be here by now.”
“I left a message.” Yolanda checks her phone, then both her hand and the phone drop back to her lap. “She’ll be here.”
“She hasn’t seen me in over three weeks.”
When he looks at his daughter, Amadeo sometimes has the sense that he’s looking at one of those holographic postcards—she’s a woman, she’s a child, she’s the tiny kid she once was. He can’t get her image to hold steady.
“Hey, you’re okay. You got us,” Amadeo reminds her.
What Amadeo didn’t expect was how boring it would all be. It wasn’t so bad when they let Angel walk the halls, but as soon as a bed became available, they stuck her in it and plugged her into machines. For long periods nothing happens, just the tedious comings and goings of people with brisk walks. They write baffling things—numbers and abbreviations and impossible-to-read drug names—on the whiteboard opposite her bed, check dials and digital displays and make marks on plastic clipboards.
A heavy lady packed into banana-printed scrubs—nurse, nurse’s assistant, doctor?—pats the arm of a chair. “Why don’t you take a seat, Dad, out of the way?” Amadeo sits obediently, the vinyl exhaling under him.
But Amadeo is still in the way, and it doesn’t matter where his chair is. “Excuse me,” says first one medical professional and then another. “Excuse me.” Amadeo scoots this way and that, and each time he moves he loses one shoe cover or another. His big feet in their yellow leather work boots stick out into everyone’s path. Finally, he wedges himself into a corner next to a red biohazard bin and behind the swinging IV line. A nurse administers an injection, and with a rapidity that can only be carelessness, passes the needle under Amadeo’s nose on its way to the biohazard bin. She pops the bin open with her foot and then lets the lid drop, subjecting Amadeo to a puff of contagion.