Amadeo rolls his eyes. “Yes, Angel.” The Smart Starts! Open House is a very important event, Angel has informed them. She’s kept the flyer on the kitchen table and has read it aloud to Amadeo and Yolanda. Come meet the Smart Starts! family! Get involved! See why EVERYTHING starts at Smart Starts!!
“I was so worried I’d have to miss it due to labor, but we’ll be there. And then I’ll start up again on Monday.” She ducks her chin to address Connor’s head. “And so will you. You will start school, too.” Angel turns to Lily. “Have you read anything good lately?”
Lily pushes her glasses up her red nose, as if trying to determine whether her cousin is making fun of her. Reassured, she tosses her thick hair. “Of course. There’s this one book? Called Into the Breach? It’s about a World War II girl who disguises herself as a soldier”—and for the next ten minutes she recounts the intricacies of the plot.
Amadeo sips his soda, sets it down. What’s the point of being sober if no one notices?
Tíve has planted a hand on either side of his plate, and he scowls at his food. Since Easter, Amadeo can’t stand to be around Tíve, who has been privy to Amadeo’s most recent major failures. Over and over he is beset with shame flashbacks: his uncle standing in the bright glare of the police station, checkbook in hand; his uncle waiting in the truck to ferry Amadeo to one court-mandated appointment or another. Even more shameful is Amadeo’s memory of his own earnest absorption in his role of Jesus, his immersion in—what? Hope? Prayer? No, Amadeo was immersed in something even more ludicrous than that: belief in himself, belief that he might actually succeed at something difficult and pure. Night after night in the cement quiet of the morada, Tíve witnessed Amadeo trying to lose himself, on his knees. Amadeo wouldn’t be more humiliated if his uncle had caught him masturbating.
Tíve’s hands are unsteady as he lifts his laden fork. His uncle’s mouth waits, agape and straining, for the trembling mound of potatoes.
Panic swipes at Amadeo’s heart. His uncle is aging. One day soon, he will die, when Amadeo has yet to earn his good opinion. As a kid, he had a fantasy that his great-uncle would one day treat him like his missing son, a fantasy encouraged by Yolanda, who is always putting Amadeo in Tíve’s way like some kind of irresistible treat. An inheritance, it’s true, was also part of his fantasy. But what Amadeo really wanted was a father figure. Isn’t that how things should be? That the man who’d lost a son and the boy who’d lost a father should find each other? Now the thought occurs to him, as though it was original, that there is no way things should be, only the way things are, and the way things are is going to keep changing.
His expression must be bleak, because across the table his mother tips her head inquiringly, but Amadeo turns away.
After dinner, as they eat cake and coffee ice cream in the living room, Tío Tíve leans across the couch to peer into the baby’s sleeping face. “He’s a looker, ain’t he?”
“Want to hold him?” Angel turns the sleeping Connor face-out, gripping him under the armpits so his onesie rides up and his limp, dimpled thighs dangle. His jowls droop over her fingers as if his entire musculoskeletal system were composed solely of dried beans. At his perfectly formed lips, a single bubble rises and pops.
“He don’t want to go to no old man,” Tío Tíve says, but he smiles, showing his teeth worn to brown nubs. The skin cinches around his eyes. He sets his untouched slice of cheesecake on the end table.
Angel lowers Connor into his arms. With a deep shuddering breath, the baby settles against the old man’s skinny chest.
“You okay? I know he’s heavy.”
Tíve waves her away with his wrinkled chin. “He’s just a little thing, ain’t he?”
The room is silent as Tío Tíve regards the baby, bewitched. He holds the baby in a stiff high cradle and looks down at the creased little face, the swollen eyelids. “I haven’t held a baby in a hunnerd years.” His knees in their polyester pants are large and square. His shiny black socks have sagged, revealing thin, nearly hairless ankles.