“This is all beautiful,” Yolanda tells Angel. She gestures vaguely around the room, holding her head very still. When she turns, her upper torso moves first right, then left with a slight robotic jerk. Amadeo wonders if his mother has a crick in her neck. Certainly she looks tired, the skin under her eyes bunched and fragile. Her nose is still bruised, as though from a punch. She’s tried to cover it, but the makeup has flaked off.
Angel beams shyly. She seems not to know what to do with her hands, keeps resting them on her hips and then letting them circle around her back. She gives one a good shake, in a gesture of excitement Amadeo recognizes from her early childhood.
“Angel!” cries one of the girls, advancing on them with a dry-erase marker. “You’re here! You gotta sign your name!”
Yolanda removes a stockinged foot from her shoe and rolls the ankle. When she teeters, she grabs Amadeo’s arm.
“Watch yourself, woman! You gotta stay on your feet.” He circles his arm around his mother, and she leans her whole weight against him, laughing quietly.
There are only a few other men. A teenage boy in jeans and flip-flops carries a baby one-handed, with an ease that amazes Amadeo. An older man with a big belly and skinny hips stands near the door, holding up his pants. He peers into the hallway, as if looking for his chance to flee.
It’s obvious who’s a Smart Starts! student: girls swollen in pregnancy or with babes in arms. One girl is both, her round body canted under the weight of an overgrown, tangle-haired toddler who keeps arching his back and squealing irritably. They’re all made-up, several of them in short stretchy black dresses that would be better suited for a nightclub. A few grade school kids run around, brandishing markers, spinning the globe, flinging themselves onto beanbags. These must be the little brothers and sisters of the students. The adults themselves—mothers, mostly—hold back, gripping their paper cups, either admonishing the little kids or smiling determinedly at them, avoiding eye contact with the other adults. They’re made-up, too, many in similarly tight dresses, and they have a heavy aura of resignation about them, as though they’re waiting to be reprimanded.
Angel, however, is in her element, hugging her friends, showing off Connor. The second she walked in, she made a beeline for the young woman who could only have been Brianna, and presented her with the baby carrier as if it were a gift basket. The teacher of Angel’s parenting class is not, as Amadeo expected, a starchy gorgon in a pantsuit. She’s young and earnest in floral rayon, and, Amadeo knows from Angel, childless. Angel stood there, flushed, as the teacher hugged her and admired the baby.
Now the girls cluster around his daughter, oohing and ahhing over Connor, and Amadeo can’t help but feel proud, because, despite the baby acne and patchy hair and plentiful eyebrows, Connor is the cutest one here. Those wide, clear, nearly black eyes, his steady, knowing wisdom: none of these other babies even come close. Amadeo has the urge to move into the festive knot of students, pick up his grandson, kiss and bounce him. He’d turn the baby face-out and make him wave at each of the girls with his little wrinkled hand. Maybe he’d even do funny voices. But Amadeo doesn’t, from shyness, maybe, or from some adult awareness that this isn’t his show.
As if she’s read his mind, Angel waves him over. “I want to introduce you guys. Ysenia, Christy, Trinity, Corinna, Tabitha.” Tabitha is the especially fertile one. Her toddler is asleep now, straddling his mother’s pregnant stomach, splayed-armed across her breasts.
Angel touches the arm of a heavyset girl holding a baby, then cups the baby’s head with a hand. “This is Lizette. And this little cutie is Mercedes.” Ah, Lizette. Mercedes, then, must be the baby she crapped out.
Lizette turns lazy green eyes on Amadeo and smiles. The lashes are thick and dark. The baby has the same eyes—enormous on her—and also a frilly headband strapped to her bald head. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Padilla.” Lizette’s voice is slow, taunting, disturbing. She blinks.
Angel laughs. “Mr. Padilla!” She’s so innocent, so oblivious to the look Lizette is giving him. Amadeo wonders if his daughter could be putting it on, that guilelessness, but no, the laughter is burbling up, genuine. “No one calls him that. Have you ever been called mister in your life, Dad?”