She supposes she can’t blame them, these young people with their faith in the body, their faith that the world will keep providing what it always has. Was Yolanda ever so oblivious to death? No, but then, she’d been the only child of old parents, one of just a few children born to all those uncles and aunts and second cousins, and sometimes it seemed barely a year went by without someone in that once-vast family dying, a long parade of death headed up by Elwin and punctuated most dramatically by Anthony.
On the way out of the Cancer Center parking lot, Yolanda flinches at the sun glinting off the hood of her car. The whole landscape—the streets and stucco medical buildings, the pi?on-dotted hills to the east—is achingly bright, like an overexposed photograph of another, less habitable planet. Realizing she is trembling and nauseated from hunger, Yolanda stops at the Tortilla Hut for a milkshake and an enchilada. It’s two in the afternoon, still plenty of time to make it back to work and finish some tasks there, but Yolanda is sapped.
At a table near her booth, a red-faced girl gazes into her computer screen and chews her three middle fingers. The fingers are in deep, to the second joint, and the girl works away at her big drooly mouthful, heedless of the people seated all around her. Yolanda feels a rush of compassion for this girl wearing her private face, forgetful that she is more than a mind perched on a body. Yolanda tries to freeze her own expression, to catch herself in her own private face, but the muscles in her cheeks and forehead tighten with awareness, composing themselves into something to be observed, if only by herself. The girl removes her slick fingers to type something, then plugs them back in her mouth.
Yolanda will soon be like one of the patients in the Cancer Center waiting room, one of the thin chalky-faced people hunched in their wheelchairs, the tubes of oxygen hissing in their nostrils. With a shock Yolanda realizes that many of those people will outlive her.
Not ten minutes ago, Yolanda thought she might pass out if she didn’t eat. But now, faced with her enormous, high-caloric meal, that urgency has fled. She drags her fork through the chile at the edge of her enchilada, then sets it down, sips her milkshake, pushes it away. She stands, hooks her purse over her arm, and leaves.
In the car, Yolanda crosses herself, then raises her head, the sunlight stabbing at her eyes, and pulls out. She backs into a parked car, then brakes hard. Her heart sloshes and she looks around. No alarm sounds, no one shouts. No one is in the lot at all. The bumper of the sedan behind her is dented.
Driving in her state is, she knows, deeply unethical. One day, one day soon, she will have her first seizure, and if it happens while she’s behind the wheel—and the chances are fairly good that it will, given that she commutes over two hours every weekday—she could kill someone. Yolanda registers her hypocrisy, judging her son for his drunk driving, but continuing to drive herself. Somehow, though, despite the headaches and the spotty gray brain scans and the grim assurances of Dr. Konecky that she is, in fact, dying, she can’t believe that her body could betray her so spectacularly.
Still, she vows, she won’t drive the baby, won’t drive Angel. This resolution has required some quick footwork and creative excuses at home to dodge her son and granddaughter’s demands. They’re a family of barely capable drivers: an old man, a teenage girl, a lady with a glioblastoma pressing on her brain, a drunk. Connor’s practically the most qualified member of the family to shuttle them all around.
In her previous life, Yolanda would have left a note on the dented sedan. It would never occur to her to not do the right thing. Now, though, she straightens out and drives away.
Amadeo calls and leaves a message for Brianna on her line at work.
“Hey. It’s Angel’s dad. From the Open House? I was wondering how you are.”
It’s the middle of the day, and he thinks of her standing in the classroom in front of all those teenagers, doing good. He feels as if, having called her, having pictured her and those girls hard at work, he is a part of that good, hard work. Energized, he does twenty push-ups on the living room carpet, then, further invigorated, he does ten more.