The Five Wounds Read online

  Last night, for instance, after she’d put Connor down, Angel marched into the living room, dangling a blue plush rabbit. “Who put this in his crib?” she demanded, looking accusingly from Amadeo to his mother. “We can’t leave crap in his crib or he’ll die. Ever heard of SIDS? I mean it: Brianna said.”

  “Okay, hijita,” Yolanda said mildly, while at the mention of Brianna, Amadeo just grinned.

  “I’m serious!” Angel cried, flinging the rabbit at his chest.

  He’s still thinking about his phone message the next day. He does what he always does at home, but daytime TV depresses him and so do the internet and video games and the endless meandering stroll through product reviews and skateboard fails. On their social media pages, his high school classmates, the ones that haven’t been destroyed by heroin, show off their full lives—their adorable children, their trips to Disney­land. There’s so much to want out there—trucks and computers and vacations and a new house—and all of it requires money.

  He must get started with CWS. But no one has responded to his ads on Craigslist or in the Rio Grande Sun or in the church bulletin, and he still can’t drive. He’ll need to talk to Angel tonight about getting started, now that she has her license. He reads some websites about business start-ups and takes notes in Angel’s math notebook.

  As if rewarding his industry, Brianna phones that afternoon. “Mr. Padilla? This is Brianna Gruver, returning your call.” Her voice is swift, but not assured.

  “Oh, hey.” His heart picks up speed. “I was just calling to say hello.”

  “So it’s nothing to do with Angel or Connor?”

  “No, they’re good. I wanted to see if you wanted to get a drink sometime.”

  A long pause. “I guess I could do something Thursday.”

  “Cool, cool,” says Amadeo, his own voice jovial, as if to make up for her doubt.

  That evening he says nothing to Angel about his plan with her teacher, an impulse he decides not to think too deeply about.

  And again he says nothing when, on the appointed day, Tíve, grumbling, drops him in Española. He’s early, so he wanders around, then stops in at the bar at El Paragua. Leaning on the sticky counter, he orders a whiskey. It’s the first drink he’s had since Easter—over ten weeks—but instead of feeling guilty for falling off the wagon, he’s proud that he can order a single drink in public like a normal man. The bartender scarcely glances at him, just delivers his drink and goes back to rolling place settings. In the corner, a woman in a floury apron operates a tortilla press, flattening each ball of masa before slapping it on a wood-burning stove. She flips it neatly with her bare fingers. A steaming, even pile of tortillas rises on the table before her.

  The lunch rush is over. Amadeo catches the eyes of the two men at the table under the big artificial tree, who are having tacos and beer. Contractors, Amadeo guesses, from their air of competence and the hardness of their forearms.

  He prods the scar in the center of his left palm, then the one in his right. In each palm is a shiny purple bean of raised skin. He could have severed a tendon, could have had lasting problems, but he was lucky.

  He raises his glass and smiles at the contractors, and then, because he’s nervous and because there’s still another hour to kill before Angel’s school lets out, and another twenty minutes after that before he’s allowed to present himself at Family Foundations, per Brianna’s instructions, he orders a second whiskey, and a beer, too.

  “What kind?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says magnanimously. “Whatever they’re having.”

  By the time he sets out, ambling along Riverside, the sun is heavy on his face, and he’s relaxed and happy. Brianna is waiting for him in the doorway of the building with her backpack, and when she catches sight of him, she rushes over, as if to intercept him. She’s wearing her floral dress and vivid lipstick.

  Her smile wavers. “Let’s go,” she says, sounding not the least bit glad to see him.

  “My truck’s in the shop,” he lies. “Mind driving?”

  “Sure.” She heads across the lot, hunched under the straps of her backpack.

  Brianna drives a sea-green Beetle, the girly kind from the early aughts with the plastic flower in the vase on the dashboard. When she starts the car, some folksy music blares, but she switches it off. Amadeo’s legs nearly touch the dashboard. He notes the aggressive cleanliness. Box of Kleenex, hand sanitizer, and in the drink holder, a plastic canister of hand wipes.

  He flicks the hand sanitizer. “You’re prepared, huh?”

  Brianna chews her lip as she pulls out of the lot, her face and throat streaked red as if from a histamine reaction. “So, where should we go?”

  Why hadn’t he thought of this? There’s Saints and Sinners or the Dive, but they hardly seem suitable for Brianna’s air of scrubbed sweetness, and besides, he doesn’t need a drink right now. “Are you hungry? We could go out to eat.”

  “No,” she yelps. “Someone might see us.”

  If it weren’t for the drinks, he might be on the verge of panic now. He looks down into the wheel well at her hiking sandals.

  “Want to drive somewhere to watch the sunset?” It’s a romantic gesture, unlike anything he’s ever suggested, and he’s certain she’ll like it.

  “Okay,” she says skeptically. “God. I really shouldn’t be doing this. Going on a date with a student’s father. It’s incredibly unprofessional.”

  “Are we on a date?” He tries for a teasing tone, but distress suffuses her face.

  “Oh.”

  “Hey, no, it’s all good.” He touches her shoulder. “It can be a date if you want it to be a date. And if not, we’re just hanging out.”

  “Right.” She relaxes, and beside her, Amadeo does, too.

  As they drive, Brianna tells him that she rents a casita from some rich lesbians near Chimayo. “We could go there,” she says.

  The property is surrounded by a well-maintained latilla fence. Up a dirt drive and then the house itself becomes visible: large and modern and adobe with a generous tiled porch and carved double front doors. Brianna parks next to a pair of matching Priuses and yanks the emergency brake. As they follow the brick walkway that leads around the main house, automatic lights snap on, though the sun hasn’t yet set. Amadeo looks into the bright windows, curious to glimpse the lesbians, but sees only stainless steel track lighting and corners of large abstract canvasses. Beyond the piñon-scattered hills, the sky is turning orange. Brianna leads him through a garden to a little cottage with a blue door flanked by terra-cotta pots of geraniums. She looks around, as if seeing her house for the first time. “It’s a little more than I wanted to pay, but I figure it’s safer here than right in town. And I get free Wi-Fi and laundry.”

  She unlocks the door, then hesitates, as though realizing she’s brought a complete stranger to her threshold. “Do you mind taking off your shoes?”

  As he stoops to untie his boots, Amadeo looks around. Inside, everything is cheery and tidy and almost belligerently feminine. The tiny kitchen is accented in red: red dish towels, red trivet. Not a crass plastic bottle of dish soap by the sink, but a red ceramic dispenser. On the stove, a gleaming red enameled pot appears to have never been used. Books on a shelf, arranged in blocks by color, spines lined up (no Mastering Ares in the red section). Candles and little accents everywhere: a vase of twigs, a bowl of quartz, and on the windowsill, an antique mason jar filled with clear colored marbles. In the corner, partially obscured by a woven screen, is a low bed with a fluffy white duvet and a scattering of throw pillows. He sees the place through his daughter’s eyes—Angel would love every inch of it. Amadeo stands in the doorway in his gray socks, feeling like a hulk. He could use a drink now.

  “Excuse the mess.” Brianna indicates the single rinsed cereal bowl in the sink.

  “These your parents?”

  Brianna confirms that, yes, the athletic gray-haired people on a trail in an Oregon rain forest are her parents. She stands i
n the middle of the tile floor, wringing her hands, then, all at once, rushes at him and clamps her mouth on his.

  Amadeo backs up in surprise, thumping his elbow against the doorknob, and the shock of pain makes him gasp, which she seems to take as encouragement. Brianna’s kisses are fierce and involve a lot of assertive tongue.

  He cups her face and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, but she bites her bottom lip and doesn’t meet his gaze. Instead, almost with impatience, she takes his hand and leads him to the bed.

  Brianna clutches herself as, grinning, Amadeo unbuttons his shirt and shrugs it onto the braided rug, kicks his feet out of his khakis. Shirtless, he’s as muscled as she’d imagined, his skin smooth and brown and taut, and his masculinity gives her a thrill—an illicit thrill, because as a feminist, shouldn’t she interrogate her attraction to this kind of masculine display? The tattoos are a surprise: the bloody red heart above his own heart, the line of thorns encircling his bicep. She finds them alarming and appealing in equal measure. Last, he removes his socks. Brianna herself is now wedged up against her bureau, arms clamped around her middle, nearly paralyzed with nervousness. She tries to slow her breath, but it’s bunched high and shallow in her chest. She has no idea what to do.

  “Can I?” he says, and steps toward her, lifting her dress over her head, exposing her newest blue cotton underpants and her red satin bra.

  Amadeo’s erection pushes against his boxers, angling toward her. He must see her doubtful expression, because he drops a hand to cover it, looking a little dashed.

  This isn’t going well—self-consciousness is spreading between them like a contagion. But Amadeo saves the situation. “Hey, come here.” He wraps his arms around her and rubs her back vigorously as if she’s cold, and together they fall onto the bed. Brianna gives a short giggle of relief, then kicks herself under the covers.

  It’s a Thursday evening, not quite a weekend, not quite a date night, but close enough that Brianna is considering this a date, which is, in fact, what she texted to her friend Sierra not one hour ago: oh gotta run, date tonight! She has, as yet, opted against answering Sierra’s insultingly incredulous reply: ???!?!?!?!?!!!??! Then, You’re not gonna tell him you’re a virgin, right???

  The scene that ensues is without the gentle insistent urgency of a sex scene in a Merchant Ivory film. No soft candlelight or slow kisses or close-ups of smooth, indistinct body parts, no slow inevitable easing together, murmuring and rocking as one until the breathless culmination. Instead, a lot of effortful thrusting, their rhythms off until Brianna stops her bucking altogether. She shuts her eyes and tries to set her expression to one that looks simultaneously relaxed and engaged.

  When he finishes, he drops onto her, his breath hot on her cheek, as if he’s fallen into a narcoleptic sleep. Brianna rubs his arms uncertainly, and finally he raises his head and rolls off her.

  “How was it?” he asks. “For you?”

  She’s glad for the thick blue twilight that has filled the cottage and that now shields her face. Words feel almost impossible to utter. “Great.” Through the window, the trees are black lace against darkening sky. After a while, because it seems strange that they aren’t talking, she says, “Did you know that heterosexual men are naturally more attracted to women who are ovulating?”

  He sits up, switches on the bedside lamp with its yellow embroidered shade, and regards her with alarm. “I used protection. You’re fine.”

  “I know that,” she says, blinking into the light.

  He gestures to the limp, tied-off condom on the bedside table, next to her book and water glass. “I always use protection.”

  “You put that there?” She yanks one Kleenex after another from the box beside the bed and thrusts a handful at him.

  He wraps the condom and, looking around, opts to place it on the floor. He falls back against the pillow. “I see where Angel gets her thing for factoids.”

  “Ha. My major was human biology. Angel might like that. She’s really into science and math. We have to encourage her. She’s smart, you know.”

  “I know. She must have gotten it from her mom. I had no patience for school.” He grins up at the ceiling, totally unself-conscious in his nudity, sweating into the duvet beneath him.

  Brianna props up on her elbows, back arched, aware of the long curved line of her back and bottom, the lushness between her legs. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the bathroom door, and is, for once, pleased with what she sees. Her cheeks and lips are makeup pink, the sheet is wrapped pleasingly around her lower back. She feels little beside him, sexy and quick and lithe.

  Brianna touches the scar on his right palm. “What happened to your hands?”

  Amadeo regards them, front, back. “Oh, it was an accident. Carpentry.”

  “Whew.” She smiles. “I really worried you’d been abused.”

  “No. God, no.” He tucks them under the sheet.

  “Could you turn that light off?” she asks, and when he does, she leans into him. They kiss a little more, and he touches her.

  When she comes, a breathy little whimper, she strokes and strokes the same part of his bicep. Real affection for him seems to have bloomed out of nowhere. She tucks herself around him in the humid little ecosystem beneath the duvet.

  “I’m glad we did this.” She burrows her face in his shoulder, then lifts it. In a rush she says, “So, until just now I was a virgin.”

  His face flickers in the twilight, and he looks at her quickly, then away. Otherwise, his face betrays no feeling at all, which is how she knows he’s dismayed.

  She flops back on the pillow, stomach clenched. Whatever composure and loveliness she possessed just a minute earlier has vanished. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. My best friend told me not to. Sometimes I do this thing where I know what not to say and it’s like I’m thinking so much not to say it, that it’s the only thing on my mind and then I say it.”

  “That’s no big deal.” Now he turns to face her. Why does she care what this guy thinks of her? But why would she reveal herself to him? He smiles, and this sickens her, too.

  “But, I mean, you’re twenty-five, right?”

  “I’m not religious or anything like that,” she says defensively. “It’s just more of an opportunity thing.”

  “Weird.”

  “It’s not weird. You can’t tell anyone.”

  “It’s just crazy that you teach all these teen moms and you were a virgin.”

  Brianna has the sense that she’s drowning and the only one who sees her flailing from the shore is this ding-dong. “I mean,” she says firmly, “that you can’t tell anyone about this at all. I’d lose my job.” She’s almost afraid to say this next thing, afraid that she’s making an unreasonable demand that will cause him to pull away from her. “I mean Angel. Angel can’t know.”

  Amadeo regards her for one beat, then another. “Hey, hey,” he says, pulling her in. “I won’t tell no one nothing.”

  For a moment, relief. But, then what? Are they going to keep doing this and never tell anyone? Is this—secretive sex with the fucked-up father of one of her students—even what Brianna wants? She wonders if she used him for sex. What if he wants a relationship? The possibility fills her with a kind of warm excitement.

  What am I doing? she wonders. A student’s father—a student’s deadbeat father, no less—though he is back in the picture now, and seems committed to being in Angel’s baby’s life. But who knows what kind of person he is? He doesn’t have a job, didn’t go to college. And now he is her First.

  Although why she is thinking in these absurd terms, Brianna can’t imagine. She is a health educator. A teacher licensed by the State of New Mexico. She likes to think of herself as knowledgeable and unembarrassed, yet compassionate. A mentor. And here she is freaking out over a guy. A man, she amends.

  Because Amadeo is a man, bulky, muscular, an unemployed male on the social margins, unable to provide for either mate or offspring, with the porous
roseate beginnings of an alcoholic nose. But despite all this, she finds him very, very attractive.

  “It’s cool,” he says, smoothing her hair.

  She submits to his comfort, resting her head against his chest, feeling him hard now between her legs, feeling herself open smoothly to receive him.

  “I won’t tell.”

  “Thanks,” she says softly.

  He chucks her under her chin. “If we can do this again.”

  “Yeah,” she breathes. She grins into his shoulder.

  Everything pisses Angel off these days, even the good things. At Tabitha’s birth party, Brianna said the exact same empty, encouraging things she’d said at Angel’s party. She and Connor and the incredible physical feat she’s performed are old news. Even the little basketball shoes irritate her. They keep falling off and ending up under the sofa or in the gravel, and who ever heard of spending fifty dollars on sneakers for a baby that just lies there? She’s so, so tired—it seems Connor wakes up every few minutes throughout the night, wrenching her from sleep, and then when he finally settles, she’s tense under the blanket, eyes open in the dark, her heart hammering.

  When Smart Starts! lets out, Angel’s mother is waiting for her on the concrete portico outside the agency. Fear seizes Angel like a claw in the chest, and her first thought is that her mother’s been fired.

  She’s in her work clothes, tight black pants and heels and a drapey blouse, hair blown smooth. She looks put together, as she usually does for work, and thinner, too—Angel notes with envy that her shoulders are sharp and glamorous under the silky fabric—but her expression is wary. Her big purse is over her shoulder, and she’s gripping it with both hands, one arm crossed protectively in front of her body.

  It’s an old fear, dating back to when Angel was five and Marissa actually was laid off when the car dealership where she’d been working closed down. It was a scary time. For six months, they lived with Marissa’s parents. Her grandmother Lola had been showing the first confusing and erratic signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s—loving one minute, spiteful the next, panicked the minute after that—and her grandfather was still disapproving of Marissa for not marrying Amadeo, all of which had resulted in fights that made Angel, even at five, pity her mother.