Free Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade Page B

grunting with some boy. “You’re not dirty,” he says.
    Guilt thick as tar bubbles in his gut, and suddenly he’s nineteen again and it’s summer, and he’s with Marissa in her parents’ backyard. They stretch out by the kiddie pool, beers warming in their hands and in the sun, while Angel slaps the water. Amadeo holds a plastic dinosaur, and he’s making it dance on the surface of the water, while Angel, with her damp black curls and lashes, slick red smile and swollen diaper, laughs her throaty laugh. They’re talking about Marissa’s older sister’s new trailer—two bedrooms, full bath, cream carpet—and Marissa says she wouldn’t mind a trailer, they could get a trailer, used at first, and beside them Angel splashes, a blade of grass stuck to her chest. Amadeo says, “You won’t catch me living in no trailer. Besides, they just lose value,” and Marissa says, stubbing out her cigarette emphatically in the grass, “It’s not that I wouldn’t rather have a house, but when? And we gotta be saving if we ever want to have a place of our own—are you even saving anything ?” This is when the fight starts, escalates. Amadeo accuses Marissa of getting pregnant just so he’ll have to take care of her, and he calls her dirty, dirty whore . (She isn’t, he knows that, hasn’t done any more than he has, but ever since she slept with him he can’t look at her the same way.) Then they’re both on their feet, and he slaps her, hard across the upper arm, which is bare and exposed in her sleeveless shirt. Marissa staggers back, reaches behind her into air to steady herself, finds no hold, falls.
    Amadeo looks at his hitting hand, horrified. But if he were honest he might admit that even as he moved to hit her he knew he could stop himself and knew he was going to do it regardless. The real surprise is the shock on her face, proof that he can act on the world.
    Marissa stands. The skin on her arm turns white then red where his palm made contact.
    “You asshole! Don’t you ever hit me again.” She screams at him, throwing plastic buckets and toys. Some strike him, some miss and fall to the grass. Amadeo wishes she’d kill him. But she keeps yelling, “Don’t you ever hit me again!”
    And it is that word, again , that terrifies him, as if by uttering it she opens up the possibility that he has it in him to do this again—even, somehow, makes it inevitable. From the kiddie pool, Angel looks up at her parents, eyes wide and black and unwavering.
    “Don’t you walk away!” Marissa yells, and Amadeo turns just long enough to see her grab the baby, too roughly, Angel’s head jerking back as Marissa swings her onto her hip, water from the baby’s sodden diaper spreading dark across her shirt, her denim cutoffs, down her short brown legs. She’s yelling at him, calling him names, and he’s thinking of how loud her voice must be so near Angel’s soft pink ear. Even as he starts the truck, Amadeo doesn’t think he’ll go through with it. His breath is ragged, he’s shaking, and he’s on Paseo de Oñate before he realizes he’s somehow still gripping the dinosaur.
    Now, fourteen years later, Amadeo turns to Angel, who cries into her hands. He looks at his watch. Almost eleven. He touches her shoulder again. “Come on. Let’s go.”
    T HE MORADA IS NOT much to look at. Outside there’s still the dark skeleton of a sign on a pole from when it was a filling station, the bright plastic panels long gone, and two blank pumps. During the day, strangers passing by will pull in for gas and look around, confused by the trucks parked in front, before heading straight through town to the Shell station on the highway. Tonight the parking lot is deserted.
    Inside, the cinder-block walls are painted white, and a few benches face the front. The only thing worth looking at is the crucifix, and Amadeo watches Angel take it in. She walks the periphery of the room, stopping at various points to gaze at the man on the