Read Sweet Nothing for Free Online

lettuce for a salad. They look like they’ve just stopped laughing about something. I feel myself getting angry. What’s there to joke about?
    “I’m sorry, Grandma,” Brianna says.
    She wraps her arms around me, and I give her a quick hug back, not even bothering to put down the knife in my hand.
    “That’s okay, mija .”
    “From now on, if she wants to have friends over, she’ll ask first,” Lorena says.
    “And no beer or smoking,” I say.
    “She knows,” Lorena says.
    No, she doesn’t. She’s fourteen years old. She doesn’t know a goddamn thing.
    Brianna sniffs the sauce bubbling on the stove and wrinkles her nose. “Are there onions in there?” she asks.
    “You can pick them out,” I say.
    She does this walk sometimes, stiff arms swinging, legs straight, toes pointed. Something she learned in ballet. That’s how she leaves the kitchen. A second later I hear the TV come on in the living room, too loud.
    “Who was he?” I whisper to Lorena.
    “A boy from school. He rode the bus all the way over here to see her.”
    She says this like it’s something cute. I wipe down the counter so I don’t have to look at her.
    “She’s that age,” I say. “You’ve got to keep an eye on her.”
    “I know,” Lorena says. “I was that age once too.”
    “So was I.”
    “Yeah, but girls today are smarter than we were.”
    I move over to the stove, wipe that too. Here we go again.
    “Still, you have to set boundaries,” I say.
    “Like you did with me?”
    “That’s right.”
    “And like Grandma did with you?” Lorena says. “’Cause that worked out real good.”
    We end up here every time. There’s no sense even responding.
    Lorena got pregnant when she was sixteen and had an abortion. Somehow that makes me a bad mother, but I haven’t figured out yet how she means to hurt me when she brings it up. Was I too strict, or not strict enough?
    As for myself, the boys went kind of nuts for me when I turned fourteen. I wasn’t a tease or anything; they just decided I was the one to get with. That happens sometimes. I was the oldest girl in my family, the first one to put my parents through all that. My dad would sit on the porch and glare at the guys who drove past hoping to catch me outside, and my mom walked me to school every day. I got a little leeway after my quinceañera, but not much.
    Manuel was five years older than me. I met him at a party at my cousin’s when I was fifteen. He’d only been in the U.S. for a few years, and his idea of dressing up was still boots and a cowboy hat. Not my type at all. I was into lowriders, pendejos with hot cars. But Manuel was so sweet to me, and polite in a way the East L.A. boys weren’t. He bought me flowers, called twice a day. And after my parents met him, forget it. He went to Mass, he could rebuild the engine in any car, and he was already working at the brewery, making real money: they practically handed me over to him right there.
    Our plan was that we’d marry when I graduated, but I ended up pregnant at the end of my junior year. Everything got moved up then, and I never went back to school. My parents were upset, but they couldn’t say much because the same thing had happened to them. It all worked out fine, though. Manuel was a good husband, our kids were healthy, and we had a nice life together. Sometimes you get lucky.
      
    I DO THE dishes after dinner, then join the girls in the living room. The TV is going, but nobody’s paying attention. Lorena is on her laptop, and Brianna is texting on her phone. They don’t look up from punching buttons when I sit in my recliner. I watch a woman try to win a million dollars. The audience groans when she gives the wrong answer.
    I can’t sit still. My brain won’t slow down, thinking about Antonio and Puppet, thinking about Lorena and Brianna, so I decide to make my rounds a little early. I can’t get to sleep if I haven’t rattled the lock on the garage door, latched the gate, and watered my