Sweet Nothing (4 page)

I have to tell her what happened with Brianna, though. I keep my voice calm so she can't accuse me of being hysterical; I stick to the facts: A, B, C, D. The questions she asks, however, and the way she asks them make it clear she's looking for a reason to get mad at me instead of at her daughter:

“What do you mean, the back door was open?”

“She acted guilty? How?”

“Did you actually see a boy?”

It's like talking to a lawyer. I'm all worn out by the time I finish the story and she goes to the bedroom. Maybe starting dinner will make me feel better. We're having spaghetti. I brown some hamburger, some onions and garlic, add a can of tomato sauce, and set it to simmer so it cooks down nice and slow.

Lorena and Brianna come into the kitchen while I'm chopping 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 flowers. Manuel called it “walking the perimeter.”

“Sarge is walking the perimeter,” he'd say.

The heat has broken when I step out into the front yard. The sun is low in the sky, and little birds chase one another from palm tree to palm tree, twittering excitedly. Usually, you can't hear them over the kids playing, but since the shooting, everybody is keeping their children inside.

I drag the hose over to the roses growing next to the chain-link fence that separates the yard from the sidewalk. They're blooming like mad in this heat. The white ones, the yellow, the red. I lay the hose at the base of the bushes and turn the water on low, so the roots get a good soaking.

Rudolfo is still at work in his shop. His saw whines, and then comes the
bang bang bang
of a hammer. I haven't been over to see him in a while. Maybe I'll take him some spaghetti.

I wash my face and put on a little makeup. Lipstick, eyeliner; nothing fancy. Perfume. I change out of my housedress into jeans and a nice top. My stomach does a flip as I'm dressing. I guess you could say I've got a thing for Rudolfo, but I think he likes me too, the way he smiles. And for my birthday last year he gave me a jewelry box that he made. Back in the kitchen, I dig out some good Tupperware to carry the spaghetti in.

Rudolfo's dog, Oso, a big shaggy mutt, barks as I come down the driveway.

“Cállate, hombre,”
Rudolfo says.

I walk to the door of the shop and stand there silently, watching Rudolfo sand a rough board smooth. He makes furniture—simple, sturdy tables, chairs, and wardrobes—and sells it to rich people from Pasadena and Beverly Hills. The furniture is nice, but awfully plain. I'd think a rich woman would want something fancier than a table that looks like it belongs in a farmhouse.

“Knock-knock,” I finally say.

Rudolfo grins when he looks up and sees me standing there.

“
Hola,
Blanca.”

I move into the doorway but still don't step through. Some men are funny. You're intruding if you're not invited.

“Come in, come in,” Rudolfo says. He takes off his glasses and cleans them with a red bandanna. He's from El Salvador, and so handsome with that Indian nose and his silver hair combed straight back. “Sorry for sawing so late, but I'm finishing an order. That was the last little piece.”

“I just came by to bring you some spaghetti,” I say. “I made too much again.”

“Oh, hey,
gracias. Pásale.
”

He motions for me to enter and wipes the sawdust off a stool with his bandanna. I sit and look around the shop. It's so organized, the lumber stacked neatly by size, the tools in their special places. This used to crack Manuel up. He called Rudolfo the Librarian. The two of them got along fine but were never really friends. Too busy, I guess, both working all the time.

Rudolfo takes the spaghetti from me and says, “Did that cop stop by your house today?”

“The bald one?” I say.

“He told me he's sure someone saw who killed that baby.”

Someone who's just as bad as the killer. I know. I run my finger over a hammer sitting on the workbench. If this is what he wants to talk about, I'm going to leave.

“Are things getting crazier,” Rudolfo continues, “or does it just seem that way?”

“I ask myself that all the time,” I reply.

“I'm starting to think more like
mi abuelo
every day,” he says. “You know what he'd say about what happened to that baby? ‘Bring me the rope, and I'll hang the bastard who did it myself.'”

I stand and brush off my pants.

“Enjoy the spaghetti,” I say. “I've got to get back.”

“So soon?”

“I wake up at two thirty to be at the hospital by four.”

“Let me walk you out.”

“No, no, finish what you were doing.”

Puppet and his homeys are hanging on the corner when I get out to the street. Puppet is leaning on a car that's blasting music, that
boom boom fuck fuck
crap. He's wearing a white T-shirt, baggy black shorts that hang past his knees, white socks pulled all the way up, and a pair of corduroy house shoes. The same stuff
cholos
have been wearing since I was a kid. His head is shaved, and there's a tattoo on the side of it:
Temple Street.

I knew his mom before she went to prison; I even babysat him a couple times when he was young. He went bad at ten or eleven, stopped listening to the grandma who was raising him and started running with thugs. The boys around here slip away like that again and again. He stares at me now like,
What do you have to say?
Like he's reminding me to be scared of him.

Baby killer,
I should shout back.
You ain't shit.
I should have shut the door in that detective's face too. I've got to be smarter from now on.

I HAVEN'T BEEN
sleeping well. It's the heat, sure, but I've also been dreaming of little Antonio. He comes tonight as an angel, floating above my bed, up near the ceiling. He makes his own light, a golden glow that shows everything for what it is. But I don't want to see. I swat at him once, twice, knock him to the floor. His light flickers, and the darkness comes rushing back.

My pillow is soaked with sweat when I wake up. It's guilt that gives you dreams like that. Prisoners go crazy from it, rattle the doors of their cells and scream out confessions. Anything, anything to get some peace. I look at the clock, and it's past midnight. The sound of a train whistle drifts over from the tracks downtown. I have to be up in two hours.

I pull on my robe to go into the kitchen for a glass of milk. Lorena is snoring quietly, and I close her door as I pass by. Then there's another sound. Whispers. Coming from the living room. The girls left something unlocked, and now we're being robbed. That's my first thought, and it stops the blood in my veins. But then there's a familiar giggle, and I peek around the corner to see Brianna standing in front of a window, her arms reaching through the bars to touch someone—it's too dark to say who—out in the yard.

I step into the room and snap on the light. Brianna turns, startled, and the shadow outside disappears. I hurry to the front door, open it, but there's no one out there now except a bum pushing a grocery cart filled with cans and newspapers down the middle of the street. Brianna is in tears when I go back inside, and I'm shaking all over, I'm so angry.

“So that talk today was for nothing?” I say.

My yelling wakes Lorena, and she finds me standing over Brianna, who is cowering on the couch.

“Let her up,” Lorena says.

She won't listen as I try to explain what happened, how frightened I was when I heard voices in the dark. She just grabs Brianna and drags her back to their room.

I wind up drinking coffee at the kitchen table until it's time to get ready for work. Lorena comes out as I'm about to leave for the bus. She says that the boy from Brianna's school came to see her again, and she was right in the middle of telling him to go away when I came in. She says we're going to forget the whole thing, let it lie.

“I want to show that I trust her,” she says.

“Okay,” I say.

“Just treat her like normal.”

“I will.”

“She's a good girl, Mom.”

“I know.”

They've beaten the fire out of me. If all they want is a cook and a cleaning lady, fine.

MY STOMACH HURTS
during the ride to work, and I feel feverish. Resting my forehead against the cool glass of the window, I take deep breaths and tell myself it's nothing, just too much coffee. It's still dark outside, the streets empty, the stores locked tight. Like everyone gave up and ran away and I'm the last to know. I smell smoke when I get off at the hospital. Sirens shriek in the distance.

Irma is fixing her hair in the locker room.

“You don't look so good,” she says.

“Maybe it's something I ate,” I reply.

She gives me a Pepto-Bismol tablet from her purse, and we tie our aprons and walk to the kitchen. One of the boys has cornered a mouse in there, back by the pantry, and pinned it to the floor with a broom. Everybody moves in close, chattering excitedly.

“Step on it,” somebody says.

“Drown it,” someone else suggests.

“No! ¡No mate el pobrecito!”
Josefina wails, trembling fingers raised to her lips. Don't kill the poor little thing. She's about to burst into tears.

The boy with the broom glances at her, then tells one of the dishwashers to bring a bucket. He and the dishwasher turn the bucket upside down and manage to trap the mouse beneath it. They slide a scrap of cardboard across the opening and flip the bucket. The mouse cowers in the bottom, shitting all over itself. The boys free it on the construction site next door, and we get to work.

I do okay until about eight, until the room starts spinning and I almost pass out in the middle of serving Dr. Alvarez his oatmeal. My stomach cramps, my mouth fills with spit, and I whisper to Irma to take my place on the line before I run to the bathroom and throw up.