Richard Lange - Sweet Nothing

Brianna runs to the bedroom that she and her mom have been sharing. She slams the door. The house is suddenly quiet, even with the TV on, even with the windows open. The cigarette is still burning, so I stub it out in the kitchen sink. The truth is, I’m more afraid for Brianna than mad at her. These young girls fall so deeply in love, they sometimes drown in it.

I CHANGE OUT of my work clothes into a housedress, put on my flip-flops. Out back, I check my squash, my tomatoes, then get the sprinkler going on the grass. Rudolfo, my neighbor, is working in the shop behind his house. The screech of his saw rips into the stillness of the afternoon, and I smile when I think of his rough hands and emerald eyes. There’s nothing wrong with that. Manuel has been gone for three years.

I make a tuna sandwich for myself and one for Brianna, plus the lemonade I promised. She’s asleep when I take the snack to the bedroom. Probably faking it, but I’m done fighting for today. I go back to the living room and eat in front of the TV, watching one of my cooking shows.

A knock at the front door startles me. I go over and press my eye to the peephole. There on the porch is a fat white man with a bald, sweaty head and a walrus mustache. When I ask who he is, he backs up, looks right at the hole, and says, “Detective Rayburn, LAPD.” I should have known, a coat and tie in this heat.

I get nervous. No cop ever brought good news. The detective smiles when I open the door.

“Good afternoon,” he says. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m here about the boy who was killed yesterday, down at 1238?”

His eyes meet mine, and he tries to read me. I keep my face blank. At least I hope I keep it blank.

“Can you believe that?” I say.

“Breaks your heart.”

“It sure does.”

The detective tugs his mustache and says, “Well, what I’m doing is going door to door and asking if anybody saw something that might help us catch whoever did it. Were you at home when the shooting occurred?”

“I was here,” I say, “but I didn’t see anything.”

“Nothing?” He knows I’m lying. “All that commotion?”

“I heard the sirens afterward, and that’s when I came out. Someone told me what happened, and I went right back inside. I don’t need to be around that kind of stuff.”

The detective nods thoughtfully, but he’s looking past me into the house.

“Maybe someone else, then,” he says. “Someone in your family?”

“Nobody saw anything.”

“You’re sure?”

Like I’m stupid. Like all he has to do is ask twice.

“I’m sure,” I say.

He’s disgusted with me, and to tell the truth, I’m disgusted with myself. But I can’t get involved, especially not with Lorena and Brianna staying here. A motorcycle drives by with those exhaust pipes that rattle your bones. The detective turns to watch it pass, then reaches into his pocket and hands me a card with his name and number on it.

“If you hear something, I’d appreciate it if you give me a call,” he says. “You can do it confidentially. You don’t even have to leave your name.”

“I hope you catch him,” I say.

“That’s up to your neighborhood here. The only way that baby is going to get justice is if a witness comes forward. Broad daylight, Sunday afternoon. Someone saw something, and they’re just as bad as the killer if they don’t step up.”

Tough talk, but he doesn’t live here. No cops do.

He pulls out a handkerchief and mops the sweat off his head as he walks away, turns up the street toward Rudolfo’s place.

MY HEART IS racing. I lie on the couch and let the fans blow on me. The ice cream truck drives by, playing its little song, and I close my eyes for a minute. Just for a minute.

A noise. Someone coming in the front door. I sit up, lost, then scared. The TV remote is clutched in my fist like I’m going to throw it. I put it down before Lorena sees me. I must have dozed off.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

“Where have you been?” I reply, going from startled to irritated in a second.

“Out,” she says.

Best to leave it at that, I can tell from her look. She’s my oldest, thirty-five now, and we’ve been butting heads since she was twelve. If you ask her, I don’t know anything about anything. She’s raising Brianna different than I raised her. They’re more like friends than mother and daughter. They giggle over boys together, wear each other’s clothes. I don’t think it’s right, but we didn’t call each other for six months when I made a crack about it once, so now I bite my tongue.

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.