Sweet Water Read Online Free

table. At least a dozen slices of toasted bread, sans plate, stood in a stack on the tabletop. The bread loaf’s plastic sack gaped open and the remaining untoasted slices from the loaf were scattered across the kitchen counter.
    “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Mama said, munching on a toast slice, her blue eyes looking huge behind her glasses lenses.
    Marisa suppressed a groan. “That’s okay, Mama. I’m sorry I didn’t wake up.”
    Last night, unable to shut out the endless parade of varying disasters that could result from the sale of Agua Dulce, Marisa had lain awake for hours. “I didn’t drop off until late. Is everything all right?”
    “Oh, yes. I just made some toast.”
    These days, having Mama in the kitchen alone cooking anything, even toast, was an unacceptable risk. Every day Marisa pondered if she should remove all cooking utensils from the kitchen and disconnect the stove.
    Her brow arched as she whipped herself into wakefulness. A pain throbbed behind her eyes. “Lord, I’m late. I hope no one’s showed up for breakfast.” She went to the coffee grinder and fumbled through grinding beans, wincing at the noise the grinder made. “Listen, Mama, I’m gonna get a shower, then run over to the café and heat up the griddle. You’ll be okay here ’til I can get back, right?”
    “Oh, yes. I’ll get dressed and take a little walk.”
    “No!” The thought of Mama alone outside was another of Marisa’s nightmares. In the vast expanse of unpopulated desert that lay outside the singlewide’s walls, Mama could get lost in nothing flat. Marisa switched on the coffee maker and lowered her voice.   “No, don’t walk, Mama. I’ll come back after breakfast and we’ll take a walk together, okay?”
    Her mother’s eyes teared and her chin quivered. “If you say so, Marisa. I hope you don’t forget. I do need my exercise.”
    Shit. Now Marisa felt like a heel. Emotion so close to the surface was part of Mama’s disease. It had taken some getting used to because such displays were so out of character for the mother Marisa used to know. “Look, you need to eat something besides toast.” She pulled Cheerios from an upper cabinet. As the coffee dripped, she prepared a bowl of cereal with canned peach slices and set it in front of her mother. “Eat some cereal while I take a quick shower, okay?” The coffee gurgled to a finish and Marisa poured Mama a cup, then poured one for herself.
    Carrying the coffee, Marisa padded to the hall bathroom, which was barely big enough for a tub/shower combo, a commode and a sink. The mobile home had a master suite of sorts on one end, but Mama used that.
    Marisa hurried through a shower and shampoo, bumping her elbows on the fiberglass walls and vowing that when she got rich, one of the first things she would have was a decent-sized bathtub and shower.
    She dried quickly and styled her hair. Cut to a shoulder-length bob, it required nothing more than a hairbrush and a few minutes with the dryer. She didn’t wear makeup, but this morning, she rubbed a bit of cream from every jar on the bathroom counter under her eyes. None of it seemed to lighten the dark circles or shrink the puffy pouches.
    She pulled on a Western style shirt--white, with embroidered red roses and silky fringe hanging from arching yokes across the front and back--and stuffed herself into clean Rockies jeans. Through the belt loops, she slipped a Mexican tooled-leather belt with conchos and a silver buckle the size of a saucer. She pulled on cowboy boots and added some silver jewelry to her earlobes and wrists. Marisa, Queen of the Cowgirls.
    Though she could ride a horse and had been around livestock growers most of her youth, she wasn’t a real cowgirl. Not even close. But it was important to look like a Westerner. In this part of Texas, near Langtry, where the legend of Judge Roy Bean flourished, and not too far from Billy the Kid’s haunt in New Mexico, the Wild West was what tourists