Free All I Have in This World by Michael Parker

cheese—Maria discovered that when conversation with her mother dead-ended into silences that made her anxious and guilty for staying gone for so many years, all she had to do was ask a question about the motel.
    Her mother might well have been tired—how could she not be, given all she’d endured in the past decade—but Maria quickly came to doubt she was too tired to run the motel. Running that motel would save her mother’s life. Men, love, romance, sex, domesticity, definitely motherhood—her mother was done with all that, at age fifty-three. She’d had enough of trying to accommodate the alternately selfish and helpless doings of men. Maria could see it in the way her mother had dealt with the few men they had come into contact with since she’d been home. Her cousin Alberto, who ran cattle behind the house, came by to check the water tanks and happened to spot Maria and her mother pulling into the drive coming back from the grocery store. He whipped in behind them and hopped out of his still-running truck to give Maria a hug and say to her mother, “How come you won’t even tell somebody Maria’s home?”
    Maria’s mother looked at Alberto as if he was still back in high school, hotdogging around town in the Nissan Sentra he’d been so proud of, a tight end for the Javelinas who had scored a lucky touchdown in a play-off game against Sierra Blanca and let it ruin the next five years of his life.
    â€œHow come somebody won’t learn to keep his cows out of my yard?”
    Her mother grabbed the groceries and went inside.
    â€œShe never did understand me,” said Alberto. “She just don’t get me.”
    Maria laughed instead of denying it, for though she had been gone for ten years, she knew it was true: her mother did not get why Alberto thought catching a ball could affect his life one way or the other beyond the time it took for the ball to be caught. Lorenzo the maintenance man at the motel provoked in her a similarly crusty demeanor, as did some poor electrician who stopped by the house to get paid for putting up a motion detector in the carport and made the mistake of attempting small talk. Her mother was over men. She would live alone for the next twenty-five or thirty years and she would not get lonely, having had to take care of two men at once and then watch them get sick and die within months of each other, and no one who knew her, who really knew her, would feel the least bit sorry for her or say aloud or even think, I wish Harriet would find someone to share the sunset with, it’s a shame, she’s not all that old, really. Maria herself knew some things about being alone but not lonely. But being back home, and around her mother, she understood them in a way that surprised and slightly worried her. Perhaps her independence, her need to have men enjoy their time with her without entitlement or jealousy or some claim on the next day, had less to do with what had happened with Randy than it did with her mother.
    Was it inherited? Or something that arose out of the soil where both had been born? Theirs was, after all, land hospitable to only the least needy vegetation nature had to offer. Mesquite was a worthless plant but not a useless one, for though it was only good for flavoring grilled meat, it was useful as an example of the thick-skinned, thorny nature it took to survive here.
    â€œWhat are you going to do with the restaurant?” Maria was hoping to draw attention away from her plate of enchiladas, from which she’d taken only a few bites.
    â€œLet it sit. I don’t know what else.”
    â€œCouldn’t you use the money?”
    â€œI always have uses for money, but the question is, do I want to put up with what I have to put up with in exchange for an extra five or six hundred a month? Some things cost more than they pay.”
    â€œBut why? Wouldn’t you just rent it out and sit back and collect the