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My mother puts the bead down.

“I liked him,” she says. “A lot.”

She sounds so disappointed. Which, for some reason, annoys me more than if she were sad, or devastated, or angry, even.

“You always do this.”

Her hand stills. She straightens, and I can tell from the change in her expression and the way she flips her brown hair that she has stopped finding this conversation amusing. And I know, from years of experience, that I should leave it alone.

Instead, I hear myself continue. “You barely knew him.”

“And?”

“And now you’re disappointed for something that could have been but that was completely in your head, Mamá.”

She stares at me for a moment, as if waiting for the rest. “Yes,” she replies eventually.

That simple answer makes something uncomfortable shift beneath my ribs.

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me. I liked him.”

“But you keep doing this.”

My mother lets out a quiet breath and glances toward the kitchen, probably calculating how much longer she has before she needs to start getting ready for work.

“You think that everything that ends is a mistake,” she says, shifting in her position again. “But you have to remember that I have two grown children, and they are going to move on, so I’m trying to do the same.”

“Ma.”

“No, Flora. I honestly don’t know where I went wrong with you,” she adds, and I feel my cheeks flush. “I don’t know why you are such a cynic about everything, especially love. Your brother is not this way.”

I take a deep breath, then look into her eyes, so similar to mine. “I think people should be realistic.”

“Realistic about what, exactly?”

“About how much they give someone before they know what they’re getting back.”

That wipes the smile from her face. For a moment, neither of us says anything.

Fifty percent of the time I’m talking to my mother, I wish I could take the sentences back, or at least rearrange them into something that reveals less about me, and about her, too.

Instead, my mother looks at me with a particular expression she gets when I accidentally hand her more information than I meant to.

“Is that what you think I was doing?”

I focus on the bracelet again. “No.”

“Giving too much?”

“I was speaking generally.”

“Of course, yes.”

“Mamá.”

“Hija, why don’t you give yourself permission to hope?”