American Dirt : A Novel (2020) by Jeanine Cummins Read Free Book Online Page A

one side. An ambiguous ges ture. ‘It will have to do.’
    She straightened up behind the counter and took a sip of her lukewarm coffee. ‘Your choices yielded Marta.’
    His eyes shined. ‘Yes, Marta,’ he said. ‘And you.’
    The next time he came, he brought a box of conchas and sat in his usual place. There were several customers in the shop, so he opened the box and placed two of the sweet treats on napkins while Lydia walked the aisles helping people with their requests. When they approached the counter to pay for their goods, Javier greeted them as if he worked there. He offered them conchas . When at last Lydia and Javier were alone, he withdrew a small Moleskine notebook from the interior pocket of his jacket and set it on the counter as well.
    ‘What’s this?’ Lydia asked.
    Javier swallowed nervously. ‘My poetry.’
    Lydia’s eyes grew wide with delight.
    ‘I’ve never shared it with anyone except Marta,’ he said. ‘She’s studying poetry in school. And French and mathematics. She’s much more gifted than her old pap á .’
    ‘Oh, Javier.’
    He touched the corner of the book nervously. ‘I’ve been writing poems all my life. Since I was a child. I thought you might like to hear one.’
    Lydia pulled her stool closer to the counter and leaned toward him, her chin resting on her propped and folded hands. Between them, the conchas stained their napkins with grease. Javier opened the book, its pages soft from wear. He leafed carefully through them until he came to the page he had in mind. He cleared his throat before he began.
    Oh, the poem was terrible. It was both grave and frivolous, so bad that it made Lydia love him much, much more, because of how vulnerable he was in sharing it with her. When he finished reading and looked up for her reaction, his face was a twist of worry. But her eyes were bright and reassuring, and she genuinely meant the words she gave him in that moment.
    ‘How beautiful. How very beautiful.’
    The maturing friendship with Javier was surprising in its swiftness and intensity. The flirtation had mostly ceased, and in its place, she discovered an intimacy she’d seldom experienced outside of family. There was no feeling of romance on Lydia’s end, but their bond was refreshing. Javier reminded her, in the middle of her mothering years, that life was exciting, that there was always the possibility of something, or someone, previously undiscovered.
    On her birthday, a day Lydia did not recall revealing to him, Javier arrived with a silver parcel the size of a book. The ribbon said, jacques genin .
    ‘The principal chocolatier in Paris,’ Javier explained.
    Lydia demurred, but not convincingly. (She loved chocolate.) And she accidentally ate every last one of the tiny masterpieces before Sebasti á n and Luca arrived at her shop that evening to take her out for her birthday dinner.
    Because of an eruption of violence between rival cartels in Acapulco, Lydia and her family, indeed most families in the city, no longer frequented their favorite neighborhood caf é s. The challenger to the establishment was a new cartel that called itself Los Jardineros, a name that failed, initially, to evoke the appropriate fear in the populace. That problem had been transitory. Shortly after their formation, everyone in the city knew that ‘The Gardeners’ used guns only when they didn’t have time to indulge their creativity. Their preferred tools were more intimate: spade, ax, sickle, hook, machete. The simple instruments of hacking and trenching. With these, Los Jardineros moved the earth; with these, they unseated and buried their rivals. A few of the dethroned survivors managed to join the ranks of their conquerors; most fled the city. The result was a recent decrease in bloodshed as the emergent winner flung a shroud of uneasy calm across the shoulders of Acapulco. Nearly four months of relative quiet followed, and the citizens of Acapulco cautiously returned to the streets, to