American Dirt : A Novel (2020) Read online

  Downstairs in the lobby, the front desk clerk excuses himself from his post and heads for the employee breakroom. In the second stall of the bathroom, he removes the burner phone from his interior suit jacket pocket and sends the following text: Two special guests just checked in to the Hotel Duquesa Imperial.

  Chapter Four

  On the occasion of their first encounter, Javier Crespo Fuentes arrived alone at Lydia’s shop on a Tuesday morning just as she was setting her chalkboard on the sidewalk outside. That week, she’d selected ten books from faraway places to promote with a hand-chalked sign that read books: cheaper than airline tickets. She was holding the door open with one leg as she lifted the sign through, and then he appeared, approaching quickly to help with the door. The bell above them jangled like a pronouncement.

  ‘Thank you,’ Lydia said.

  He nodded. ‘But far more dangerous.’

  She frowned and propped open the easel. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The sign.’ He gestured, and she stood back to assess her lettering. ‘Books are cheaper than traveling, but they’re also more dangerous.’

  Lydia smiled. ‘Well, I suppose that depends on where you travel.’

  They went inside, and she left him to his own counsel while he browsed the stacks, but when at last he approached the counter and set his books beside the register, she was startled by his selections.

  Lydia had owned this store for almost ten years, and she’d stocked it with both books she loved and books she wasn’t crazy about but knew would sell. She also kept a healthy inventory of notecards, pens, calendars, toys, games, reading glasses, magnets, and key chains, and it was that kind of merchandise, along with the splashy best sellers, that made her shop profitable. So it had long been a secret pleasure of Lydia’s that, hidden among all the more popular goods, she was able to make a home for some of her best-loved secret treasures, gems that had blown open her mind and changed her life, books that in some cases had never even been translated into Spanish but that she stocked anyway, not because she expected she’d ever sell them, but simply because it made her happy to know they were there. There were perhaps a dozen of these books, stashed away on their ever-changing shelves, enduring among a cast of evolving neighbors. Now and again when a book moved her, when a book opened a previously undiscovered window in her mind and forever altered her perception of the world, she would add it to those secret ranks. Once in a great while, she’d even try to recommend one of those books to a customer. She did this only when the customer was someone she knew and liked, someone she trusted to appreciate the value of the treasure being offered; she was almost always disappointed. In the ten years she’d been doing this, only twice had Lydia experienced the pleasure of a customer approaching her counter with one of those books in hand, unsolicited. Twice in ten years there’d been a wild spark of wonder in the shop, when the bell above the door was like mistletoe – a possibility of something magical.

  So when Javier approached Lydia as she stood behind the register perusing catalogs, when she lifted his selections from the counter to ring them up, she was astonished to find not one, but two of her secret treasures among them: Heart, You Bully, You Punk by Leah Hager Cohen and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Lydia whispered.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  She looked up at him, realizing she hadn’t actually looked at him yet, despite their cheerful banter earlier. He was fancily dressed for a Tuesday morning, in dark blue trousers and a white guayabera, an outfit more suitable for Sunday Mass than a regular workday, and his thick, black hair was parted sharply and combed to one side in an old-fashioned style. The heavy, black plastic frames of his glasses were similarly outdated, so retro they were almost chic again. His eyes swam hugely behind the thick lenses and his mustache quivered as she considered him.

  ‘These books,’ she said. ‘They’re two of my favorites.’ It was an insufficient explanation, but all she could muster.

  ‘Mine, too,’ the man across from her said. The mustache hitched ever so slightly with his hesitant smile.

  ‘You’ve read them before?’ She was holding Heart, You Bully, You Punk with both hands.

  ‘Well, only this one.’ He gestured to the one she was clutching.

  She looked down at its cover. ‘You read in English?’ she asked, in English.

  ‘I try, yes,’ he said. ‘My English isn’t fluent, but it’s close. And this story is so delicate. I’m sure there were things I missed the first time around. I wanted to try again.’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled at him, feeling slightly crazy. She ignored this feeling and plowed recklessly ahead. ‘When you’re finished you could come back, we could discuss it.’

  ‘Oh.’ He nodded eagerly. ‘You have a book club here?’

  Her mouth opened slightly. ‘No.’ She laughed. ‘Just me!’

  ‘All the better.’

  He smiled and Lydia frowned, eager to preserve the sanctity of this moment. Was he flirting? Whenever a man’s behavior was inscrutable, the answer was typically yes. She placed the book on the counter and her palm flat against its cover.

  He read the caution in her gesture and endeavored to correct himself. ‘I only meant because sometimes the experience of reading can be corrupted by too many opinions.’ He looked at the book beneath her hand. ‘A remarkable book. Remarkable.’

  She conceded a smile, lifting her scanner from its cradle and pointing it toward the book.

  When he returned the following Monday, he went directly to the counter, even though Lydia was busy with another customer. He waited to one side, hands clasped in front of him, and when the customer left, they smiled broadly at each other.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Even more incredible the second time.’

  ‘Yes!’ Lydia clapped her hands.

  One of the book’s main characters had a condition where she couldn’t prevent herself from jumping off high things. She didn’t want to die, but she was constantly hurting herself because of this dangerous impulse.

  ‘I have this same condition,’ Javier confessed suddenly.

  ‘What? No!’

  The condition was fictional.

  And yet, Lydia had it, too. Anytime she stood too close to the balcony railing at home, she had to dig her fingers in. She had to press her heels to the floor. She was afraid that one day she would leap over without thinking, without purpose. She would splatter on the pavement below and the Acapulco traffic would screech and blare, swerving needlessly around her. The ambulance would be too late. Luca would be orphaned, and everyone would misinterpret the act as suicide. Lydia had run the scenario through her brain a thousand times as an attempted antidote. I must not jump.

  ‘I thought I was the only one in the world,’ Javier confessed. ‘I thought it was a crazy fabrication of my mind. And then there it was, in the book.’

  Lydia didn’t realize her mouth was hanging open until she closed it. She sat back onto her stool with a bump.

  ‘But I thought I was the only one,’ she said.

  Javier straightened his body away from the counter. ‘You also?’

  Lydia nodded.

  ‘Well, my God,’ he said in English. And then he laughed. ‘We will start a support group.’

  And then he stood there, talking with her for so long that she eventually offered him a cup of coffee, which he accepted. She pulled a stool around to the far side of the counter so he could drink it in comfort. He was careful not to get foam on his mustache. They talked about literature and poetry and economics and politics and the music they both adored, and he stayed for nearly two hours, until she began to worry that he’d be missed somewhere, but he waved his hand dismissively.

  ‘There is nothing out there more important than this.’

  It was just as Lydia had always hoped life in her bookstore
would be one day. In between the workaday drudgery of running a business, that she might entertain customers who were as lively and engaging as the books around them.

  ‘If I had three more customers like you, I’d be set for life,’ she said, taking her last sip of coffee.

  He placed a hand across his chest and bowed slightly. ‘I shall try to be enough.’ And then he said casually, softly, ‘If I had met you in a different life, I would ask you to marry me.’

  Lydia stood abruptly from her stool and shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Javier said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.’

  She gathered the cups in silence. The treachery wasn’t in receiving his confession. The treachery was in her unspoken response: in a different life, she might’ve said yes.

  ‘I should get back to work,’ she said instead. ‘I have to place an order this afternoon. I have to prepare some parcels for the mail.’

  He took seven new books with him that day, three of which were Lydia’s recommendations.

  On the following Friday morning a summer shower washed down the street, and two large, worrisome men crowded themselves in beneath the awning that hung above Lydia’s bookshop door. Moments later, Javier appeared, and Lydia felt a strong measure of happiness. There would be new books to discuss! She tried to behave naturally, but as she watched those men in the doorway, her breath constricted in her chest.

  ‘They make you nervous,’ Javier observed.

  ‘I just don’t know what they want.’ Lydia paced from her usual position, emerging from behind the register. She, like all the other shop owners on this street, already paid the monthly mordidas imposed by the cartel. She couldn’t afford to pay more.

  ‘I will send them off,’ Javier said.

  Lydia protested, grabbing his arm, growing louder even as Javier’s voice dropped to a comforting hush. He stepped around her when she tried to block his path.

  ‘They will hurt you,’ she whispered as severely as she could without raising alarm.

  He smiled at her in a way that made his mustache twitch and assured her, ‘They will not.’

  Lydia ducked behind the counter, lowering her head as Javier opened the door and stepped outside. She watched in astonishment as he spoke to the two bulky thugs beneath her awning. Both men gestured to the rain, but Javier pointed a finger, made a shooing gesture with his hand, and the men trotted off into the downpour.

  Lydia was reluctant to understand. Even as his visits continued and lengthened, as their conversations deepened into more personal matters, as she caught fleeting glimpses of the men on two other occasions, Lydia willfully forgot the power Javier had wielded on that rainy morning. When eventually he spoke adoringly about his wife, whom he called la reina de mi corazón, the queen of my heart, Lydia felt her defenses relax. Those shields dropped further still when he revealed the existence of a young mistress, whom he called la reina de mis pantalones, the queen of my pants.

  ‘Disgusting,’ she said, but she surprised herself by laughing, too.

  It was hardly unusual for a man to have an affair, but talking so openly about it with another woman was something else. For that reason, the confession served both to cure Lydia of any flattered wisp of attachment and, as Javier revealed more and more of his secret self, to turn the key in the intimate lock of their friendship. They became confidants, sharing jokes and observations and disappointments. They even spoke at times about the irritating things their spouses did.

  ‘If you were married to me, I would never behave that way,’ Javier said when she complained about Sebastián leaving his dirty socks on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Of course not.’ She laughed. ‘You’d be an ideal husband.’

  ‘I’d wash every sock in the house.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’d burn all the socks and buy new ones each week.’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  ‘I’d forgo socks altogether, if it would make you happy.’

  Lydia laughed in spite of herself. She’d learned to roll her eyes at these proclamations because, in the weather of their friendship, his flirtation was only a passing cloud. There were far more important storms between them. They discovered, for example, that both of their fathers had died young from cancer, a fact that would’ve bonded them all by itself. They’d both had good dads, and then lost them.

  ‘It’s like being a member of the shittiest club in the world,’ Javier said to her.

  For Lydia, it had been nearly fifteen years, and though her sorrow was now irregular, when she did stumble into it, her grief was still as acute as the day her father had died.

  ‘I know,’ Javier said, even though she didn’t say these things out loud.

  So she endured his intense flattery, and he, in turn, accepted, perhaps even relished, her wholesale rejection of his flirtation. She came to think of it as part of his charm.

  ‘But, Lydia,’ he told her reverently, placing both hands on his heart, ‘my other loves notwithstanding, you truly are la reina de mi alma.’ The queen of my soul.

  ‘And what would your poor wife say about that?’ she countered.

  ‘My magnificent wife only wants me to be happy.’

  ‘She’s a saint!’

  He spoke frequently of his only child, a sixteen-year-old daughter who was at boarding school in Barcelona. Everything about him changed when he talked about her – his voice, his face, his manner. His love for her was so earnest that he handled even the subject of her with tremendous care. Her name was like a fine glass bauble he was afraid of dropping.

  ‘I joke about my many loves, but in truth, there is only one.’ He smiled at Lydia. ‘Marta. Es mi cielo, mi luna, y todas mis estrellas.’

  ‘I am a mother.’ Lydia nodded. ‘I know this love.’

  He sat across from her on the stool she’d come to think of as his. ‘That love is so vast I sometimes fear it,’ he said. ‘I can never hope to earn it, so I fear it will disappear, it will consume me. And at the same time, it’s the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.’

  ‘Oh, Javier – that can’t be true,’ Lydia said.

  The subject made him morose. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes roughly beneath the glasses.

  ‘It’s just that my life hasn’t turned out as I intended,’ he said. ‘You know how it is.’

  But she didn’t. After weeks of learning about each other, this was where their common language faltered. With the exception of having only one child, Lydia’s life had turned out precisely as she’d always wished it might. She’d given up hoping for the daughter she could no longer have; she’d accepted that absence because she’d worked at it. She was content with her choices, more than content. Lydia was happy. But Javier looked at her through the warp of his lenses, and she could see the yearning on his face, to be understood. She pressed her lips together. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  He removed the glasses and folded the stems. He placed them in his breast pocket and blinked, his eyes small and raw without their accustomed shield. ‘I thought I would be a poet!’ He laughed. ‘Ridiculous, right? In this day and age?’

  She put her hand on top of his.

  ‘I thought I would be a scholar. A quiet life. I’d do quite well with poverty, I think.’

  She twisted her mouth, touching the elegant watch on his wrist. ‘I’m dubious.’

  He shrugged. ‘I guess I do like shoes.’

  ‘And steak,’ she reminded him.

  He laughed. ‘Yes, steak. Who doesn’t like steak?’

  ‘Your book habit alone would bankrupt most people.’

  ‘Dios mío, you’re right, Lydia. I’d be a terrible pauper.’

  ‘The worst,’ she agreed. After a beat she said, ‘It’s never too late, Javier. If you’re truly unhappy? You’re still a young man.’

  ‘I’m fifty-one!’

 
; Younger than she thought, even. ‘Practically a baby. And what have you got to be so unhappy about anyway?’

  He looked down at the counter and Lydia was surprised to see genuine torment cross his features.

  She lowered her voice and leaned in. ‘Then you could choose a different path, Javier. You can. You’re such a gifted person, such a capable person. What’s stopping you?’

  ‘Ah.’ He shook his head, replacing his glasses. She watched him pushing his face back into its customary shapes. ‘It’s all a romantic dream now. It’s over. I made my choices long ago, and this is where they’ve led me.’

  She squeezed his hand. ‘It’s not so bad, right?’ It was something she’d say to Luca, to shepherd him toward optimism.

  Javier blinked slowly, tipped his head to one side. An ambiguous gesture. ‘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 papá.’

  ‘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.