Cummins Jeanine - American Dirt - A Novel (2020)

‘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 coraz ó n, 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?’