American Dirt : A Novel (2020) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the green of the palm fronds, the trunks of the trees painted white to discourage beetles, the vivid blare of signs advertising shops and hotels and shoes. At El Rollo, Luca looks at the children and teenagers in line for the ticket window. They wear flip-flops and have towels around their necks. Behind them, the red and yellow water slides swoop and soar. Luca puts one finger against the glass and squashes the children in line one by one. The bus squeaks its brakes at the curb, and three damp-haired teenage boys get on. They pass Luca and Lydia without a glance and sit in the back of the bus, elbows planted on knees, talking quietly across the aisle.
    ‘Papi’s going to take me in the summertime,’ Luca says.
    ‘What?’
    ‘To El Rollo. He said this summer we could go. He would take a day off work one time when I’m not in school.’
    Lydia sucks in her cheeks and bites down. A disloyal reflex: she’s an gry at her husband. The driver closes the door and the bus moves off with the traffic. Lydia unzips the overnight bag at her feet, kicks off her heels, and replaces them with her mother’s quilted gold sneakers. She doesn’t have a plan, which is unlike her, and she finds it difficult to form one because her mind feels unfamiliar, both frenetic and swampy. She does have the wherewithal to remember that every fifteen or twenty minutes, they should get off and change buses, which they do. Sometimes they change direction, sometimes they don’t. One bus stops directly in front of a church, so they go briefly inside, but the part of Lydia that’s usually available for prayer has shut down. She’s experienced this numbness a few times before in her life – when she was seventeen and her father died of cancer, when she had a late-stage miscarriage two years after Luca, when the doctors told her she could never have more children – so she doesn’t think of it as a crisis of faith. Instead she believes it’s a divine kindness. Like a government furlough, God has deferred her nonessential agencies. Outside, Luca vomits on the pavement once more while they wait for the next bus.
    Around her neck, Lydia wears a thin gold chain adorned only with three interlocking loops. It’s a discreet piece of jewelry, and the only one she wears apart from the filigreed gold band around the fourth finger of her left hand. Sebasti á n gave her the necklace the first Christmas after Luca was born, and she loved it immediately – the symbolism of it. She’s worn it every day since, and it’s become so much a part of her that she’s woven her mannerisms into it. When she’s bored, she runs the delicate chain back and forth along the pad of her thumb. When she’s nervous, she has a habit of looping the three interlocking circles together onto the tip of her pinky nail, where they make a faint tinkling sound. She doesn’t touch those golden hoops now. Her hand moves absently toward her neck, but already she’s aware of the gesture. Already she’s training herself to disguise old habits. She must become entirely unrecognizable if she hopes to survive. She opens the clasp at the back of her neck and slips Sebasti á n’s wedding ring from her thumb onto the chain. Then she refastens the clasp around her neck and drops the whole thing inside the collar of her blouse.
    They must avoid drawing the attention of the bus drivers, who’ve been known to act as halcones, lookouts for the cartel. Lydia understands that her appearance as a moderately attractive but not beautiful woman of indeterminate age, traveling the city with an unremarkable-looking boy, can provide a kind of natural camouflage if she takes care to promote the impression that they’re simply out for a day’s shopping or a visit to friends across the city. Indeed, Luca and Lydia could easily change places with many of their fellow passengers, which Lydia thinks of as truly absurd – that the people around them cannot see plainly what abomination they’ve just