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

other, holding hands while their kids bicker. The boy looks at Luca and sticks his tongue out as the elevator doors close. Luca knows by instinct and by Mami’s subtle cues that he must behave as if everything’s normal, and he’s managed that behemoth task so far. But there’s an elegant older woman in the elevator, too, and she’s admiring Mami’s quilted gold shoes. Abuela’s shoes. Luca blinks rapidly.
    ‘How beautiful, your shoes – so unusual,’ the woman says, touching Lydia lightly on the arm. ‘Where did you buy them?’
    Lydia looks down at her feet instead of turning to engage with the woman. ‘Oh, I don’t remember,’ she says. ‘They’re so old.’ And then she stabs the ten button repeatedly with her finger, which doesn’t speed up the elevator but does have the intended effect of silencing any further attempts at conversation. The woman gets off on the sixth floor, and after she does so, Mami hits numbers fourteen, eighteen, and nineteen as well. They get off at ten and walk three flights down to the seventh floor.
    A surprising thing happens to Luca after Mami finally opens the door of their hotel room with her card key, after she looks both ways up and down the carpeted corridor and ushers him quickly inside, after she dead-bolts and chain-locks the door, dragging the desk chair across the tiled floor and wedging it beneath the doorknob. The surprising thing that happens to him is: nothing. The cloudburst of anguish he’s been struggling against does not come. Neither does it go. It remains there, pent up like a held breath, hovering just on the periphery of his mind. He has the sense that, were he to turn his head, were he to poke at the globular nightmare ever so gently with his finger, it would unleash a torrent so colossal he would be swept away forever. Luca takes care to hold himself quite still. Then he kicks off his shoes and climbs up on the edge of the lone bed. A towel has been placed there, folded into the shape of a swan, which Luca takes by the long neck and thrashes to the floor. He clutches the remote control like it’s a life preserver and clicks the television on.
    Mami moves their Walmart bags, backpacks, and Abuela’s overnight bag to the small table, and dumps everything out. She begins removing tags, organizing items into piles, and then quite suddenly she sits down hard in one of the chairs and doesn’t move for at least ten minutes. Luca doesn’t look at her. He glues his eyes to Nickelodeon, turns Henry Danger up loud. When at last she begins to move again, Mami comes to him and kisses his forehead roughly. She crosses the room and slides open the door to the balcony. She doubts there’s any amount of fresh air that could succeed in clearing her head, but she has to try. She leaves it open and steps outside.
    If there’s one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it’s that it’s more immediate than grief. She knows that she will soon have to contend with what’s happened, but for now, the possibility of what might still happen serves to anesthetize her from the worst of the anguish. She peers over the edge of the balcony and surveys the street below. She tells herself there’s no one out there. She tells herself they are safe.
    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