‘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.