Free American Dirt : A Novel (2020) by Jeanine Cummins

declaration, that she curses his name and throws him out onto the street, that she wishes him dead and orders him never to return? Lydia understands nothing.
    For an instant – only an instant – she considers telling the driver to stop. She imagines walking over to those SUVs and knocking on one of the drivers’ windows. She thinks of going to Javier, wherever he is, meeting him outside the confines of the bookstore for the first time. She might embrace him, throw herself on his mercy, demand an explanation. She might beg him just to get it over with. She might punch and kick him, pull the machete from her pant leg, slash his face, slash his throat. And then she looks over at Luca, and it all evaporates. She’s in a stuffy shuttle bus and there’s something sticky on the seat. The ghost of some child’s melted candy. She is here with Luca and she will protect him at all costs. This is the only thing left that matters. Ahead of them, a black SUV rolls slowly across the intersection.
    ‘Can you take us to the bus depot?’ Lydia asks the driver.
    ‘I’m not supposed to deviate from my route.’
    ‘But there are no other passengers, it’s only a few extra blocks. Who’s going to know?’
    ‘GPS.’ The driver points to a screen strapped onto his dash. ‘There’s a different shuttle that goes to the bus terminal. This one’s for the shopping district. You want to go back to the hotel, you can take the other shuttle.’
    ‘Please,’ Lydia says. ‘I can pay you.’
    In response, the driver brakes and opens the door. Lydia shoots him a hateful look but gathers her things and prompts Luca off the bus in front of her. It’s too early for shopping, and the streets of the district are deserted. The driver closes the door behind them and rolls away. The boulevard is wide and open. It’s only half a mile’s walk from here to the bus station, but it feels an impossible, exposed distance to cover, like walking across a battlefield without armor or weaponry. She hides her fear well, but Luca can sense it anyway, in the cold slick of his mother’s hand.
    Getting to the bus depot feels like some deranged version of the game Crossy Road, where, instead of dodging taxis and trucks and trains, Luca and Mami have to duck and lurch between the possibility of concealed narcos in their tinted SUVs. The ever-present threat of gunfire screams through Luca’s mind like the unexpected train.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ he tells Mami. ‘If anyone was looking for us, they’d go to the central terminal downtown, right? They wouldn’t expect us to be all the way out here in Diamante.’ Luca doesn’t know about the parcel, but his logic is enough to make Lydia smile for a moment.
    ‘That’s what I thought, too. Smart kid.’ She tugs the brim of Papi’s red baseball cap lower on Luca’s face. He walks too fast. ‘We have to walk like normal,’ she says. ‘Slow down.’
    ‘Normal people are sometimes late for a bus.’ Luca’s limbs feel twitchy.
    ‘There’s always another bus,’ she says.
    It’s seven minutes past six in the morning when Mami purchases their one-way tickets to Mexico City, so they have thirteen minutes to kill before the bus leaves. The terminal is a modern structure, mostly glass, and even though the sun isn’t up yet, the sky has begun to lighten, and Luca can make out the shapes of the cars in the parking lot. There’s only one SUV, and it appears to be empty, lights off. But someone could be inside waiting, seat reclined, asleep on the job. Luca studies the SUV while Mami collects her change from the lady behind the counter. It’s Sunday, so the buses back to Mexico City will be crowded with families heading home from their minivacations. Luca and Mami can look like one of those families. There’s a handful of energetic children in the terminal already, chattering and skipping circles around their bleary-eyed, coffee-sipping parents.
    Mami herds Luca into the handicapped stall in the ladies’