The Boy Read Free Page B

their mother, but only by their mother.”
    Anna looked away.
    “There’ve been books published.”
    “Books?”
    “Lots of books. I gave mine radishes, I gave them squash. I gave them tomatoes. And spinach. I gave them lots of spinach.”
    “No harm in spinach.”
    “I gave them sauerkraut.”
    “You gave them sauerkraut?”
    “I gave them sauerkraut. And guess what? They love it.”
    “Right on. You’ve got yourself a team of sauerkraut eaters. You should field them in formation.”
    She got a long, cold stare; and in those large, oddly reflective eyes, as if on a screen, Anna saw herself slicing bread and boiling beans, because, just after their move, Eva would eat nothing else .
    She tried to sneak in some whole wheat. Eva picked up the slice and held it against the light. “What’s this?”
    “Bread.”
    “Why is it dark?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “I don’t like dark bread.”
    “You’ve never tried dark bread.”
    “Mamma, I don’t want dark bread.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I don’t.”
    Motherhood multiplied by a thousand, motherhood on a constant edge, motherhood like a prison sentence until the day Anna got called in and told that her daughter was shoveling handfuls of dirt in her mouth at recess.
    “Dirt?”
    The teacher gave a grave nod.
    “In her mouth?”
    Another nod.
    “She eats it?”
    “We are not sure, we think she does.” Nearly a minute went past before the teacher, a transplant from the Hungarian countryside raised on the milk of human kindness, took Anna’s hands in hers and whispered, “Why would she do that? Why would Eva feel the need to do that?”
    Reclaiming her hands with a jerk, Anna had no trouble adding up a father, a continent, two nannies, and two dogs, and saying, “She’s lost everything. The girl’s lost everything.” A few minutes later, fumbling badly with the buckles of Eva’s car seat, Anna felt her daughter’s tiny palm on her cheek. “Mamma, are you crying?”
    “Little bit.”
    “You never cry.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Why, Mamma? Why are you crying?”
    “They say you’re eating dirt. They say you squat behind bushes, put dirt in your mouth and eat it.”
    “I can stop.”
    The first buckle snapped shut. “You can?”
    “Yes.” The second buckle slid in. “You sure?”
    “It’s my mouth, Mamma.”
      
    Things crack under too much pressure, and in the interstices occasionally new life takes root. From one day to the next, the school drop-offs, the playdates, the blessedness of Sunday mornings at home settled into a merciful routine. Eva got a dog out of a cardboard box in front of the food store and called it Paco, the Spanish nickname for Francisco. She was a bunny, a pirate, then a witch at Halloween. Anna started a column for the local paper. Eva acquired a taste for chicken and beef, zucchini and rice, shrimp tempura.
    They moved houses, settling down into a narrow pass glazed with snow and ice. The roof leaked and Anna axed the ice off of it, putting in gashes a foot long. Accumulated snow snapped branches off their apple tree, tearing Anna and Eva from sleep in deep terror, and Anna pruned it at the wrong time of the year. Then frost loosened into mist, ice turned to mud, the sun rioted longer and longer over the escarpment, painting the rock beneath it all kinds of violent hues. The hummingbirds came in crazed droves. Knees against chest, Eva dropped crocus bulbs into the earth. Caught in a shaft of dying light, Anna watched.
    That was how summer came that year.

Chapter Two
    T he sun rose over the escarpment and ran fast and hard over a stretch of broken ground on which a few casitas sat despondent, down to the river and up to the house, casting long, gaunt shadows on the patio outside. A few miles past the solitude of the mesa, past acres and acres of chamisa, past the steady metronome of what had once been a furiously blinking light, the town was starting to stir. The bells of the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe