Read Online Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer - Free Book Online Page A

he’d scraped off all the words of a book, page by page by page. He put his hands into his pockets. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t grossed out, that he shouldn’t be embarrassed, and that I was always embarrassed too. I wanted to tell him that I would like to see his fingers again. I hadn’t meant to make him uncomfortable.
    “Lorca,” he said softly to his shoes. No one had ever said my name like that. “Wasn’t Lorca the gay one?” he asked, out of nowhere. “Wasn’t he the one they shot?”
    “No,” I snapped, hating myself for a second but also not needing Blot to think that my parents wanted me dead.
    “Yes,” he said. “I know I read that somewhere.”
    “No,” I said again. And then: “Yes.” When the sound repeated in my head, it was impatient and rude.
    “That’s cool, though,” Blot said. “It’s cool to be named after a poet guy.”
    I wanted to tell him, but didn’t, that my father had named me after Federico García Lorca because he wrote about the moon’s white petticoats and the gypsies. (I didn’t speak Spanish, but I memorized the whole poem in its original language when I was seven, and when I recited it to my father, tears came to his eyes and he kissed my face all over, again and again.
El niño la mira, mira.
) And because my mother had still loved my father then, when I was born, she’d let him choose my name.
    I wanted to ask Blot what he knew about Lorca. Why else a father might have named his daughter after him. Maybe, I thought, I could feel closer to him, knowing those things. Blot got up. I whispered, “Wait,” but reconsidered and did a pretty good cover-up:
    “His first play,” I said, “was actually
El maleficio de la mariposa,
not
Mariana Pineda.
It’s about a cockroach and a butterfly who fall in love. It’s a common misconception that it was
Mariana Pineda.
”
    I was an idiot. Where did I get this stuff? He must know that I loved him. What else?
    “Cool,” Blot said. There went the dimples again. They made me forget to breathe out.
    “Thank you,” I said. Stupid. Moron. Idiot.
    Just as Blot was walking away, it occurred to me that if I really wanted to find the recipe and save myself, I couldn’t waste any time.
    “Hey,” I blurted, a little spit flying. “Do you have any older issues of
Zagat
?” My face went hot and numb as it occurred to me that this was a bookstore and not a library and why would they?
    “Well, no,” he said. “We replace them every year. We have the newest one downstairs.”
    Obviously. Then I lied. “Oh, the old ones are very valuable,” I said. “The Strand has some in their rare-book collection.”
    “We don’t,” he said. “Are you looking for something specific?”
    Specifically, I wanted to know if he wanted to search for the masgouf with me. If he wanted to traipse around the city and hold my hand and maybe eat a hundred different dishes until we found the one that would make my mother go bananas, in a good way. His presence would change everything. That was the specific question I wanted to ask him. And the specific answer I was looking for was
I’d love to. I can’t wait.
That’s what I wanted him to say.
    Then, carefully, I explained the situation to him—excluding all the parts about getting in trouble, boarding school, hurting myself, and the romantic bits featuring him. He said, “Is it a special birthday or something? Is that why you want to make your mother the fish?” I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t expected that it might seem strange that I would go to Mars and back for my mother for no good reason. You’d think I’d have realized how weird this was earlier, years before, but I hadn’t.
    My mother was an enigma, fickle, unknowable, like a giant fish. She loved me in fits and spurts. Lou said that she was how she was because she was adopted. “Someone didn’t love her enough. How about cutting her a little slack?” I told her one thousand times a day how much I loved her, hoping