Previously, Dave cleaned out his decades-old storage unit in Tampa, throwing away remnants of his past while confronting memories of his hard-won sobriety. Among his parents’ old belongings, he discovered a photograph revealing they had secretly visited their Slovakian homeland shortly before their deaths. Read Chapter 10.
The first eight chapters of Kindling released to all subscribers. Only paid subscribers can see past the previews from Chapter 9 onwards.
Chapter 11: Grazia
Tampa, Florida – December 2023
Grazia had one clear memory of her childhood in Cuba.
A glass wall, la pecera, at the Havana airport, her mother’s hands pressed flat against it from the other side; her father drawing a heart with his finger in the condensation. She was five years old. “Give Tia Rosa a hug from us, dulcita,” she remembered them saying. “We’ll see you soon.”
Her father was a lector in a Havana cigar factory where he read newspapers and novels to the cigar rollers, the torcedores, who sat at long tables with their hands moving constantly, manipulating the tobacco. The workers voted at the beginning of each week for the material they wanted him to share. He understood something few people articulate. What you read shapes what you become. Three hundred torcedores trusted him with that. He took his influence seriously.
Which is why, in 1961 as the Cuban Revolution closed in, he put his daughter on a flight to Miami.
