her Planet Hollywood coffee mug—looked back at me over her shoulder. “You’re not really having dinner at his house?” she said. “The little Russki or whatever?”
“Nah. We’ll just be here watching television.”
“Do you want me to bring you something?”
“Boris likes those cocktail sausages you bring home. And I like the wings. The hot ones.”
“Anything else? What about those mini taquito things? You like those too, don’t you?”
“That would be great.”
“Fine. I’ll hook you guys up. Just stay out of my cigarettes, that’s all I ask. I don’t care if you smoke,” she said, raising a hand to hush me, “it’s not like I’m busting you, but somebody’s been stealing packs out of the carton in here and it’s costing me like twenty-five bucks a week.”
xix.
EVER SINCE BORIS HAD shown up with the bruised eye, I had built Boris’s father up in my mind to be some thick-necked Soviet with pig eyes and a buzz haircut. In fact—as I was surprised to see, when I did finally meet him—he was as thin and pale as a starved poet. Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea. But when you looked him in the eye you realized that his frailty was deceptive. He was wiry, intense, bad temper shimmering off him—small-boned and sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox.
Though I’d glimpsed him in passing, and heard him (or a person I presumed was him) bumping around Boris’s house at night, I didn’t actually meet him face-to-face until a few days before Thanksgiving. Then we walked into Boris’s house one day after school, laughing and talking, to find him hunched at the kitchen table with a bottle and a glass. Despite his shabby clothes, he was wearing expensive shoes and lots of gold jewelry; and when he looked up at us with reddened eyes we shut up talking immediately. Though he was a small, slightly built man, there was something in his face that made you not want to get too close to him.
“Hi,” I said tentatively.
“Hello,” he said—stony-faced, in a much thicker accent than Boris—and then turned to Boris and said something in Ukrainian. A brief conversation followed, which I observed with interest. It was interesting to see the change that came over Boris when he was speaking another language—a sort of livening, or alertness, a sense of a different and more efficient person occupying his body.
Then—unexpectedly—Mr. Pavlikovsky held out both hands to me. “Thank you,” he said thickly.
Though I was afraid to approach him—it felt like approaching a wild animal—I stepped forward anyway and held out both my hands, awkwardly. He took them in his own, which were hard-skinned and cold.
“You are good person,” he said. His gaze was bloodshot and way too intense. I wanted to look away, and was ashamed of myself.
“God be with you and bless you always,” he said. “You are like a son to me. For letting my son come into your family.”
My family? In confusion, I glanced over at Boris.
Mr. Pavlikovsky’s eyes went to him. “You told him what I said?”
“He said you are part of our family here,” said Boris, in a bored voice, “and if there is anything ever he can do for you…”
To my great surprise, Mr. Pavlikovsky pulled me close and caught me in a solid embrace, while I closed my eyes and tried hard to ignore his smell: hair cream, body odor, alcohol, and some sort of sharp, disagreeably pungent cologne.
“What was that about?” I said quietly when we were up in Boris’s room with the door shut.
Boris rolled his eyes. “Believe me. You don’t want to know.”
“Is he that loaded all the time? How does he keep his job?”
Boris cackled. “High official in the company,” he said. “Or something.”
We stayed up in Boris’s murky, batik-draped room until we heard his dad’s truck start up in the driveway. “He won’t be back for a while,” Boris said, as I let the curtain fall back over the window. “He feels bad for leaving me so much alone. He knows is a holiday coming up, and he asked if I could stay at your house.”
“Well, you do all the time anyway.”
“He knows that,” said Boris, scraping the hair out of his eyes. “That’s why he thanked you. But—I hope you don’t mind—I gave him your wrong address.”
“Why?”
“Because—” he moved his legs to make