24

When her son stepped off the bus, nothing remained of the boy who left seven months before. He smelled good but looked hungry, and she didn’t fuss, not even when she felt his bones in her embrace.

After kissing his head, she shifted her eyes to the men in suits.

The police had gotten their pound of flesh, but they wanted to know how it got into her son’s car. Her boy carried himself like a man, shaking their hands and agreeing to an interview without her present. She insisted it wait, and he took one of their cards and set an appointment for the following morning.

“What’s this?” she asked of the wooden case in his hand.

“It’s a nineteen eighty-five Tomas Pilar,” he said, eyes bright.

She gave both her large breasts a shove upward.

“I don’t know what the hell that is, Andrej,”

His gentle laugh almost brought her to tears.

They lunched at the casino buffet, as they had every Sunday before he left home. She listened as he talked about his time away between ravenous bites of his favorite things. He’d been a violinist for the summer before waiting tables at The Russian Tea Room. It sounded exciting, yet she couldn’t hold her tongue on the drive back to Brigantine.

“Andrej,” she said at the last red light. “You don’t have to tell me what happened, but never disappear like that again,”

His hand found hers on the steering wheel.

“I’m sorry, mamka.”

♪

She parked underneath their beach house.

Painted coral blue, the slender three-story went unchanged in his absence, and all that remained of the Volkswagen Rabbit was a light oil stain between the stilts that kept their house off the sand. Ocean waves applauded his climb up the stairs, their foamy crests filling the air with salt.

Andrew retreated to his bedroom while mamka started a pot of coffee.

Tell-tale brush marks revealed the carpet freshly swept, and covering his bed was a laundered quilt heavy with fabric softener. A bare patch on the wall over his headboard brought back bad memories—he’d left the blanket that hung there in the Rabbit.

Andrew emptied the first duffle bag onto the floor and found that his last seven months needed a good wash. The other duffle sat beside it. Curious to see what Sash left behind, he set upon it like a child at Christmas.

On top was a white-on-red parachute cloth that turned out to be Poland’s flag. Grinning, he shook out the folds, stepped onto his bed, and tacked it to the bare spot with some push pins.

The bag also gave up the console and some games, and beneath those stolen silk sheets were four neat rows of belted cash. Each bank-fresh bundle stunk faintly of gunmetal, and Andrew hastily rezipped the bag when mamka entered with a mug of mocha-scented coffee.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked of the flag.

“A friend,” he said, taking the warm mug.

“A Polish friend?” she pursed her lips. “You date this friend?”

“I dated the Ukrainian,” he sassed. “I balled the Pollack,”

“Oh,” she said, nonplussed. “Taller than you, I bet.”

“Which one?” he wondered.

“Both,” she replied, arm draped around him. “You never got my height.”

Andrew cuddled into her chunky breast.

That night, he slept without dreaming.

Days became weeks, and weeks turned into months.

The school refunded him, and Andrew spent the money on a new case for the Pilar. That duffel cash tempted him, much like Samil used to on dull days.

Finally, he gave in and kept a ledger on what he would repay. His first take went to local contractors, paying them to transform the attic into a livable space. His new bed would sit on the loft under their colossal round window, the one mamka called their Millennium Falcon.

Sheets of pink insulation went in next, hidden by drywall that Andrew covered with a fresh coat of muted gold. A new bathroom, with a clawfoot tub, shared honeycomb tiles with a kitchenette that mamka found unnecessary since her kitchen worked just fine.

Andrew’s final purchase was a hide-a-bed couch for the living room, found at a charity store downtown. The thin-cushioned nightmare looked good in front of that 36-inch TV that mamka bought him for Christmas.

His renovations complete, Andrew began a separate but shared life with his mamka. He scored a bartender job at the casino where she worked; he didn’t want her to discover that dirty money financed the remodel.

After a year of pretending to pay down his imaginary credit card debt, he submitted his two-week notice.

Tonight was his last complete shift, and like the other three nights before, it tested his short-timer syndrome. Off-season weeknights at a casino moved slower than growing hair, but around eight, a family reunion floated in from the gambling floor. Not genuine casino people, they rarely tipped, and the women among them regarded the cocktail waitress and her skimpy uniform with a critical tenacity.

The twenty-eight-year-old waitress du jour, Jesse, somehow squeezed her thin frame into a thinner costume, which found her behind the bar every ten minutes, adjusting her ample portions.

A smirk animated her cocoa visage. “Here comes my gangsta’s,”

Her manly group lingered in from the poker tables, their dapper suits in line with their boss, a braided man who dressed like he owned the casino. They were Jesse’s shade of comfort, and they drank often and tipped well.

“Oh shit, that white man is with them,” she whispered.

Andrew turned to look, but she grabbed his arm.

“Don’t stare,” she warned. “He’s only got one eye,”

Andrew grinned when the man called out from the end of the bar.

“Hey, get your boney ass down here and give me a drink,”

“I know he ain’t talking to me,” she snapped.

Andrew grabbed a bottle of Absolut. “No, he’s talking to me,”

“You know him?” she asked.

“Kinda,” said Andrew. “Go work your tables,”

Sash stood there with an unlit cigar between his fingers. After unbuttoning his hunter-green suit jacket, he slid onto the stool and set his lone blue eye upon Andrew with affection. Thoughts of their first real night together at a local motel last New Year’s Eve made Andrew’s ass throb like a day-old bee sting.

“Are you chasing this trash with ginger ale?” he asked, dropping a cube into a double-shot glass before drowning it in vodka.

Sash nodded and set a hundred-dollar bill on the bar.

Andrew broke it at the register, taking enough for two drinks; that’s all Sash would have, judging by the gun holster peeking from his jacket.

Sash downed the shot and stared at his change.

“You could’ve taken more, Andrej,”

“I don’t need it,” he said, wiping the bar. “Speaking of unneeded things, when are you coming to get your bag?”

“I already removed my share.” Sash sat back, his muscled chest outlined in a tight tan turtleneck. “How have you been, Andrej?”

“Better than Niko,” said Andrew, lowering his voice. “They found him four miles out,”

Sash slid the empty glass at him, tapping two fingers on the bar.

“He had some strange ideas about where his money went,”

Andrew refilled the glass. “Was he coming after me?”

“How have you been, Andrej?”

Sash clearly didn’t wish to discuss Nikola.

“I’m teaching classical to students,” he told him, filling the glass with ginger ale from the soda gun. “My mother charges me ten dollars a month for rent.”

“That’s a good rate for your neighborhood,”

“It’s a steal in this market for sure,”

“You are many things, Andrej, none of them a thief,”

Andrew changed the subject.

“I’m opening a musical instrument shop,”

“Good,” said Sash. “I bought a new violin,”

“My shop has a playing room,”

“You want me to play for you, Andrej?”

“We can play together,”

Sash nodded. “It’s good you found a use for that money,”

“Oh no,” Andrew shook his head. “I got a loan from the bank. Just enough to cover the strip mall rent and buy some second-hand instruments,”

Sash knocked back his second shot and turned the glass over on the bar.

“All of it is yours, Andrej,” he said, a mirthful eye upon him.

“I took out twelve thousand and paid most of it back,” said Andrew.

“This vodka is shit.” Sash pinched the bridge of his nose before sipping his ginger ale. “Does your mamka drink this shit?”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,” he said, head swinging.

Sash collected his unlit cigar from the bar.

“I get off at midnight.” Andrew held up a lighter, flipping the top to produce a flame. “If you’re still around, we can see what she has in the freezer.”

Sash brought the cigar to the flame.

“I saw that you had a visitor last month.”

“Are you stalking me, Sascha Stasiak?”

Smooth hairless cheeks hallowed as his mouth worked the log, turning its end a fiery red. “I saw the pair of you on the boardwalk.” Sash was a regular fixture along the Margate stretch, running every day, rain or shine, garnishing the attention of the older Jewish women who weathered the chill on their benches to watch him pass.

“My visitor,” he assured. “Went back to California last week,”

“No, Andrej,” Sash murmured. “He’s how Niko found you.”

A knot tightened in Andrew’s stomach.

“Please tell me Dmitri is okay,”

“Of course.” Sash regarded him casually. “I’m not an animal.”

Andrew poured himself a shot and downed it.

“He’s gone back to Williamsburg,” Sash added. “He’s better off.”

“What about me?” Andrew wondered. “Am I better off?”

“No,” Sash said thoughtfully. “You’re in love with a criminal,”

“Get over yourself, Glass-Eye.”

Andrew lost himself in Sash’s smile.

After a time, he watched the man silently put his suit jacket back on—he would be back when there were fewer eyes. Watching him depart, the strings of Sonata 9 began playing in his head, a melody that tickled his soul with each draw of the bow.