“Just let me get my shoes.”
We’re sittingin a booth of this diner, a cup of coffee in front of Viktor and a hamburger and fries in front of me. I take a bite of the salty stick of potato and smile, savoring the manufactured taste of it.
“I really missed American food,” I say to him.
He perks up a little. He’s been quiet and distracted the whole way over here. Now, he’s glancing around us at the other tables, his eyes watching the movements of the waitresses as they go from table to table.
“Ever been to Europe?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “Once when I was younger. Maybe twenty-five, thirty years ago.”
I blink dumbly for just a second and feel my face flush. I forget how much older he is than I am.
“I was deported back to Russia,” he says, sipping from his coffee cup. “Got into some trouble with the law. I forget what the charge was, exactly. Stealing, probably.”
I’m just staring at him. All these years I’ve known him and I never knew he was an immigrant. “You weren’t born here?”
He shakes his head. “The short version of my origin story is that my parents came here when I was five, and maybe six years later, they both died in a car accident. So, I had to fend for myself… and I did. One day, I got caught and got deported back to Russia.”
I frown as I do the math in my head. “You were just a kid. Eleven, right? And they still deported you?”
“I was a criminal,Tanechka. The courts didn’t care how old I was.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, well, it was fate. If I hadn’t been deported, I wouldn’t have met your father. He was overseas around the same time I was. He happened to see me stealing rolls off the plates ofa restaurant one evening. Unfortunately, so did thePolitsya.” He smirks at me, his eyes twinkling playfully. “You know what the crime was thirty years ago for a young boy caught for petty theft?”
“Jail?”
“Bingo. This was maybe a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, so there were still some laws that needed to be changed. Now, if you’re caught for petty theft, you’ll probably pay a fine or something like that. Back then, though, you would not be so lucky. And trust me,Tanechka, you do not want to do time in Russia.”
He finishes his coffee and pushes the cup to the outer corner for the waitress to refill. “Anyway, Nikolai pretended to be my father. He told the cop that I was mentally disabled to get me out of that jam. Once that was settled… for some reason that I’ll never know, he took me in.”
I’m speechless. How is it that I never knew this story? My father basically raised Viktor and I was never told about it. “Did Nicki know all this?”
“If he did, he didn’t hear it from me,” he says. “All this happened shortly before he was born. Your mother was still pregnant with him when they took me in.”
I blink with wonder. “You knew my mother.”
He nodded.
My stomach is doing flips. He’s been a part of the Bratva since before I was born. Of course he knew her… but I didn’t know that she cared for him.
“By the time Nicki was in the world, I was well on my way to becoming Bratva. When I was eighteen and on my own, I was committed to the role asbyki, even though I think Nikolai thought I’d be better suited for a higher rank. When Nikolai asked me to mentor his son a few years later, I almost said no. He convinced me that it could only be me, as I was like a big brother to him anyway. Or that’s how he saw it.” He pauses, his eyes drifting back around him again, as if checking the exits. “I never told Nicki. I thought that it wouldn’t be right if he knew that for all intents and purposes, I served as a surrogate son before him.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say as I poke my fry into the pool of ketchup on my plate. “I think he might’ve liked to know that you were more brothers than he thought.”
He smiles slightly at that. “Thank you for saying that.”
The waitress comes by and refills his cup of coffee, then asks me how everything is. I tell her it’s fine, but in my head, I’m already planning my next questions.
She leaves and I say, “So, I have kind of a confession to make.”
“I’m listening.”
I take a breath. “I know that my father gave you a job today. I overheard you.”
His smile fades and he takes a sip from his cup, but he doesn’t say anything.
