Page 63 of My Wedding Night Massacre

I watch him accept this. He pours himself coffee, wraps both hands around the mug, and watches Denis eat. He doesn’t even blink, determined to commit this moment to memory. He doesn’t try to speak to him, doesn’t reach toward him, doesn’t do any of the things adults do when they’re trying to win a child over. He just sits there and lets Denis ignore him, which is either instinct or wisdom, but either way it’s the right call.

“Were the eggs good?” he asks me.

“They were good.”

He nods, satisfied. Then, after a pause, “Do real bears have hats?”

“Not usually.”

He considers this. “But maybe?”

“Bears can surprise you.”

Another pause, longer, while he looks at the window. “Does it open?”

“Yes.”

“Can we open it?”

“Not right now.”

He accepts this with the equanimity of someone who has learned to pick his battles, and goes back to his crackers.

Slava, beside him, says nothing. He’s watching Denis’s face while Denis talks to me, and a corner of his expression has come undone. Not soft exactly. Just open, in a way I’ve never seen it.

I look away before he catches me looking.

Denis slides off his chair, crosses the kitchen, and reaches Slava’s chair. He looks up at it, looks up at Slava, and begins to climb.

No strategy, just upward, one foot finding Slava’s knee, the other his thigh. Slava’s hands come up on either side of him, hovering, not grabbing. Uncertain in a way I’ve never seen his hands be.

Denis crests the top and installs himself in Slava’s lap with the satisfaction of a kid who has completed a difficult project. He sits there for a moment, seemingly reviewing the new vantage point. Then he reaches out and picks up Slava’s left hand.

He turns it over. Examines the back of it, then the palm. Then he finds the watch on Slava’s wrist, and his attention narrows completely. He pushes the sleeve up slightly to see its full face, tilts it toward the light, and watches the seconds hand move.

Slava’s other hand has settled on Denis’s back. I watched it happen, the hovering and then the landing, that extraordinary care, both palms spread wide across the small back. Denis doesn’t look up. He’s fully absorbed by the watch. Slava looks down at the top of his son’s head, at the dark blond hair that is so completely, so irreversibly his own, and I see him breathe in slowly then hold it for a moment before he lets it out.

I look at my coffee cup, then at the window and the city outside. At Nadia, standing at the counter with her back to the room, her shoulders very still, giving us the privacy of pretending she isn’t here.

Then I look back because I can’t help but look back.

Slava is watching Denis examine his watch. Denis is doing this with the seriousness of a jeweler, turning Slava’s wrist this way and that, pressing one small finger against the crystal face.

“It ticks,” Denis says.

“It does,” Slava says.

Denis considers this information, eyes still on the watch. “Why?”

“So I know what time it is.”

Another pause, the second hand moving. “What time is it?”

Slava looks at the face Denis is still holding. “Eight forty-two.”

Denis looks up at me. “Mama. Eight forty-two.”

“I heard,” I say.