Page 60 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“Then the rest of it, and this part isn’t a negotiation, it’s a fence. I teach first grade at a public school in Brooklyn. I go back Monday, and I’ll be there until they carry me out at sixty-five with a laminator under one arm. That building is not part of this. Not now, not in ten years, not when one of you gets into trouble and remembers I’m easy to find. No soldier in my parking lot, no favor called in at my flagpole, nobody’s nephew on the front desk. Danil comes Thursdays and cuts felt with six-year-olds, and that’s the entire Bratva presence permitted within four blocks of my school. Touch my kids to get at my husband, and I’ll take everything he builds and hand it to whichever one of you is willing to bury him with it.”

“And when the business wants your face?” says the heavy one with ink to the jaw.

“Then somebody calls me and asks, like an adult, and I’ll say yes, or I’ll say no. Half the time it’ll be no, because I’ve got parent conferences and those matter more than you do. I’ve spent my whole life being moved around a table by men who didn’t ask first. The last one to try it married me, and you’ve all seen how that’s going for him.”

Yefim laughs until he has to put both hands on his knees.

“So we’ve got a pakhan in Manhattan and a queen doing bus duty in Brooklyn,” the heavy one says, and the room comes apart. My husband, gray in the face and pinned under a blanket, lets one millimeter of his mouth move for me alone.

When it’s done, I hold Yefim’s cane out across my own coffee table, brass first. The old man puts his hand over mine and pushes the whole thing back into my lap.

“Ona tvoya (It’s yours),” he says. “ Fifty years it sat in my kitchen waiting to be useful to a Filatov again.”

Danil gives me the update on my father the following Friday, standing in my kitchen, refusing the stool.

“He landed. He’s alive, he’s working, there’s no address.”

“West?”

“West.”

“Don’t give me the city.” I finish making two coffees and slide his across the marble. “Did he send anything?”

“He said to tell you he’s sorry.”

“He’s been sorry my whole life. Sorry’s the only currency he’s ever had, and it doesn’t spend anywhere.” Danil drinks his coffee and never puts my father in a sentence again.

Monday the classroom takes me back like I’ve been out with a cold. Kevin still can’t spell Wednesday, Sir Nibbles has done something to his wheel that three separate children describe to me as an emergency, and Poppy pays out a month of bus duty without one complaint, which unsettles me more than a room full of gray suits ever did.

I put the second coat on the rims on a Sunday, out on the terrace with the city going gold behind me, one hand steadying the frame, the brush in the other, sunflower-yellow laying on thick over the raw metal. Lev sits three feet off, under the blanket he still hates, and doesn’t offer to help once. He doesn’t say a word about not offering, either, and I know exactly what it takes out of a man like him to sit there with his hands empty.

Tonight the elevator lets me off at seven with gold in the creases of both knuckles and paste in my hair. He’s down at the far glass with his back to me, favoring the right side, still barred from lifting anything heavier than a plate.

I set the brakes and get Yefim’s brass under my right hand. I stand up out of my chair and leave it where my hand knows to find it.

Fourteen steps run from the elevator to him. I’ve counted them off the chair every night this week.

One and two are the worst, they’re always the worst. Three pulls the wire hot out of the fused place at the base of my spine, and I breathe into it instead of away. Four is the traitor leg coming through late, but it comes through. Five, six, seven, and the pain climbs into my ribs and settles in, which is the rent, and I’ve never once minded paying it.

He turns at three, and after that he doesn’t move at all. Some evenings this is the chair the whole distance, and he’s fine with those evenings; he’s told me so, too, but tonight it isn’t the chair. He stands at that glass with his hands down at his sides like a man ordered not to touch anything in the room.

Nine. Ten, and my shoulders are shaking, my palm’s gone white on the brass. Eleven is where I’d normally sit down.

I don’t sit down. Twelve and thirteen, and I’m close enough to see his throat working.

At fourteen, I put my free hand flat on his chest, over the pocket where he kept a photograph of me. He takes my wrist and holds it there.

There’s a sound coming off him that has never belonged to him. It’s small, and it’s under everything, and it doesn’t stop.

I turn his wrist over. The steel is warm off his skin, the crystal is new, and both hands are going, the small one just past seven with the second hand sweeping around over it.

“When?”

“Tuesday. The man said it wanted a spring and a cleaning, nothing else.” His thumb moves once across the inside of my wrist. “Nineteen years for a spring.”

I get my ear down against his shirt, over the ribs still knitting, and I hold his wrist up beside my head so I can listen to both of them going at once.

Epilogue