Chapter Four Milo
Four
Milo
I’d need days to process whatever happened back at the gas station with Mrs. Welch and her daughter, but I only had about two minutes before Nadia and I pulled into Nik’s driveway.
We’re greeted by haphazardly discarded children’s bikes strewn all over the long, winding entry, flattened soccer balls, broken kites, and every other type of outdoor toy Sef and Nik have given their seventy-two children to, seemingly, destroy.
Okay; they have only five kids. But five is a lot of fucking kids for a thirty-year-old to have. Or anyone, for that matter.
Nadia throws her sunglasses onto the dash. Then she begins rolling her window down to greet her public as we round the corner toward a two-story traditional brick home with a family of seven on the porch awaiting our arrival.
Scratch that, there’s eight of them up there. Nik’s best friend, business partner, and our pseudo-sibling since elementary school, Aleks, is on the porch too, holding one of my nieces up so she can see over the railing.
I honk the horn three times in a row and Nadia matches every one with a curse word. “ Fuck, shit, fuck. ” Each word is followed by a uniquely panicked expression, sinking farther into her seat as if she wants to disappear inside of the pleather fabric.
“What’s wrong?” I laugh, pulling around the side of the house.
She nearly rips Bertha’s overhead visor off when she slides the small rectangular mirror open.
“I didn’t…I wasn’t—” She rubs her finger under her bottom lash line, attempting to wipe a trace of black makeup clean.
“Fuuuck.” She wets her finger with her tongue before pressing it to her eye’s inner crease.
“Oh,” I say, looking toward the porch where Aleks fixes his hair nervously. “When was the last time you saw him?” I ask, trying to mask my obvious curiosity under false indifference.
“When’s the last time someone punched you in the teeth?” Nadia turns toward me, blinking so innocently in contrast to her seething words that it makes my skin crawl.
“So this is why you wanted cigarettes, then? Boy drama?”
“Shut up, Milo,” she says, slamming the visor closed. “Leave it alone.”
“It’s Aleks….” I look past her, putting the car into park. “He saw you after you cut yourself pageboy bangs in the eighth grade, it cannot get worse than that.”
She stares into the depths of my soul through widened eyes. “Seriously, drop it.”
“Do you think he still doesn’t know how to ride a bike?”
“Fuck off,” she fires back, fighting with the lever to wind the window up.
“Maybe you could teach him…. That’d be romantic.”
“Lick rust.”
“Fine, fine, whatever! Best of luck!” I hop out of the car, then run around a garden bed toward the porch steps. “Hi, hello!” I am tackled, immediately, by three gremlins and their little sibling who, once I’m down on the ground, wipes a wet palm across my face and dries it in my hair.
Nik and Sef had their first kid, Levi, at twenty. She’s great, as far as ten-year-olds go. She messages me from her iPad every once in a while. Usually, she sends funny cat videos, selfies with increasingly strange filters on them, or unprompted updates about her hamster.
After Levi came Max, who’s now eight, Wyatt, who’s six, Perry, who’s just shy of four, and baby Quinn, who is…I don’t know. Less than two but more than one. I love my brother, Sef, and all of their many, many spawn but I simply cannot be expected to keep track of this many ages, let alone months.
“Let him breathe!” Nik calls out in his booming, deep I-am-your-father voice that he’s been perfecting since Nadia was still in diapers.
“Help!” I pretend to struggle, making them all giggle over me. “Help me, brother!”
“Auntie Bunny!” Perry shouts, using my spleen as a launching pad as she and all her siblings ditch me for the youngest, more beloved Kablukov sibling. I wonder why Nadia bothered fixing her hair as I watch her get tackled to the ground as well.
“Hi,” Nik says, standing over me in his blue flannel shirt and dark jeans. I admire his work boots, the same pair he’s had for over a decade now, and take his offered hand to help me stand.
“Hi, man.” I throw my arms around his shoulders and we both pat each other’s backs twice before going in for a real hug. “Missed you,” I tell him, holding him close.
“You too,” he whispers gruffly. “Thank you for coming.”
We step apart, his hand still on my shoulder, as Sef makes her way down the porch steps, smiling knowingly as she holds their youngest. She’s wearing a yellow crocheted top that doesn’t cover even half of her protruding, pregnant belly and a floor-length brown skirt.
A laugh escapes me, and I grab hold of Nik’s arm to steady myself. “Surely not…” I whisper to him.
Nik’s pride is unquestionable as he watches his wife approach. “Yeah…”
“Please tell me I’m not the world’s largest asshole. Did I know Sef was knocked up again?”
“He thought you wouldn’t come if he told you,” Sef says, going on the tips of her toes to hug me tightly. “Hi, Mi. Missed you.”
“Hi, Seffy.” Sef, or Sefina, is one of the purest souls I’ve ever met.
She’s a walking, talking daily affirmation card.
An avid astrologist with a penchant for making people give her the exact time and location of their birth ten seconds into meeting them.
A total sweetheart. The yin to my grumpy older brother’s yang.
And, apparently, extremely fertile to boot.
“Congratulations.” I tighten one arm around her, kissing her cheek as I reach toward my brother and pull him in too for a kiss on the side of his head that he immediately wipes off.
“Now, real question for you both, have you two ever been told about this new, life-changing device called condoms?” I whisper, earning me a shoulder shove.
“Alternatively, there’s this new craze called the pull-out method. ”
“You mean how Wyatt and Perry came to be?” Sef smiles widely. “Yeah, not your brother’s best skill.”
“Hey!” Nik laughs jaggedly.
“He’s getting a vasectomy,” Sef says, patting my brother’s cheek with a wink. “Aren’t you, handsome?”
Nik grumbles but kisses his wife’s wrist before she disappears to greet Nadia excitedly.
“So this is why you called in your one-one-nine?” I ask. “You didn’t have”—I look around at the many, many bodies in their front lawn, and the one lurking on the porch watching my younger sister intently—“enough adults?”
One of my brother’s dimples deepens, as his smile twists unevenly. “Something like that.”
“How, uh, how pregnant is she?”
“The baby will arrive sometime in the next month or so.”
“Shit. Has it really been—”
“We haven’t spoken on the phone since January.
” Nik levels me with a look that is far more paternal than I’d like.
Disappointment and regret with a little bit of I-told-you-so flare.
“We tried to call,” he says. And here I thought I was being an excellent brother by remembering to call on his birthday this year. Just not since.
I nod, looking at the dirt path under our feet as we walk toward the van, silently agreeing to fetch my and Nadia’s bags.
“I talk to Levi,” I say, an unquestionable defensiveness seeping into my tone. “I always respond when she messages.”
“I know. Thank you.” Nik nods, hitting the back of Bertha just right so when he twists the handle, she opens willingly for him. She’s always liked Nik more than me. “We ask her or Nads for signs of life when we get worried.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I say, hopping into the back of the van. I slide Nadia’s heavy-ass bags toward him, and he picks them both up without so much as a flinch. Once a farmhand, always a farmhand, I guess. “I’d tell you if there ever was,” I say, jumping out.
Nik nods, drawing a line in the dirt between us with the steel toe of his boot.
I tilt my head to the side, pushing my hair back, and spot a far more interesting subject of conversation. “What’s the story there?” I ask, jutting my chin toward Nadia and Aleks on the porch steps, standing at an awkward distance apart as they both nod a little too eagerly at every other word.
“There definitely is one…but he won’t tell me shit.”
Aleks, who was known to our family as “the weird neighbor kid” until he was simply one of us, developed into quite the looker. Not my type—I’ve learned my lesson not to mess around with my brother’s friends—but possibly Nads’s type, based on her softened gaze. “What does Sef know?” I ask.
“Everything, as per usual, but she won’t tell me either—you know what her and Nadia are like.
I just know that there’s unfinished business, for sure.
I get the feeling that they spent a lot of time together after we’d left home.
” He clicks his tongue, watching alongside me as Aleks attempts to lean onto a porch banister, nearly falls over the railing when his hand misses, then attempts a smooth recovery.
“Hard to believe anything could have happened. Nads would tear him in two…” Nik whispers.
I laugh, closing Bertha’s door. “I don’t know, maybe not. She was nervous when we spotted him on the drive up. Maybe we’ve finally found her one weakness.”
“Huh…” Nik says, pouting his lips in disbelief. “Well, wouldn’t that be something.”
A banshee screams and I flinch, turning to watch my niece dramatically collapse to the ground as her older brother holds a toy over her head.
“Wyatt!” Nik booms, then shakes his head menacingly when Wyatt looks over. He slowly lowers the toy to the ground in front of Perry and smiles sweetly at his dad, knowing he’s been caught.
“Wow. Do you ever make them do tricks?” I ask. “Sit, spin, play dead?”
My brother sighs, hoisting the bags back up on his shoulder as he keeps his face pointed to the ground. “It’s good to have you here, man.” Nik walks ahead, toward the house, then turns to walk backward as he smiles, looking me up and down. “I was tired of being the dumbest person in the house.”