Chapter 13
ELENA
Mara is waiting up when I get home.
She’s sitting at the kitchen table with two mugs of tea already made, which means she has been tracking my commute and timed it, which means she has been thinking about this conversation since I texted her this morning to say the resignation did not go the way I planned.
She pushes one mug toward me when I sit down, wraps both hands around hers, and looks at me with the patience of someone who has already decided to let me get there on my own.
I take the mug.
I sit with it for a moment.
“He tore it in half,” I say.
Mara’s eyebrows go up slightly. “The letter.”
“He read it, set it down, picked it up, and tore it in half. Then he told me I’m the most capable person in his organization and that he has no interest in replacing me and that the answer is no.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that.”
She looks at her tea. “What did you say?”
“I pushed back. He ended the conversation.” I wrap my hands around the mug and feel the warmth of it and think about standing in his office this morning with the two halves of my letter sitting on his desk between us and his expression, not angry exactly, just completely and utterly immovable.
“He didn’t even ask me why. He just said no, and that was the end of it. ”
“Elena.”
“I know.”
“You have to tell him.”
“I know.”
“Not eventually. Not when you feel ready. Now. This week.” She looks at me directly. “You are pregnant with this man’s child, and he just refused your resignation, which means you cannot leave without telling him why, and the longer you wait, the worse this gets.”
“I am aware of the mathematics of my situation, Mara.”
“Then act like it.”
I look at my tea. The steam rises off it in a thin, pale column and disappears. “I don’t know how to tell him. I don’t know what happens after I tell him. I don’t know what kind of man he is when the thing in front of him is not a business problem he can solve by tearing something in half.”
“You’ve worked for him for two years.”
“I’ve worked for the version of him that exists inside that office. This is not an office problem.”
Mara is quiet for a moment. “Are you scared of him?”
I think about it honestly. “No. I’m scared of what telling him changes. I’m scared of what it doesn’t change.” I look up at her. “Either way, my life looks completely different on the other side of that conversation, and I’m not ready for that yet.”
“You don’t get to be ready, Elena. Ready is a luxury you don’t have right now.”
I know she’s right. I have known she’s right since the moment I sat on that park bench and watched her face when I told her.
“Give me a few days,” I say.
She looks at me for a long moment. “A few days,” she says. “That’s all I’m giving you.”
My father’s house in Queens on a Tuesday evening should feel the way it always feels, garlic and warmth and the low sound of the television from the front room.
It feels like all of those things when I come through the door, and it also feels like something else, something I notice before I can name it, a quietness underneath the familiar sounds that was not there the last time I visited.
Papa is in his chair by the window.
He looks up when I come in, and his face does the thing it always does, opening into something warm and immediate, and I cross the room and kiss his cheek and pull the footstool over and sit beside him the way I have sat since I was small enough to fit in the space between the chair and the wall.
He looks worse than last time.
Not dramatically. Not in a way that would alarm a stranger. But I am not a stranger, and I can see it in his shoulders, lower than usual, carrying something they are not used to carrying, and in the skin beneath his eyes.
The way his hands sit in his lap, still in a way my father’s hands are almost never still, because my father has always been a man who does things with his hands, who fixes things and builds things and finds something to occupy them in every room he sits in.
His hands are just sitting there.
“You came on a Tuesday,” he says. “You never come on a Tuesday.”
“I wanted to see you.”
“You saw me four days ago.”
“I wanted to see you again.”
He looks at me with the eyes he has always used to see through me, warm and steady and not missing anything. “You look tired, myshka.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look like your mother used to look when she was carrying something she didn’t want to put down.”
The comparison lands somewhere I am not prepared for it to land, and I look at my hands for a moment and breathe. “I’m fine, Papa. How are you feeling?”
He makes a short, nasal exhale that signals the question is being redirected. “I’m sitting in my chair. I’m watching my program. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Elena.”
“I’m your daughter. I’m allowed to say that.”
He looks at me for a moment and then he looks out the window at the street and the Tuesday evening doing its quiet thing outside, and I watch the side of his face and I think about two pink lines on a coffee shop bathroom floor and a torn resignation letter and a man who looked at me across an arrivals hall yesterday morning like he was trying to work something out.
“I had another appointment last week,” he says finally.
“I know. Carla told me.”
“She worries.”
“She’s not wrong to worry.”
He turns back to look at me. “It is what it is, myshka. These things take the time they take. I am not going anywhere.”
I reach out and put my hand over his, and he turns his hand over and holds mine the way he held it when I was seven years old, and the world was smaller, and the problems in it were things a father could fix by being present and steady and certain.
He cannot fix this one.
I cannot fix this one either, not yet, not without doing things I’m not ready to do, and the weight of that sits in my chest alongside everything else that has been sitting there for weeks, and I hold his hand and look at the window, and I let the room be quiet for a while.
We watch half of his program together.
I make him tea, and he tells me about the neighbor’s son who has started a new job and the woman three doors down who has been parking in front of his house again.
I listen and laugh in the right places, and by the time I stand up to leave, the light outside has shifted into the early dark of a November evening.
Carla appears from the kitchen as I put on my coat. She is holding a dish towel, and she has the look she always has when she has been waiting for the right moment, which, with Carla, is always the moment I’m about to leave.
“He’s not eating properly,” she says, low enough that it doesn’t carry to the front room. “He says he’s not hungry, and I can’t force him.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“You just sat with him for an hour, and you didn’t talk to him.”
“I’ll talk to him next time.”
She folds the dish towel. “The bills from last week’s appointment came today.
The insurance covered less than they estimated.
” She names a number, and I feel it the way I always feel the numbers she gives me, in the back of my throat, a tightening that does not go away when I swallow.
“I’ve been doing the math, Elena. Between what I bring in and what you send every month, we are managing.
But managing is not the same as fine, and your father’s situation is not improving, and managing is not going to be enough for very much longer. ”
I look at her. “I hear you.”
“Aleksei—”
“Carla.”
“He called again yesterday. He’s not going to keep calling forever, and when he stops calling, that door closes, and it does not open again.
” She looks at me with the flat practicality that has always been the most exhausting thing about her, the way she strips everything down to numbers and outcomes, removing every other consideration as if it were never there.
“I am not asking you to be happy about it. I am asking you to be realistic.”
I button my coat.
“Goodnight, Carla,” I say.
I walk down the front steps and to my car, and I sit in the driver’s seat, and I don’t start the engine for a long time.
The street is quiet. A dog barks somewhere a few houses down and then stops. A car passes with its radio on, something with a heavy bass that fades as it rounds the corner.
My father’s front window throws a rectangle of yellow light onto the small patch of front yard, and inside that light, I can see the edge of his chair and the side of his lamp and nothing else.
I start the car.
The apartment is quiet when I get back. Mara has left a plate of food on the counter with a note that says eat this and gone to bed, which is Mara’s version of I love you and also I know you won’t eat if I’m not here to watch you.
I eat the food standing at the counter, and I look at the kitchen wall, and I run the numbers the way I have been running them for weeks, moving the pieces around, looking for the configuration that produces a different answer.
My salary covers my rent, my share of the bills, and the amount I send to Queens every month, and not much else.
My father’s medical bills are already beyond what that covers, and they are going to keep coming, and Carla is not wrong about the math, even if I will never say that out loud to her face.
Aleksei is a door I will not walk through. That is not a position I am willing to negotiate on, regardless of the numbers. I know what that house would feel like from the inside. I spent eight months finding out, and I am not going back.
Which leaves me with a pregnancy I haven’t told the father about, a resignation he refused without asking why, and a conversation I have been putting off for days that is going to change everything the moment I have it.
I put the plate in the sink.
I go to my room, and I sit on the edge of my bed, and I look at my hands in my lap, and I think about my father’s hands sitting still in his chair and my mother’s hands hovering an inch from my elbows all those years ago, ready to catch, and I think about what Mara said.
Ready is a luxury you don’t have.
I lie back on the bed and look at the ceiling, and the apartment is quiet around me, and outside the window, the city carries on as it always does, not particularly interested in any of the things I am lying here trying to solve.
I close my eyes.
I have to tell him. Soon.