Epilogue 2
SEVASTIAN
My daughter falls asleep at her own party, mid-frosting, the way only the truly powerful can.
It’s full dark now. The streamers have given up.
The long table is down to crumbs, one heel of bread nobody will commit to.
The yard has rearranged itself around Kir’s fire pit, which burns clean and steady, a fire built by a man taught in the dark who wanted, for once, to build one for light.
Krista sleeps on my chest, fist closed around my shirt, cake in her hair, and I sit very still, the way I once sat still in rooms where stillness kept men alive. A better use for the skill.
Around the fire, my family runs itself without me.
Yelena holds court from a folding chair with a blanket over her knees, issuing rulings.
Roma and Tasha share one chair in defiance of the chair’s design.
Promise and my grandmother have become, over a year of summits, a two-woman government in exile that both households fear.
Lacey is teaching Joss a dance that has no music.
Stevie sits leaned against her husband, the paramedic, who came to this family by way of a sprained ankle in a dark bar and has never once asked an unnecessary question.
He catches my eye over the flames and salutes me with a marshmallow on a stick.
There is a night, in a closed bar on the wrong side of the Strip, that the four of us have never spoken of.
Not once, not at the wedding, not at their wedding, not tonight.
The marshmallow is as close as we come. I tip my glass an inch, the old shorthand.
He grins into the fire, and the secret stays where it lives, in the dark, with the music.
My grandmother levers up from her folding chair eventually, makes her rounds, ends at me.
She stands looking down at the two of us, her great-granddaughter’s cake-ruined hair, my shirt held hostage in a small fist, and she says nothing for a long moment, which from Yelena Volkonskaya is a speech with full honors.
“Your brother would have spoiled her rotten,” she says at last, in Russian.
“I’m going to spoil her rotten.”
“Yes.” She bends, with the sound of seventy years of doing it anyway, kisses the baby’s head, then mine, which she has not done in three decades.
“But you’ll be alive for it. That was always the difference between my boys, Seva.
Not the spoiling. The staying.” She straightens up, recovers her glass from where it was guarding her chair.
“Next year, two cakes. She’ll be old enough to want one she’s not allowed to ruin. ”
She issues this like a budget directive and goes to rejoin her government.
The marshmallows, for the record, come out perfect.
Golden, rotated, patient. Cynthia eats three and declares the desert officially forgiven.
Crystal’s bag sits open by the fire where anyone can reach it, because she’s at this party too, in the way she’s at everything now, a name on a small girl, a photo in a frame her own hands chose, a bag of marshmallows nobody had to be told to bring.
Later, with the guests gone quiet and the fire banked, I do what I do. I walk the property once, check the gate out of habit rather than need, and end up in the garage with the work light on.
I don’t wax anything tonight. I sit on the stool, my daughter still asleep against my shoulder because handing her to anyone else felt like a poor trade, and I look down the long black row of everything I used to need.
The armored one. The hearses. The mistake I keep, which now has a child’s seat anchor bolted into it, installed by my wife while I was in the city, with tools I have decided not to ask how she obtained.
I talk to my brother while I sit there. I do it most nights now, quietly, nothing anyone would call a conversation.
Mostly inventory. The casino’s clean numbers.
The men’s marriages. The way his niece grabbed a soldier’s finger today and the soldier, a man I have seen do unspeakable work, said thank you.
Kostya always liked hearing what we had.
I tell him what we have. It takes longer every year, the telling, because there’s more.
I’m most of the way through the week’s report when the door off the breezeway opens. Bare feet cross the concrete, and my wife leans into the pool of work light with her arms folded, looking from me to the baby to the untouched tin of wax.
“You walk loud for a mother,” I say.
“Your house repeats everything.” She comes and stands at my knee, brushes cake out of our daughter’s hair with two fingers, gentle as theft. “Still doing your own detailing?”
“The staff doesn’t touch the cars.”
“The staff,” she says, “married you anyway.”
She takes the stool beside mine, the one that’s hers, that has been hers since two in the morning a war ago.
For a while we sit in the light with the small weight breathing between us and say nothing at all.
There’s no version of my old life that has a chair for this.
I built rooms for money, for weapons, for men who needed to fear me.
The best room I own turned out to be a garage with two stools and bad light.
Nobody sold it to me. It walked in looking for water.
I named my casino Dust to Dust as a joke about myself. The kind of joke a man makes when he believes the punchline. Everything I touched was supposed to end up in the ground, that was the whole comedy, the empire as one long funeral I was throwing myself in advance.
The joke didn’t survive her. Few things do.
Dust to dust, fine. The desert will take all of it back eventually, the casino, the cars, the walls, me.
Let it. The desert has always been honest about the terms. But tonight there’s a child asleep on my chest who has my brother’s easy laugh already, a wife stealing the wax cloth off my bench right now purely to make me watch her do it, a fire in my yard built for nothing but light.
The dust can have what’s left when we’re done with it.
We’re not done with it.