“Yeah, I get you.” I gave him another peck on the mouth. “Okay, let’s do this.”
I pressed the offer against the wall and signed my name.
Steven took the paperwork and said to Sasha, “Sir, you have an accepted offer. Congratulations on purchasing your first home. It’s beautiful.” Then he turned to hug me. “You have an amazing man here. Pay Diamond off and don’t go near him again.”
“I won’t. Promise.”
“I’ll see you both at the bank at eight Friday morning to close.”
When Steven left, I drew Sasha into an embrace and squeezed. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“We’re never going to own enough furniture to fill this house up.”
I laughed. “No, not for a while.”
“And, Nick. One more thing.”
“Yeah?”
Worry lines cut between his brows. “So I sold Zayde’s house for three hundred and twenty thousand dollars. I’m going to have to settle the taxes, but I had an idea for the rest.”
“You got three twenty and still gave me a low-ball offer?” I joked. “That’s awesome. You deserve the cash. Think you might want to go back to school?”
“Nah. I never really wanted to be a music teacher. I like playing music, and I can do that without a degree.” He studied his shoes. “What I was thinking was maybe—only if you want to—I could go into business with you. Flipping houses.” He glanced up and met my eyes. “I know I don’t know anything, but I want to learn. I have it on good authority that you’re an awesome teacher. And I could help you too. I can read the homes. Control the emotions. Look for hidden defects and such. What do you think?”
I was speechless. I’d never had a partner before, never wanted one, but Sasha and I worked great together. And his unique gifts brought something completely new to the table.
He ran his hands down his beard. “You hate the idea, don’t you? It’s okay. I won’t feel bad if—”
I squeezed his shoulders. “I love it. I love the idea of working with you. Of being partners. In every sense. Let’s do this.”
The next days flew by in a whirlwind of paper signing and legal jargon, all organized for me by Steven, who had a talent of explaining the steps for real estate transactions in a way I could almost understand. I’d made some big decisions in a short period of time, which was unusual and very scary for me, but regret hadn’t set in, and with each day that passed, it seemed more likely that it never would.
“Frank’ll see you now,” said the bored woman, the gatekeeper to Frank Diamond’s office.
I squeezed Nick’s hand. “You ready?”
“More than ready.”
The woman led us back to the smoky office. It wasn’t any better the second time around, but I knew enough to avert my gaze to ignore the phantom blood stains.
Frank sat in his leather chair with his hands steepled in front of him and a gimlet stare fixed on Nick.
“You got one day left Cooper. If it’s a time extension you’re looking for, you might as well turn right back around.”
“Don’t need more time.” Nick slapped a cashier’s check on the desk. “Paid in full.”
Frank’s brows raised. He picked up the check and examined it intently, inspecting every decimal point with his thick glasses. Apparently satisfied, he drew out his smartphone and snapped a picture to upload the check to his bank account. For a guy who still kept hand-written ledgers, this bit of technical savvy surprised me.
“You impress me, Nicky. I had my doubts that you’d make good on your end.”
“Like you, I’m a man of my word.”
That was laying it on a little thick, but maybe Nick was not-so-subtly reminding Frank that he was no longer under his thumb.
Frank gave him a hard stare, then nodded once. “Nice working with you. Keep me in mind next time you get in a bind.”
We showed ourselves out. When we got into the truck, I said, “You are never borrowing money from that guy again.”
“Truth.”
We drove home. Our home. My name might be on the deed, but everywhere I looked, from the hardware on the kitchen cabinets to the restored mantel over the fireplace, there was Nick’s signature. Technically, we had moved in, though most of the rooms were empty. There was still plenty of work to finish, but with the luxury of time, we could tackle the rest in weekend projects.
We walked inside and collapsed on Nick’s couch, the only furniture in our living room. My eyes drifted closed, and I let myself feel the vibrations of the house. To say it was pleased with this new arrangement was an understatement. It was over the moon. We weren’t going to have to worry about spontaneous bursting pipes or an unexplained foundation crack anytime soon.
Nick pulled me to him, so my head rested on his chest, and stroked my hair, sending chills down my spine.
“So now what do you want to do?” I asked.
“Chill on the couch and watch the Brewers game.”
“We don’t have a TV.”
He kissed the crown of my head. “So I guess I’ll relax with you. It feels like we haven’t stopped moving in months. An afternoon with nothing to do sounds perfect.”
“Just so I have this straight, are you saying I come in second place to the Brewers?”
He groaned and flipped me around so he was sprawled on top of me, his big body holding me in place. His kiss was warm and filled with the promise of hot things to come as soon as we could motivate ourselves.
After a few minutes, Nick said, “I have something for you.” He sat up with some reluctance.
I scooted upright and ran my fingers through my hair. “For me? What?”
“One sec.”
Nick took the steps two at a time in his rush upstairs, returning with a small jeweler’s box.
I raised a brow in question. “This better not be an engagement ring.”
“Don’t worry. I know you need time get back on your feet after this last year. Besides, I don’t need some piece of paper as long as I get to sleep next to you every night. Open it.”
The hinges creaked as I lifted the lid. Inside was Zayde’s silver baby spoon. Sort of. It wasn’t a spoon anymore. The scoop part had been removed and the intricate handle was curled in on itself, making a ring. It had been polished so the Star of David shone and the Hebrew lettering on the handle ringed around the band.
My heart leaped to my throat. “This is amazing! How did you do this?”
“I liberated it from the garbage. I took it to a jeweler to clean it up, but you were right, the spoon part was all gross. The jeweler suggested turning it into a ring. That’s a thing nowadays.”
I slipped the ring on my middle finger, where it fit just perfectly. “Guessed right on the sizing.”
“I told the guy your fingers were thinner than mine. He said if it didn’t fit right, he could size it for you.” He paused a moment, and then added, “I won’t be offended if you don’t want to wear it. I know you’re not much of a jewelry guy.”
“No, I love it. Really. Thank you.” I kissed him softly. “I love you.”
Nick’s cheeks blushed pink. Neither one of us were big on declaring our feelings all the time. What was more important was knowing that we were in this together. Partners in every sense of the word.
I set the box on the floor and pulled Nick down on top of me again. We kissed leisurely, like two people in love who had all the time in the world.
Well, until my phone rang.
I ignored it, letting the call go to voice mail, but less than a minute later, the ringing returned. With a groan, I dug it out of my pocket and checked the screen.
Rina.
“I better get this,” I said with an apologetic look. I pressed the Call button. “Yeah?”
“Sasha, honey. I got your message about selling the house.”
I sat up, bracing myself. “Yes, under the circumstances, I thought it was for the best.”
“If you didn’t want to live there, you could have rented it
to me.”
I didn’t have it in me to fight with her today about what a piss-poor risk that would have been. “The closing is in a couple weeks. You’ll need to get your stuff out of there before then. Do you have somewhere you can take it?”
“Yeah. I have a room in a women’s home right now, but they have little storage areas you can rent for cheap. It’ll do until I can afford a place.”
I hadn’t expected anything that optimistic. “Does that mean Jerry’s out of the picture?”
She took an audible drag on a cigarette. “I guess. He’s back to shacking up with his baby-mama. Says there’s nothing going on between them, but I’m not stupid. I have no way of hauling the stuff though. Think that guy of yours will help me with his truck?”
I glanced at Nick, who still sat with a worried expression on his face. “Yeah, we can help.”
And that was how we found ourselves two hours later loading up the back of Nick’s truck with my mother’s meager belongings and other sentimental odds and ends.
Rina and I stood in the kitchen doing one last survey while Nick finished battening things down with bungee cords. She was sober today, but the trembling in her hands suggested that she’d be heading off for a fix as soon as we were done. And that made me sad. So fucking sad.
“Sure you don’t want any of the furniture?” I asked.
“Nah, I don’t really have the room to store it. Besides, this place doesn’t hold the same good memories for me as it does for you. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to escape from here.”
I froze. Desperately wanting to ask her what she meant and not wanting her to shut down on me. I’d never known what could’ve been so awful in her life that she’d had to turn to drugs. I’d asked Zayde a few times, but he’d just blamed it on bad kids at school and had admonished me to stay away from hooligans. Had something happened to her in this home to make her seek comfort elsewhere? Surely, Zayde and Bubbe hadn’t been abusive. Zayde had hardly ever raised his voice to me.
I cleared my throat and asked as delicately as I could, “Will you tell me about it?”
Rina’s mouth tightened, and when she didn’t speak for a long moment, I figured she would shut down completely, but she surprised me. She leaned against the counter and began to speak.
“It all seems silly, now. Think of all the kids out there with real problems—hunger, abuse—I didn’t have any of that. I was an only child growing up in a lower-middle-class family, in a middle-class town with stable parents who loved me. But I was a kid, right? All I saw was how different we were. It’s not easy growing up in white-bread America with immigrant parents.”
She fingered the lacey curtains on the patio door that her mother had sewn sometime before I was born. They were yellowed, but Zayde would never have considered replacing them.
“We mostly spoke Russian in the home. Abba could speak English well. Had to. You couldn’t get a decent job in this town without it. But Ima didn’t work outside the home.”
“I thought she had a sewing business,” I commented.
“Yeah, she took in sewing, but Abba ran most of the client interactions for her. She never got over feeling self-conscious speaking English in public. She had a hard time letting go of the Old World. She used to make me go with her shopping so I could translate.”
“You were embarrassed by her because she spoke Russian?”
Rina shot me a glare. “You don’t understand. We spoke Russian during the Cold War. Every bad guy on TV back then was Russian. Kids at school were suspicious of us. They used to call me KGB. Of course, that was just kids teasing, but there were plenty of parents who were cautious about having their children play with the Russian-Jewish girl, you know? And it didn’t help my popularity any that Ima made my clothes until I went to high school. I looked like I’d come straight from the Eastern Bloc.”
I’d seen photos of Rina as a child growing up, so I had a good idea of what she was talking about. My bubbe had loved head scarves, stiff dresses, and fur-lined everything.
“When I got to high school,” she continued, “I’d had enough. I told Abba I’d go to school naked if he wouldn’t let me shop at the mall like the other girls. After an entire summer of fighting about it, he gave me some money and a ride to Kmart. Happiest day of my childhood.”
I took a seat at the table, relishing the opportunity to have a real conversation with my mother when she wasn’t angry or inebriated.
Rina hesitated for a moment, but then sat down across from me, pushing a stack of papers out of the way. It was still cluttered from me working to settle Zayde’s accounts. I could have let most of them go—he was dead after all—but he wouldn’t have liked that. Also on the table was Rina’s box from my bedroom ceiling. She’d probably want it. Rina let her fingertips trail across the lid in thought.
I wanted to keep her talking. “Did the new clothes help?”
“A little. I fit in better, but I still didn’t have any friends. At least not until I met Sherry Moseley in tenth grade. Do you remember Sherry?”
I did. She’d been pockmarked and so thin that I could make out her skeleton under her skin, which used to frighten me as a child. “She died, didn’t she?”
“Yeah. Suicide. She had AIDS back in a time when there wasn’t much you could do for it. She ended up ODing when the pain got to be too bad. But she was the first real girlfriend I ever had. Abba and Ima didn’t like her because she was constantly running away from home and hanging out on the streets. She had problems, yeah, but she was nice to me.”
“And she got you into drugs?”
Rina rolled her eyes. “It’s not like she put a gun to my head. I got myself into drugs. Being friends with Sherry just made them easier to get. I thought I was having a good time. And I figured when high school was over, I’d get serious and go to college. But by then it was too late. I was in love with the high. Quit going to classes. Never did graduate.” She paused, staring out the window with a faraway look in her eyes. Then she smiled. “And there you have it. The not-so-tragic story of how your mother ended up an addict.”
We sat in that moment, neither speaking, or even really looking at each other. Afraid to break this fragile time between bonding and arguing. I was so sick of fighting with her.
The thing that was easy to forget was that when my mother was sober, she wasn’t so bad. There had been a brief time when I was about ten when she’d been somewhat stable. She’d rented a small apartment in the city and took a job at the Walgreens in the photo department. I remembered it because it was one of the few times she’d been home for my birthday, and she brought me a cheap camera with a couple of rolls of film. Then, we’d gone out to the backyard and taken pictures of garden slugs and tree bark.
I hadn’t thought about that day for a long time. Probably because the next time I’d seen her, she’d shown up tweaking, with no job, with no apartment, and cussing up a wild streak because Zayde wouldn’t give her money.
I picked up a pen from the table, and set it back down again. I glanced at the neat stacks of mail on the table, the legal pad where I’d been keeping track of what was paid and what still needed to be settled.
That was when I remembered the brochure that I’d seen in her box. The one from Woodland Acres Rehab Center. The expensive one down south. She’d kept it for a reason. Didn’t that mean some little part of her wanted to get better? I opened the lid, unfolded the brochure, and passed it to her.
“I bet this place doesn’t have staff that brings in contraband.”
Rina looked at the cover and huffed, “I’m sure it doesn’t. For what it costs to go there, they can afford to pay their staff enough so they don’t have to run sidelines.”
“They have an eighty-seven percent success rate.”
“What did you do, memorize the thing?” She pushed it across the table back to me.
“I understand how awful those state rehabs are. If a person were serious about getting clean for good, they would go someplace like this. Far away
from the negative influences in their life. A place where all they had to do was concentrate on getting healthy.”
“Give it up, Sasha. You know I can’t afford no magic rehab.”
“Nothing magic about it. It’s hard work.” I paused, unsure if I wanted to lay it all out there. But damn it, this was my mother. Zayde would want me to try. And if she said no? Well, then I could walk away with a clear conscience knowing I’d done what I could. I took a deep breath. I needed to get the offer out there before I came to my senses. “You know, if you’re ready to get serious about cleaning yourself up, I’ll pay for it.”
She stared at me, mouth gaping. I didn’t want her to say no.
“Zayde always hoped one day he could afford to send you there. And I made some money from the sale of the house. Not a lot, but enough that I could pay for you to go and get the help you need.”
Her expression moved from shocked to skeptical. “Why would you do that? I got a piss-poor track record when it comes to getting clean. You’d be farther ahead to take it to the casino and have a little fun losing it.”
“I’m not worried about making a bad bet on you. I think if you’re in the right place, this place—” I tapped the brochure “—you can do it. I know you can.”
Rina opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, starting to speak but stopping herself.
Encouraged by her lack of outright refusal, I continued, “You always said that the reason you failed those state programs was because they were filled with the same people you knew on the street. I guarantee you won’t have history with anybody at Woodland.” I opened the brochure to the page with a bullet-pointed program offering. “See, they don’t just focus on your addiction, they work to address all your issues, mental and physical. When was the last time you saw a doctor for a checkup? Have you ever had a breast-cancer screening? You’re pushing fifty with a short stick. It’s time to start making your health a priority.”
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