The Delivery (7 page)

Chapter 10

T
he three of us make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in our family kitchen and drink glasses of milk. We’re whispering and licking our fingers and watching the sunrise over our backyard with a rusted May pole and a sagging, old clothesline. It feels like in the few hours we’ve been together Lexi and Mozey have become fast friends. And that’s even stranger than unusual because my brother has
never
had
any
friends.

I drum my fingers and pick my cuticles, nervous about my parents waking up and what the hell we’ll say to them. These two are laughing and talking video games like they’ve known each other for years.

“What do you say we tell Mom and Dad that Mozey is your friend?” I try to sound casual and then down some milk to compensate.

This gets both of their attention, and they stop talking and stare at me, trying to guess where I’m going with this.

“My mom and dad might get the wrong idea if they think you’re here with me. Maybe you could be Lexi’s friend from school? It would make it easier on me.”

“Sure,” Mozey says with the lightest hint of a smile.

“I’ve never really brought anyone home before,” I say finally to qualify what I mean. It’s humiliating to say it, not just because it’s the truth but it also forces us to admit that Mozey coming all this way sort of implies something. “I mean, it’s not like
I brought you,
but we’ve got to say something.”

Lexi nods at me solemnly, and Mozey just smiles.

“Lex, are we lovers at college or just study partners?” he asks, hitting him playfully on the back.

Mozey adapts to the lie without question, instantaneously. Really adapts, like at a frightening pace. He can obviously do bullshit, and from the looks of it, he likes doing it too. Lexi is caught so off guard he might choke on his sandwich.

“What do we study? Hell, where do we go? Or we could just be buddies from the gym—that way I won’t have to know anything about school.”

Lexi is processing, and it’s painful to watch. This must be hard from him because friendship is one thing he just doesn’t do. And, my brother, couldn’t fool anyone for even an instant that he’d ever stepped foot in a gym. He’s a skinny schlub, he’s a pale pansy, he’s what they call a man of the spirit and not, just not, of the flesh.

But Mozey is all body, and at the mention of the gym, my eyes scan his broad shoulders and his biceps that are hugged tightly by any shirt he wears. As usual my mind scans right over undressing him to imagining him naked, erect, reaching those strong arms out for me.
Please, stop it, Lana. You’re sick
.

“Gym friends—you’re his trainer.” I speed out as fast as I can. “You two hit it off, and you were already coming this way. You’re a wrestling coach and your name is Cruz and you really like the ladies.”

“And I smoke Newports and drink wine coolers. I’m not Mexican, just a white guy with a killer tan,” Mozey adds, smiling.

“And you have a motorcycle and you like heavy metal.” I’m giddy off no sleep and our dumb joke. Lexi is looking at us like we’re insane or might be loaded on drugs.

“I collect wrenches and lug nuts, and I always smell like grease.”

“Yeah and you love dark beer and rare steak and sleeping naked. And you snack on apricots for iron.” I’m tired and punchy, and I could probably riff with Mozey all night.

Mozey doesn’t answer, and both him and Lexi stare at me.

“Apricots? I don’t even know who you are, Doc. I like you better already in Michigan,” Mozey says, looking at me with eyes so brightly lit it makes me feel like we’re both plugged into the same electrical wire.

“Apricots,” Mozey repeats and chokes on his milk. He laughs so hard it comes out of his nose. I’m laughing too and holding my stomach, feeling both happy and scared enough to puke. I’m giddy when I’m around him, and I feel ridiculously light. Lexi is laughing too and that warms my heart. My brother rarely laughs, so it’s a very special moment.

“It’s a stone fruit,” my father says, walking into the kitchen looking like a cross between Wee Willy Winkie and Lenin in his beard and nightgown. His slippers are well worn and his hair sticks up everywhere. “Who likes apricots? We may have some dried ones in the cupboard.”

My father was born in Detroit; his parents immigrated after the war. My mother, on the other hand, came when she was just sixteen. One year later she married my father, and the rest is family history. But they waited a while for the babies. Two babies in total. Those would be Lex and me.

My dad has always taken care of my mom as she’s never fully mastered English. She often seems like she comes from a different time period; she left before the dissolution of the Soviet era, but her whole aesthetic stayed there.

Mozey takes in my dad with genuine intrigue, and he stands to offer him his hand.

“I’m a friend of Alexei’s. I came to help out it you have to move. I just got introduced to Lana.”

Okay, Mozey, don’t try to be overly convincing. I just this very second met her. I don’t even know her from Adam.

“Svetlana,” my dad says, coming in for a hug. I hug him back hard and breathe in the scent of cherry wood tobacco in his beard. “You’re mother and I have a paper route. Would you like to help us out this morning?”

“Oh, that explains why you’re up so damn early.”

“It pays the small bills,” my father says, pouring himself some steaming tea.

“Your name is Sweat Lana?” Mozey asks quietly, his eyes wide with surprise. I roll mine at him in response.

“Svetlana,” my father says, coming to the table with his toast, over-pronouncing the v. “How is work?”

I blush at the word “work” and avert my eyes from Mozey’s. “Work is good, Dad, you know. Just trying to get myself established while not losing the house.”

It comes off as callous, but I don’t mean it that way. It’s not their fault they lost their jobs or that they fell victim to the mortgage bubble. My mom and dad are hard working, honorable people.

“You work very hard, my dear. I don’t know what we’d do without you,” he says, sincerely biting into a large slice of black rye toast loaded with butter.

My mother pads down the stairs next, in curlers and a bathrobe. She yelps when she sees me and immediately fusses over both me and my brother.

“I’ll make blini,” she says, pulling my hair back from my face while standing behind me. She’s eyeing Mozey with suspicion, and she probably should. I’m suspicious of him too. Why the hell did he come this far just to help me and my family move?

“Ma, Mozey is here to help us. If we lose in court, he’ll help us, you know with the furniture and the heavy stuff,” I say, biting into the toast my dad has pushed onto my plate.

“Strong,” my mother says, patting her own flabby triceps. Pantomime is my mother’s main form of communication, except for yelling at my father in Russian. Lexi and I never learned to speak it besides a quick “spasiba” and hurried “preevyet” shouted at our grandparents. Typical, lazy, American kids. Always relying on English. That’s what my grandfather accused us of while my grandmother tried to drill phrases into us “just in case, we had to go back to the old world.” But Lex and I always preferred American cartoons and pop culture to the awkward Russian dances sponsored monthly by the local Owl’s Club chapter.

My family often accuses me of not being invested in my Russian roots. Those accusations reached a fever pitch in high school when I changed my last name from Filchenkov to Finch and started going by Lana. My uncle did the surname switch first, and I jumped aboard right after him. Lexi and I both go by Finch now, and our parents absolutely hate it.

But the way I see it is that we were born in this country so they can’t take away our affections and loyalty to it. I’ve never been to Russia, and I’ll probably never be able to afford to. I’m as ethnically Russian as you can be, but I’m a motor city girl who’s Motown at heart. I like who I am and I wouldn’t change it for the world. But changing my name made things easier. It cuts through the judgmental shit. So Finch it will be, whether they like it or not.

Two hours later we’re piled into Alexei’s escort crammed in between hundreds of rolled-up Detroit metro newspapers. We let my parents go back to bed, promising to take care of the route, but now my eyelids are heavy and it’s starting to rain.

“Coffee, comrades?” Lexi asks when he puts the car into gear and backs out of our driveway. Our house looks like it’s on the verge of collapse. The paint is practically all peeled off the façade. It was once a sweet Robin’s eggshell blue, but now it’s an old gray bird molting all of its feathers. But I grew up there, and it’s the only roof over my parent’s heads. I sigh out loud, and Mozey reaches across the seat of the car and flicks my knee through my jeans.

I look up at him surprised, and he smiles at me through his long, dark lashes.

“This is fun! I’m glad I came, really, Sweat Lana.”

I pick up a rolled newspaper and thwap him on the head. But just one little touch from him makes me start to think about all the naughty things I would do to him if we weren’t separated by age or by my job or by my connections to Pathways.

We chuck most of the papers, and Mozey is good at it. Turns out he’s not only strong, but he’s got a good pitching arm. I pass the papers to him from the back seat, and Lexi drives slow and steady trying to avoid having to break. We’re a pretty efficient paper delivery team. The only part that sucks is I have to jump out when his aim is off and dart through the rain, to get the paper by the mailbox or the doorstep and I feel like a fool doing it.

“Drive faster, Lex. I want to go home and go to bed!” I can’t believe my poor parents do this seven days a week; it’s not an easy task.

“How come they don’t do this in LA?” Mozey asks. “I’d be good at this job.”

“Because no one reads an actual physical paper any more, people just look at it online.” My brother rambles on about the disappearance of print while the rain gets heavier bent on melting the snow. I fall asleep in the car, listening to Lex and Mozey’s murmuring voices. I feel so strangely content, as if we gained another family member. And maybe Lex a new friend; he’s so relaxed around Mo. I’ve never seen him like this.

Chapter 11

H
ousing court is two days later, and our extension isn’t granted. We’re given two days to vacate the house and move my parents in with my uncle Viktor, the one whose last name is Finch and who doesn’t get along with my dad. My mom thinks his wife, Aunt Kirsten is too artificial and that she doesn’t care about her kids. I think she intimidates Mom, somehow makes her feel inadequate and old-fashioned.

We eat lunch at a crappy downtown diner, and everyone’s in shock. I’m thinking back to the times when I was small and I thought we were well off. My parents worked menial jobs with very long hours, but they doted on Alexei and me, and we had everything we wanted. I stir my chicken-noodle soup around and around in it’s bowl. I keep adding crackers without taking a bite, and then I can’t eat anything when my mother starts crying.

My father comforts her softly in Russian as she snivels into the shoulder of his well-worn cardigan with dark-brown leather elbow patches. Mozey is with us, squished in the booth next to Lex. I’m on the very end, one butt cheek hanging off. I look at Mozey and register how strange it is that he’s here. He’s like a parasite, but a good one that’s taken ahold of us. I still hate that I’m so attracted to him. Maybe if I weren’t we could just adopt him. But who am I kidding? Who’d want into this family? We haven’t even got a place to live and the future of our finances is banking on one lousy social worker and her unmotivated little brother.

“Hey, everybody,” Mozey says, grabbing all of our attention. “I’ve done this before. It’s not so bad. It’s just called starting over. I’ve lost my house, had nothing, but life still goes on.”

“Thank you, Mozey, for your words,” my dad says, leaning across the table and roughing up Mozey’s shoulder. My parents have accepted him as if he were their third kid. Since when is it so easy to just snake into this family? Just ride a bus to Detroit and then you get to be one of us? I’ve paid my dues over twenty-five long years, and I’m not gonna lie, a whole lot of those years have been pretty shitty. Especially the ones where I’ve been footing all of the bills.

“Starting over from zero,” I say morosely. I’m not in the mood to be cheered up. I loved my house. I love my family. I don’t understand how things could be so fucked.

“A fresh start!” Mozey says, smiling, and I shoot him a dirty look. I wish his cheerful ass would shut the hell up.

“Mom and Dad, Lana and I discussed how this should be done. Dad, it will be too emotional for Mom to see her things carted off.”

My dad nods in agreement then massages his brow. All this negotiation has been going on for years, and now suddenly the threats are all real. It’s a done deal. Our house is up for short sale—but more likely it will be demolished and the land sold, our house is in bad shape.

“You and Mom will pack tonight with just the absolute necessities. You can mark whatever you want put in storage, and tomorrow we’ll take care of that. There won’t be much room for furniture so most of it will end up going to the dump.”

Alexei assumes my mom won’t understand this, but she does and again bursts out crying.

Mozey grabs my mom’s hand, and I practically fall out of my seat. She looks at him sincerely as she wipes away her tears.

“Mrs. Finch, they won’t take anything you don’t want them to.” His gesture is kind but his appropriation of everything
mine
is down right blowing my freaking mind. How do you just insert yourself into someone’s family over the course of a few days? It’s his job to comfort
my
mother? His easy character drives me nuts. Now he’s charmed everyone into caring for him, and it doesn’t seem fair.

I shove my soup away from myself and abruptly stand.

“I’ll wait in the car,” I say, throwing some cash on the table.

I storm out of the diner and head toward the car. I stomp my foot when I realize that Lex has the keys, and it’s colder outside than I remembered it being. I lean against the car, trying to get the best angle of the sun. I’ve got to get some space between me and him before he drives me insane.

I squint and look up at the weak sun and smile. I remember when I was a teenager and I took a towel to the back yard to try to tan my pasty Siberian skin, and my dad came out to do some yard work. I must have been around thirteen.

“Why are laying down, Svetlana?” he asked me with genuine curiosity.

“To get a tan, Dad. You know, to try to get bronzed. Beach girl—like Malibu Barbie.”

That’s when my dad schooled me on how Russians tan standing up. Then everything is exposed at once.

“You won’t have to flip around like a grilled sandwich.” I remember him telling me.

I smile into the weak sun as the memory warms me. My dad always did stand on the beach or at the lake. The sweetness of the memory honeys the sting. Goodbye to that backyard. Goodbye to all of those memories.

I open my eyes when I see a shadow cross over my lids. Mozey Cruz is blocking my sun and all up in my personal space.

“You got a lot of nerve following me here,” I say, pointing my finger at him. “Hijacking my family, trying to take over crisis control!” I cross my arms and stare him down. “That’s my job. And speaking of jobs, having you here could make me lose mine. I support my family, Mozey, by eating shitty Ramen for dinner, packing toast for breakfast every morning and NEVER even going to the movies!”

Tears are streaming down my face, and I can’t even remember the last time I cried. I’m numb to tragedy especially when I work with it daily and it’s my job to try to smooth it.

“I’m sorry, Lana. Would you rather have me leave?’

He looks so handsome when he says it, grown-up concern shadowing his beautiful face.

“I wanted to help you, but if I’m not helping, I’ll leave.”

I put my hands on my hips and groan and cry a little more.

“Just say the word, I’ll go. Am I no longer a team asset?”

I smile a little at him and use my sleeve to wipe my cheek. I can’t help but giggle even with the tears flooding my face.

“You’re a pain in my ass is what you are. A certified stalker. We’re not even
on
the same team.”

“I could give you a hug and maybe you’d feel better.”

“I’m not allowed to hug clients,” I say, bringing my arms across my chest. My green sweater is scratchy, and I want to dig inside my grandmother’s old coat and tear at my skin.

“We’re not at Pathways. We’re in Motor City, and no one will see us. I followed you here because I like you Lana. A lot. And I think you like me, too, even though you won’t admit it.”

I spin on the pavement and march to the other side of the car, trying all the door handles even though I know they’re all locked. The tears are falling again, making me feel so out of control.

“I don’t even have a house, Mozey. Don’t make me lose my job, too!” I can see my words reflected in the little puffs of air that let me know the temperature is quickly dropping.

When I look up my mom and dad are hobbling down the steps of the diner. My mom’s hip has been bad for years, but now my dad really has to sustain her. Mozey rushes over to help them, and it makes me even angrier.

I wipe away the tears and plaster on a fake smile to hide my pain from my mom. She doesn’t need more to worry about. She’s just lost everything she ever owned.

Later that evening I help my mom pack up pictures. We wrap them in her silk scarves, something she’s got maybe fifty of. She takes out a bright purple one and wraps it around my head.

“Your eyes,” she says. Brushing the back of her hand along my temple.

“Purple brings out green,” I say, and she smiles and nods.

My father is at the kitchen table with Mozey and Lex, going over finances. Really it should be me down there because I basically support my parents, but in my house we adhere to sexist gender roles for the most part, no matter how antiquated or ridiculous.

“Mozey, eh? Eh?” my mother says, smiling at me.

I blush so hard my face is probably more purple than the scarf on my head. My mother and I DO NOT discuss men. Or sex, or even menstruation for that matter.

“Handsome boy,” she says, nodding her head.

I screw my face up at her. I’m mortified. Of course she saw right through our cover.

“He’s Alexei’s friend.” I shrug my shoulders at her. “Should we move onto your jewelry and hair combs?”

She keeps nodding at me like we have a secret, and it’s completely annoying. I go to her dresser and yank out the top drawer. It’s velvet lined and contains every treasure she’s ever collected.

I have childhood memories of when she’d let me look at and touch these mysterious things. They seemed to hold so much power to me when I was small, the way they shimmered and glistened and made my mother beautiful when she wore them. I remember thinking she was magical with these charms, and it made me want to grow up fast and become a woman.

Sometimes she would put a scarf on me or a necklace or a comb in my hair. I’d walk around like I was balancing a book on my head, refusing to even move my neck and shoulders.

But then I grew up into a tomboy and then a hippie and then an activist, right in that order—I was never a glamor girl. I never even got my ears pierced. Now that I think about it, Lex and I probably both disappointed the hell out of our parents.

I lean in and give my mom a kiss on the cheek, something I rarely do with her is initiate affection.

“You’re right, Mom. Mozey is smokin’ hot! But he’s way, way too young.”

She probably doesn’t understand me, but I feel the need to share this, to speak it out loud. She wants me to have a love life, so I can pretend. Besides, I’ve got to tell someone how attractive he is, and I can’t even tell Janey he’s here let alone detail the description of his freakishly beautiful face and his stupid gorgeous body. Guys shouldn’t be so pretty. Mozey’s face and body are a crime against humanity for making us feel lesser than.

Her green eyes that mirror mine sparkle at my comment, and for a minute, I wonder just how much she plays dumb when it comes to understanding us.

We drink a toast of vodka before bed with my dad because he’s Russian and he’s a lunatic and he vehemently believes in ceremony, no matter how painful or embarrassing. Now Mozey knows my whole crazy family intimately and our finances and apparently that guarantees him an honorary spot in my dad’s weird rituals.

We drink out of a crystal decanter that’s been in the family a long time. Dad makes a toast in Russian, and we all clink glasses. My mom and I each take two, but then the guys keep going. We head to the kitchen to pack some final things, and we can hear all three of them laughing and clinking. At least it brings some warmth to the house, and at least they’re not drinking in sorrow, they’re bonding and singing. My dad is teaching Mo to toast in Russian, and my mom and I giggle when my dad bellows “Na Zdorovie” and Mozey repeats it with a terrible accent.

I’m the first in bed. The house is freezing. I put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt and climb in under the covers. This is the last time I’ll sleep in this bed. A place where, as a child and then an adolescent, so many dreams and nightmares, so many of my thoughts were processed here. It’s a strange feeling, your last night in your room that is no longer your own. The spot you grew up staring at on the ceiling that was the starting point for so many beginnings. It’s what your eyes saw day after day when you woke up in the morning. If there’s one place you know you can always return to—it’s your parent’s house to your childhood bed. It’s your ground zero, your home base, and your personal nook of security. I fall asleep thinking about how a lot of the kids I work with never had this spot, that comfort is a luxury that too many of us take for granted.

Mozey probably never had a comfort spot like this; he left his home early to immigrate to the States. Then his mother never replaced the comfort spot when they got to wherever they were going. He came all this way to comfort me—comforted all of us over the last couple of days, and it breaks my heart he doesn’t have a place like this to return to. There is a simple solace of knowing your own origin.
I wish I could give him a comfort spot,
is my last thought before sleep.

I awake in the middle of the night with a start to the familiar squeak of my childhood bedroom door closing. A dark shadow drifts across the floor.

“Lex?” I say, sitting up quickly in bed. My adrenaline rushes as the shadow looms over me, and I blink my eyes in the dark.

“It’s me, Lana. Mozey,” he whispers, and two things happen with the sound of his voice—my heart heaves itself off of Niagara Falls in a barrel tumbling down toward the rocks, while my spirit soars like a rocket ship plowing through the atmosphere.

“What do you want?” I yell-whisper at him, trying to keep my cool.

“Your dad set me up in the basement, and I think it’s forty below down there. I have hypothermia, and I can’t feel my toes.”

“Sleep on the couch, then!” I bite back, turning away from him and pulling my covers up to my chin. But my blood is roaring through my veins with the mere proximity of him.

“I tried that, too. But you have a crazy Russian couch stuffed with horsehair and hay. And I’ve slept on cement before, so you’d think I could swing it, but it’s triggering my asthma, and I’ve only got a few pumps left in the inhaler.”

“Do you even have asthma?” I say, sitting up. But when I say it out loud, it brings forth a memory of seeing it listed on his intake form under personal medical history. Mozey takes advantage of my momentary shift and plants his butt on my childhood twin bed.