“Why were you laughing?” he asked Samantha and Pavel, as he rubbed his hand across Back Up’s pink belly. The question came out harsher than he meant it to.
But there was a smile in Pavel’s voice when he answered, “Because Mama is really bad at math. I didn’t want to do my homework and Mama told me she’d do my homework for me, but I keep on having to correct it and put in the right answers.”
“Luckily we’re using pencil,” Samantha said. Her voice had a different kind of smile in it.
“Luckily,” Pavel agreed, cracking up again. “You’re so bad at math!”
“And you’re getting so good at it.”
Nikolai stood there, rubbing Back Up’s belly longer than necessary, awkward as a moose at a deer party. Obviously Pavel had no idea Sam was only pretending to be bad at math, and he could barely fathom such a scenario in his own past. Growing up, his mother had only to threaten to tell his father he wasn’t doing something he was supposed to do, and Nikolai would do it. Right away.
But apparently Pavel had to be tricked into doing what he was supposed to do. It made him feel… he didn’t know. Sometimes it felt like Pavel was a duty, something to be managed until he reached his majority. And sometimes… sometimes it felt like he was a conduit to memories Nikolai didn’t want to have—memories he’d done a good job suppressing until the little boy had shown up in his life.
“Would you like some dinner?” Sam asked, her tone gracious but automatic. He got the feeling she would have offered anyone passing through the kitchen something to eat, even a servant.
“Mama and me made the noodles ourselves with your pasta machine!” Pavel told him, with great excitement in his voice. Like making noodles from scratch was the most exciting activity in the universe.
“Da, I will have spaghetti,” he said quickly. Happy for the change of subject.
The careful smile fell off Samantha’s face when he went over to the restaurant grade sink to wash his hands. And out of the corner of his eye, he noticed her hesitate before she went over to a cabinet, grabbed a bowl, and started filling it with pasta.
He sat down at the counter and watched her ladle meat sauce on top of the noodles before she came back over and set the bowl in front of him with a flat, “Here you go.”
“Thank you,” he answered, not knowing exactly why he’d agreed to eat a second dinner, even as he twirled the noodles around his fork.
Sam sat back down and said, “If we’d known you were coming, we wouldn’t have eaten.”
“It is okay,” he answered, taking a bite of the spaghetti. It was good. Really good. Somehow better than what he was used to because it was plain and homemade. Not perfectly spiced to his exact specifications, like the meals Isaac delivered to his office.
He could feel Pavel and Samantha’s eyes on him as he ate, as if a monster had entered their midst. And he had the feeling the quiet, filled with nothing but the sound of him eating the homemade spaghetti would have gone on forever if Pavel hadn’t chosen that moment to ask, “When you were kids, did you have birthday parties?”
“Are you asking me or your uncle?” Samantha asked him.
Pavel became very interested in the problems on his math worksheet as he answered, “Both of you, I guess.”
Samantha cleared her throat. “My mom made me a cake every year, and sometimes she took me out to dinner someplace like McDonald’s and she’d get me a Happy Meal,” she answered. “But no, never like a full on birthday party. How about you, Nikolai?” she asked. “Does Russia do the whole kids birthday party thing?”
“Da, we have these things, but I did not growing up,” he answered.
“Why not?” she asked, looking at him directly for the first time since he’d arrived home.
He thought about the true answer, which was because at the end of the day, he was a bastard with a generally depressed mother and a father who wouldn’t have shown up to a birthday party for him even if one had been thrown. And then he answered, “It is silly custom.”
Pavel’s cheeks reddened. “Yeah, you’re right, Uncle. Birthday parties are kind of stupid. I don’t know if I even want to go to the one Mateo invited me to.”
A reasonable conclusion on the boy’s part, Nikolai thought, but for some reason Samantha threw Nikolai a murderous look before saying to Pavel, “Birthday parties aren’t so bad. We throw them for our kids at the shelter all the time and they’re always a lot of fun. Maybe you should go to one and see how you like it.”
But Pavel quickly glanced up at Nikolai and answered, “No, that’s okay.”
And so the matter was settled. Or at least Nikolai thought it was. A soft knock sounded on his study door a couple of hours later.
“Come in,” he said, looking up from the work he’d brought home with him.
Sam stuck her head in. “Hey, got time to talk?” she asked.
Her voice was friendly and calm, like that scene in the kitchen hadn’t been awkward at all. He frowned. He was beginning to suspect friendly and calm was Samantha’s default for when she was anything but.
Nonetheless he took off his reading glasses and indicated she should sit down, which she did, looking around his study, a more somber affair than the rest of the house with dark wood paneling and a statesman like desk, so big, it had necessitated the interior designer and his crew break it down into pieces before rebuilding it inside the room.
“Wow,” she said. “This is… maybe fifty times bigger than my office at Ruth’s House. Sweet!”
A compliment, Nikolai realized after mulling her words over for a few moments. “Thank you,” he said.
“So,” she said, folding her hands on her lap. “How’s it going? Everything good with the job?”
“Da, it is fine,” he answered, knowing how Americans enjoyed their small talk. He awkwardly added, “I have much paperwork.”
“Paperwork is the worst, right? I always say I enjoy everything about my job, except the paperwork. It’s a real beast.”
“Da, it is beast,” he agreed, his voice stilted.
Why was it so hard to talk to this woman? He’d never had any problems talking with women before her. But everything about Samantha unsettled him, made him feel like he was once again the unacknowledged bastard of Sergei Rustanov. Not even good enough to warrant his parent’s marriage.
“I came in here to talk about Pavel…” Samantha introduced the new subject like it was a delicate object, one she carefully set down on the desk between them. “He really admires you. He’s very proud to have a hockey star for an uncle.”