Chapter Thirty-Three

I CONVINCE DUSTY TO COME HOME with me and hang out for awhile and then stay for dinner.

When we pull off the road into my driveway, my heart starts to race as I glimpse Dmitri’s blue rental car parked next to my front porch.

He’s leaning against it, smoking a cigarette, and feeding Gimp potato chips out of a blue foil bag. He’s wearing his black T-shirt beneath the black leather jacket he had stashed in his car, and his slick black leather boots, made for dancing in clubs not working in mines. I don’t see any sign of Shannon or the baby but I assume they’re inside, maybe taking a nap.

Dusty and I get out of my car.

“Darling,” Dmitri calls out to me immediately and smiles wickedly beneath his coal-black mustache. “Where you been? I missed you.”

Dusty looks back and forth between the two of us.

“Who’s this guy?” he asks me.

“It’s a long story,” I explain. “But don’t worry. I’m not his darling.”

“How quickly she tosses the men aside,” Dmitri observes, peering through a plume of white smoke.

“How about you?” he asks Dusty. “You one of her conquests, too?”

“This is my son’s best friend,” I tell him abruptly. “He is not a conquest and neither are you.

“Why don’t you go in the house, Dusty. Have a beer. Relax. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Dmitri watches him walk past, and the mirth that was just shining in his ebony eyes shifts to glints of suspicion and combativeness. I’m reminded of how we first met and that even though he may have his charming moments, he’s also capable of smashing a woman in the face with her own boot.

He studies the silver glitter words on my shirt as I walk toward him.

“Who is this ‘him’ you’re dumping?” he asks me.

“It’s just an expression.”

“No. ‘Slow down and stop to pick roses’ is expression.”

“It’s stop and smell the roses,” I correct him.

“‘Dump him’ is command. Not expression.”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Sure, it does. Means you don’t like men.”

“That is such bullshit.”

“Tell me”—he pauses to pop one of the chips in his own mouth before giving another one to Gimp—“do you have boyfriend?”

“No. I mean, yes. Well, sort of.”

He laughs.

“He must be some boyfriend if you don’t even know he’s boyfriend.”

He clenches his empty hand into a fist and bends his arm up into a body builder’s pose.

“I’m bigger, I bet. And stronger, too.”

“You’re definitely balder,” I tell him.

“I can grow hair,” he scoffs. “What do I need with hair?”

“You have it all over your lip.”

He strokes his mustache and smiles.

“This is sexy. Hair on head is nuisance.”

“Dmitri,” I begin. “It is Dmitri, right?”

He nods.

“Where’s Shannon and the baby?”

“Gone. I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what I say. I lost her.”

“You lost her?”

“She is very crafty. Like wolf.”

“You mean like fox.”

“No. Fox is small and frightened.”

“But they’re crafty.”

“No, they are small and frightened.”

My frustration gets the better of me. I want to reach out and grab him and physically shake the answers out of him, but I settle for shouting instead.

“What do you mean? Do you mean she’s not here with you now?”

“She’s not here with me now.”

“But how could you lose her? She has a one-day-old infant with her. She just gave birth in my guest room. She can’t be in very good shape for traveling.”

“It’s not important how. I just did.”

“And you have no idea where she’s going?”

“No. “

“Or who she’s selling the baby to?”

He takes a long drag off his cigarette and eyes me skeptically.

“What do you know about me and baby?”

“I know you’re the father.”

He smiles and nods again.

“This baby is very good looking. She has my eyes.”

“Shannon told me so many lies. I don’t know what to believe. Did she come here because she was running away from you?”

The smile disappears instantly, replaced with a sneer of anger.

“No. Did she tell you this?”

“I’m guessing.”

“No. She had no reason to run from me. That’s why I followed her. If she had reason to run from me, I let her run. But she had no reason so I come after her.”

“Okay. I’ll pretend to understand that.”

“I knew baby was mine,” he continues, the roughness in his voice gradually fading. “We were in relationship. I’m having personal problem and think I’ll have to leave New York and New Jersey—whole East Coast—maybe whole country for awhile. I know this is why she gets pregnant with me. She thinks I’m going to be out of picture like all her other fathers. But this don’t happen. I stay. She is pregnant. I…how do you say…I do the math. I figure out. I confront. She denies. I tell her I’ll ask for test when baby is born to prove he’s mine. So she admits. Then I tell her I’ll stop adoption if she doesn’t let me pick the family.”

“You didn’t want the baby?”

“I have no time for babies. I’m only thinking what’s best for baby. I would make great father someday. Not now. I’m too…”

“Vain? Self-absorbed? Egotistical? Violent?” I provide for him.

“I keep odd hours.”

“So you wanted your cut of the money?”

He grows angry again.

“I don’t care shit about money.”

“What a lie.”

“I’m not lying. I don’t want money for selling child. This is disgusting. I wouldn’t touch the money. Even if I am starving. I would get job washing cars first. I only want to make sure baby goes to good home with good parents. Not like the people I work for.”

“I thought the man you work for is your friend.”

“He is my friend. What makes a man good friend doesn’t always make him good father.”

Gimp finally decides he’s had enough chips and it’s time to acknowledge my presence. He walks over to me and nudges his head beneath my dangling hand.

“Shannon agrees I can help her pick family,” Dmitri goes on with his story. “She tells me about the family Kozlowski wants for her. She tells me about this other woman she finds by herself. She tells me the family is paying her expenses, the woman is paying her expenses, so she is stealing their money. I don’t approve but I like she’s planning to rip off Kozlowski.

“But she was not supposed to run from me. This was our deal. My opinion about the family is as important as her opinion. But she does run. And I don’t know where she is. Not before Kozlowski comes to Mickey and they tell me where to look.”

“What did you decide? Who’s getting the baby?”

“It’s not important.”

“How can you say that? You just finished telling me how important it is to you to know where the baby is going and now you’re going to tell me it isn’t?”

“It’s important for me. It means nothing to you.”

“That baby is my niece.”

“You have lots of nieces and nephews you will never know.”

The truth behind this depresses me and I suddenly lose all interest in discussing the baby any further. I realize she’s a lost cause, and I need to let her go.

I reach for the bag of chips and help myself to a handful.

“I still don’t understand why Shannon finally came home again after all these years,” I say to Dmitri as I crunch away. “Why now?”

He shrugs.

“I can tell you only what I know. Whole time I know Shannon she never talks about family or past. Where she comes from. It’s not just her life is closed book; it’s book that was never written.

“One day I’m at her apartment waiting for her. There’s a calendar on her kitchen wall, and I start looking at it. It has mostly appointments on it. No birthdays marked. No brothers’ or sisters’ birthdays. No aunts or uncles. No friends. Not even her own birthday. Except one. Her mother.”

“Her mother’s?” I ask, startled.

“Yes. So I ask her about this. I ask her how old is your mother? Where she lives? You see her often?

“She says to me, ‘She’ll be sixty next month.’ Then she gets funny look on her face and says, ‘Sixty is pretty old. Don’t you think? She could be dead by now.’

“I don’t know what to say. I think maybe she didn’t see her mother for many years and is wondering if she’s dead. I tell her maybe not. Lots of people live to be seventy or eighty. Some even to be ninety.

“She gets mad with me. She argues with me, ‘No, she could be dead. She could be dead of natural causes.’ Natural causes. These are the words she uses over and over. Natural causes. She could be dead of a heart attack or cancer or something that killed her naturally.

“Again I don’t know what to say. She’s getting very upset. I think it’s her hormones. I want to calm her down so I agree. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Natural causes could definitely have killed her.’

“This works. She calms down. She almost looks relaxed and happy. She says, ‘I can go home now if I want. She’d be dead anyway. It wouldn’t be my fault.’

“Does that make sense to you? Where is your mother?”

I don’t respond right away. I have to digest what I’ve just learned.

“She died two days after Shannon was born,” I say numbly. “A blood clot in her brain. Complications of childbirth.”

“That’s it,” Dmitri says, snapping his fingers. “The guilt. She stayed away because of guilt. Now it’s been long enough she can believe it wasn’t her fault.”

“But it wasn’t her fault.”

“It doesn’t matter what’s true. It only matters what she thinks. Guilt is the most powerful human emotion, after hunger.”

“Hunger is a physical need. It isn’t an emotion.”

“Maybe you’ve never been hungry enough.”

He finishes his cigarette and tosses it onto the stones of my driveway.

“I should go,” he tells me. “Too much country air is not good for me.”

He reaches into his car and returns with a box he hands to me.

“Here,” he says.

“What’s this?”

“Something to remember me.”

I think he might kiss me. I almost want him to kiss me. But the moment passes as so many do.

He gets into his car and rolls down his window.

“How did you like paprikash?” he asks as he’s about to back out.

“It was great. Fanci and Kenny must have eaten three bowls apiece.”

“These are children in your kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“She is too skinny, and he is too short.”

“He’s only four years old.”

“Oh, well, maybe not so short.”

I watch him drive away. Gimp follows his car for about five feet with his tail waving slowly in the air behind him.

I open the box and pull out a royal blue silk robe, perfect for a ballerina cop.