She turned toward the kitchen, and I followed. We all sat at a long table with a centerpiece of dried cattails. Medve circledtwice and dropped onto my feet with a groan, his warm weight slung across both my boots. Varga’s father took the head of the table with the TV on across the room, muted. His mother sat nearest the stove so she didn’t have as far to go. His sister sat across from me.
Varga changed.
Here he was Lukács. His father used the full name, the entire weight of it. His mother called him Luki. With his family, he was quiet. He didn’t shut down or try to be careful. He relaxed. Varga’s family was home.
He let his mother talk over him, and he didn’t get upset when his sister won an argument. He ate slowly. Whole minutes went by without a joke. I sat there with the dog on my feet, seeing a part of his life I’d never known.
His mother nudged the stew toward him. “Eat,” she said.
“I am eating.”
Varga’s father muttered something at him, a complaint about the muted game, and he shot back in Hungarian, fast and easy. His father grunted and jabbed his fork at the screen.
“Bad call,” he said, in English, so I could understand. “You see it? Terrible. I could referee this game from the couch.”
“You couldn’t see it,” Varga’s sister said. “The sound’s off, and your glasses are in the kitchen.”
“I don’t need glasses to see bad.” He fought a smile and lost. “Thirty years, I’m telling you. You never listen, your mother never listens, and the referee never listens.”
“Nobody listens to you, apa. It’s a gift,” Varga said, grinning. His father pointed the fork at him, then gave up and laughed.
Under the table, Varga placed his hand on my knee.
“I put you in the big room,” his mother said. “End of the hall. It’s the good bed.”
“The big room,” his sister repeated.
“The one we kept.”
I looked at Varga. He kept his eyes on his plate, but he squeezed my knee. One room. We would be in one bed under his parents’ roof, in the house he’d bought them.
After the table was cleared, I ended up in the kitchen with his mother and a dish towel. The window over the sink had fogged up solid. She ran the tap hot. I dried what she washed and stacked where she pointed.
She handed me a pot and didn’t let go of it right away.
“The tree,” she said. “Luki’s tree. The maple. He told me on the phone that you planted it.”
“I did.”
“In the ground. I sent it for an apartment. I thought it would try to grow in a pot on a balcony. He would forget to water it, and it would die, but I sent it anyway.” She let go of the pot. “You put it in the ground.”
“It’s eight feet tall,” I said. “I see it from the kitchen window. It’s in the back corner of the yard, where it gets the morning light.”
She let the water out of the sink and smiled at me.
“There was a card,” I said, “with the tree. It’s in Hungarian, and I can’t read Hungarian. I asked him what it said. He told mefor your house, but it’s more words than that. I’ve wondered for three years what the rest is.”
She looked at me.
“It doesn’t sayfor your house,“ she said. “He gave you the small part because he didn’t want to give you the big one. That’s him. That’s my son.” She wiped an eye with the back of her wrist. “It says plant the tree, so it puts down roots. And then, for my son, that he will have a home.” Her voice broke. “Nothing about a house. A home.I sent it because I was afraid he didn’t have one. I thought he was alone in an apartment, so I sent something of mine to be there with him, putting down roots, even if he didn’t.”
I stood there with the dish towel in my hand.
“And you planted it in the ground.” She was crying now, openly. “You couldn’t read it, and you didn’t know what it said. You planted it like you knew anyway.”
“I knew it mattered to him,” I said. “That was enough.”
She hugged me. I kept the dish towel out to the side so I wouldn’t drip on her and put my other arm around her shoulders. Over the top of her head, I saw Varga in the hall.
