Page 61 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

Lev

“You’re holding those juice boxes like they’re evidence.”

Poppy says it from the shade of the pavilion with a clipboard under her arm and a whistle around her neck she has not earned and will not surrender. Eighteen months of Sunday dinners and she talks to me the way she talks to Kevin, which is to say she has never once been afraid of me and has stopped pretending she ought to be.

“They’re leaking.”

“They leak. That’s the deal with a juice box, that’s its whole point. You puncture it with a straw, and then you carry the consequences.” She takes four off the top of my stack and goes down the line of coolers. “Table two, and don’t let Amelia near the grape.”

Brighton Beach in July, ninety degrees, the train going over on its stilts, and two hundred yards of boardwalk cordoned off for a first-grade class picnic that has grown a lot of guests nobody invited. Yefim is under an umbrella with three other old men and a folding table of pickled things they brought from home, and he has been telling the same story about a customs official in Odessa for forty minutes to a rotating audience of seven-year-olds who do not understand one word and refuse to leave.

Down on the sand, Danil is running the sack race.

He has a stopwatch. He has drawn lanes with a rake, and he has been out here since seven in the morning because the tide comes in over the finish line and he wanted the geometry right. He is on one knee in the sand in front of Louis, who has come in fourth and is taking it hard.

“You went early,” Danil says. “You came out of the box before I said the word, so you spent the first ten feet correcting, and then you had nothing left at the end. That’s not slow. That’s early. Next heat you wait for the word.”

“But everybody else went early.”

“Everybody else lost too.” Danil sets him back at the line. “Wait for the word.”

Louis waits for the word. Louis wins the next heat by a length and a half and comes up the beach with his fists over his head, and Danil turns to the parents with a face I have not seen on that man since 2021.

Vasilisa is at the rail on the boardwalk with the cane hooked over the top bar, watching him.

The chair is in the trunk two hundred feet behind us. Some Sundays it comes out on the boards with us, and she takes the whole promenade in it. Today it stays in the trunk, and she does the boardwalk on the brass, slow, with her hand in mine, and she calls it a cane day the way somebody else would call it a nice day.

“Table two is out of grape,” I tell her.

“Table two was always going to be out of grape. Table two is Amelia’s table.” She takes my arm to shift her weight off the right side for a second, then takes it back off. “You’ve got sand in your shoes.”

“I have.”

“You could have worn something other than dress shoes to a beach picnic.”

“I own four pairs of shoes, and they’re all the same pair.”

“I know. It’s one of your three personality traits.” She turns her face up. She’s got the freckles all the way out, she’s been on the terrace every afternoon this summer purely because she knows what it does to me, and I stopped being able to keep count of them the first winter and never told her. “Fifteen minutes and then the relay, and you’re anchoring the parents’ team.”

“No.”

“Mr. Delgado has already announced it. He brings orange slices, Lev, he’s the most powerful man on this beach, and you know it.”

I anchor the parents’ team. We come second. Mr. Delgado runs a leg like a man half his age and shakes my hand at the finish with both of his. I stand on the sand in Brighton Beach with a rib that still aches in the cold and forty people applauding a thing that does not matter at all.

At four the cars come to take the coolers back, and my wife’s kids go home covered in salt and gold glitter that will be in their houses until Christmas, and I sweep the boards with a push broom Poppy hands me without asking.

We’re home by six.

The apartment is quiet, the terrace doors open, the city doing what it does forty floors down. She’s washing the paste out of her hands at the low sink, and I’m putting the coolers away, and when I come back she’s at the island with a box in front of her.

It’s small. Blue paper, a ribbon somebody’s made a mess of and then given up on. She has her hands flat on either side of it.

“Sit down,” she says.

“That’s my line.”

“I stole it. Sit down.”