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“You know what? You have to tell me where you’ve been all this time. It has been almost a year. You were gone for a year!”
“Does it matter? Don’t change the subject.” I took a step toward the desk, placing both my hands on the edge, looking her straight in the eye. “Katia. I know my mother’s name is Katia. It’s time for you to stop lying and start telling the truth. Lies never helped anyone.”
“Baby…”
“You say you care about me. So, prove it. Who is Katia? Where is she? Why did she give me away?”
She placed her elbows on the desk and covered her face with her hands. I could hear she was breathing heavily now, as if she was on the verge of a panic attack and she was trying to keep it at bay. I pulled up a chair, sat down, and crossed my arms over my chest. I felt sorry for her, but I couldn’t back down now. If I had to, then I’d apologize later. Right now, I needed answers. And, apparently, I had to press her for them. Fine. I could do that. I was VDC. There were few things that scared me, and this woman’s panic attack caused by her own lies sure wasn’t one of them.
“I’m waiting,” I said. “Take all the time you need but know that I will not move from this spot until you tell me the truth. The whole truth. It’s the only reason I came back.”
“The only reason you came back,” she said in a weak, defeated voice.
I swallowed hard. “That and… I missed you.”
She looked up at me. “I missed you too, baby. I missed you so much. And I just couldn’t understand why you’d…”
“Mom, please. Understanding why I left isn’t rocket science. Honestly. It’s not like I was happy, or like Dad wanted me around. Let’s move on, okay? Katia. Tell me about Katia.”
She took a deep breath and released it slowly. She reached out under the desk, opened the mini fridge she had there, and pulled out two glasses and a bottle of what looked like… gin? Really?! My mother drank at work?! Wow! Since when? This woman was full of surprises.
“Since you left, I need a drink from time to time, so…” She shrugged as she poured two fingers of gin in both glasses. She pushed one over the desk toward me and took a sip of hers.
“Mom, I’m not drinking with you.”
She smiled bitterly. “You’re still calling me Mom.”
“Should I not?”
“No, no… you should. I raised you, after all.”
“You did.”
“Katia gave birth to you, but I raised you. And I did my best, please believe me. I’m sorry about your father. Stepan is… a difficult man.”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it,” I huffed.
She shot me a pained glance. “Stepan and Katia… They weren’t on good terms.”
I leaned over the table. The smell of gin entered my nostrils, and despite myself, I grabbed the glass and took a sip. Not bad.
“They were together for a while, both so poor they didn’t have a thing to eat most days. He did odd jobs here and there, she started working herself… but he didn’t agree with her… mmm… line of work. They broke up.”
“What was her line of work?”
My mom shrugged and took another sip of her drink. She was trying to dodge the question, and for once, I couldn’t blame her for it.
“She was selling her body,” I said in a stern voice.
Her eyes bore into mine. “How did you know?”
“I have my ways. So, they broke up. What then? Where are you in this story?”
“I was her friend. Before… you know. Before she started working. I knew her since we were ten, going to the same school. She dropped school after a few years,
though. She used to disappear for days. I didn’t know much about her, just that her mother was ill, and she was her only caregiver. My parents would sometimes give me food for her, but when her mother died, she vanished for a year, then came back to ask me for money. I helped her, of course. She was an orphan now. That was when I met Stepan, her boyfriend. They were both renting a room in a rundown house on the outskirts, but they were barely surviving. I helped them for a while, but I couldn’t do much for them. It wasn’t like my own family was rich. Then she vanished again, and I found out months later what she’d started doing. From Stepan.”
“So, you stole her boyfriend or what?”
