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Becky doesn’t buy it. “Sure. Jace goes overseas and spends weeks getting needle tattoos. Do you know how painful that is? How long it takes? He might be a nut job.”
Her bitterness is unmistakable.
“You don’t like him, do you?” My heart falls at the thought. She’s my best friend, and usually, I value her opinion.
“I never said that. I do like him.”
“Liar.”
“I do. I actually do, Lu. You know what I don’t like?” Her gaze narrows. “Lies. Can’t fucking stand them. I don’t like secrets either. And I have a feeling Jace has a handful.”
When we’re done, I take a train to Brighton Beach, which is way too far to go grocery shopping, but I’m excited to have my fridge stocked with yummy Eastern-European food as well as the candy that Becky eats with the speed of light.
Stepping off the train, I’m surrounded by Cyrillic letters on every sign, which instantly reminds me of Mom.
When I came to Brighton Beach for the first time, every little story Mom told me came alive. Her hanging out on the beach in the summer, taking strolls on the boardwalk, feeding seagulls, and ignoring the stern, overly open stares of the older immigrants who crowd the many benches. Fake designer logos and excessive bling in clothes shops. Foods from every corner of the former USSR and pastry sellers out on the streets. Crowds of smoking men with mug-shot faces and women of all ages in dresses and high heels outside restaurants at night. The overwhelming number of parties and the loud music in cars. The notorious double-parking. Eastern-European flags on license plates.
“Come back to the USSR,” Mom calls the seven blocks under the elevated train tracks that drip all year round and the trains that deafen passersby. “And no one parties like the Hispanics and Eastern Europeans, trust me.”
I wish Mom came here more often. She came half a year ago, spent two days partying with her friends in Sokoloff, the popular restaurant on the Brighton boardwalk, and flew back. I asked her to come for my exhibit, but Dad is having hand surgery, so it’s not happening.
My parents don’t exactly have money to splurge. They lost their jobs during the pandemic. My biological father offered to pay for my university and the dorms and anything else I wanted. But I want to make it on my own. It’s not out of bitterness, no. I don’t even know my biological father very well, despite having met up with him a bunch of times when I learned about him.
It’s not his fault my mom never told him she was pregnant, then married my dad who adopted me, then chose not to tell me or my biological father until I was eighteen.
“Why?” I shouted when she told me several years ago.
“Because youhavea father. Mikeisyour father. And I wanted you to be an adult to know the facts.” Her accent got heavier when she got bitter. So did her smoking.
“Facts, she says. That’s not fair!” I shouted. “I had the right to know!”
“See? Grownup and still can’t take it like one. Baby, take time thinking it over instead of shouting.”
Easy for her to say. Mom has the patience of a partisan and the calm of a python. She is impossible to argue with.
My dad is impossible not to love, especially when he wrapped me in a hug that day and said, “You’ve always been mine. The rest is just a biological detail.”
And that biological detail turned out to be a handsome man on the heavy side with a family of his own. I wouldn’t care much, but strange unease and curiosity fill me knowing that that man’s DNA runs in my body, that I was made out of his flesh, or a sperm, an accidental particle—whatever.
Bags with food from a Ukrainian deli make my arms hurt as I struggle like a hag lady back toward the subway station. I could’ve taken a cab, but that’s extra money I don’t need to spend, considering I just spent a fortune on candy for Becky.
Then there comes a text.
Father #2: Hey, kiddo. How is everything?
My bio dad.Dad—I struggle to call him that. Father is more appropriate like there’s an emotional difference in the words. Having two dads is strange.
I’m about to text back when my eyes catch a familiar figure across the street. My heart thumps in my chest in surprise—Jace, talking to a man.
Jace? In Brighton?
They shake hands and split.
I’m about to call Jace’s name, but he’s walking away too fast. So I hurriedly cross the road toward his companion who stands smoking at the curb, typing something on his phone.
“Excuse me,” I say with the widest smile I can pull off.
He’s in his fifties, dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, gold watch and necklace. His hostile expression is definitely an Eastern-European trademark, with no hint of friendliness when he raises his cold eyes to me.
