CHAPTER 10

The three of us make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in our family kitchen and drink glasses of milk.

We're whispering and licking our fingers and watching the sunrise over our backyard with a rusted May pole and a sagging, old clothesline.

It feels like in the few hours we've been together Lexi and Mozey have become fast friends.

And that's even stranger than unusual because my brother has never had any friends.

I drum my fingers and pick my cuticles, nervous about my parents waking up and what the hell we'll say to them.

These two are laughing and talking video games like they've known each other for years.

"What do you say we tell Mom and Dad that Mozey is your friend?" I try to sound casual and then down some milk to compensate.

This gets both of their attention, and they stop talking and stare at me, trying to guess where I'm going with this.

"My mom and dad might get the wrong idea if they think you're here with me.

Maybe you could be Lexi's friend from school? It would make it easier on me."

"Sure," Mozey says with the lightest hint of a smile.

"I've never really brought anyone home before," I say finally to qualify what I mean.

It's humiliating to say it, not just because it's the truth but it also forces us to admit that Mozey coming all this way sort of implies something.

"I mean, it's not like I brought you, but we've got to say something."

Lexi nods at me solemnly, and Mozey just smiles.

"Lex, are we lovers at college or just study partners?" he asks, hitting him playfully on the back.

Mozey adapts to the lie without question, instantaneously.

Really adapts, like at a frightening pace.

He can obviously do bullshit, and from the looks of it, he likes doing it too.

Lexi is caught so off guard he might choke on his sandwich.

"What do we study? Hell, where do we go? Or we could just be buddies from the gym—that way I won't have to know anything about school."

Lexi is processing, and it's painful to watch.

This must be hard from him because friendship is one thing he just doesn't do.

And, my brother, couldn't fool anyone for even an instant that he'd ever stepped foot in a gym.

He's a skinny schlub, he's a pale pansy, he's what they call a man of the spirit and not, just not, of the flesh.

But Mozey is all body, and at the mention of the gym, my eyes scan his broad shoulders and his biceps that are hugged tightly by any shirt he wears.

As usual my mind scans right over undressing him to imagining him naked, erect, reaching those strong arms out for me.

Please, stop it, Lana.

You're sick .

"Gym friends—you're his trainer."

I speed out as fast as I can.

"You two hit it off, and you were already coming this way.

You're a wrestling coach and your name is Cruz and you really like the ladies."

"And I smoke Newports and drink wine coolers.

I'm not Mexican, just a white guy with a killer tan," Mozey adds, smiling.

"And you have a motorcycle and you like heavy metal."

I'm giddy off no sleep and our dumb joke.

Lexi is looking at us like we're insane or might be loaded on drugs.

"I collect wrenches and lug nuts, and I always smell like grease."

"Yeah and you love dark beer and rare steak and sleeping naked.

And you snack on apricots for iron."

I'm tired and punchy, and I could probably riff with Mozey all night.

Mozey doesn't answer, and both him and Lexi stare at me.

"Apricots? I don't even know who you are, Doc.

I like you better already in Michigan," Mozey says, looking at me with eyes so brightly lit it makes me feel like we're both plugged into the same electrical wire.

"Apricots," Mozey repeats and chokes on his milk.

He laughs so hard it comes out of his nose.

I'm laughing too and holding my stomach, feeling both happy and scared enough to puke.

I'm giddy when I'm around him, and I feel ridiculously light.

Lexi is laughing too and that warms my heart.

My brother rarely laughs, so it's a very special moment.

"It's a stone fruit," my father says, walking into the kitchen looking like a cross between Wee Willy Winkie and Lenin in his beard and nightgown.

His slippers are well worn and his hair sticks up everywhere.

"Who likes apricots? We may have some dried ones in the cupboard."

My father was born in Detroit; his parents immigrated after the war.

My mother, on the other hand, came when she was just sixteen.

One year later she married my father, and the rest is family history.

But they waited a while for the babies.

Two babies in total.

Those would be Lex and me.

My dad has always taken care of my mom as she's never fully mastered English.

She often seems like she comes from a different time period; she left before the dissolution of the Soviet era, but her whole aesthetic stayed there.

Mozey takes in my dad with genuine intrigue, and he stands to offer him his hand.

"I'm a friend of Alexei's.

I came to help out it you have to move.

I just got introduced to Lana."

Okay, Mozey, don't try to be overly convincing.

I just this very second met her.

I don't even know her from Adam.

"Svetlana," my dad says, coming in for a hug.

I hug him back hard and breathe in the scent of cherry wood tobacco in his beard.

"You're mother and I have a paper route.

Would you like to help us out this morning?"

"Oh, that explains why you're up so damn early."

"It pays the small bills," my father says, pouring himself some steaming tea.

"Your name is Sweat Lana?" Mozey asks quietly, his eyes wide with surprise.

I roll mine at him in response.

"Svetlana," my father says, coming to the table with his toast, overpronouncing the v.

"How is work?" I blush at the word "work" and avert my eyes from Mozey's.

"Work is good, Dad, you know.

Just trying to get myself established while not losing the house."

It comes off as callous, but I don't mean it that way.

It's not their fault they lost their jobs or that they fell victim to the mortgage bubble.

My mom and dad are hard working, honorable people.

"You work very hard, my dear.

I don't know what we'd do without you," he says, sincerely biting into a large slice of black rye toast loaded with butter.

My mother pads down the stairs next, in curlers and a bathrobe.

She yelps when she sees me and immediately fusses over both me and my brother.

"I'll make blini," she says, pulling my hair back from my face while standing behind me.

She's eyeing Mozey with suspicion, and she probably should.

I'm suspicious of him too.

Why the hell did he come this far just to help me and my family move? "Ma, Mozey is here to help us.

If we lose in court, he'll help us, you know with the furniture and the heavy stuff," I say, biting into the toast my dad has pushed onto my plate.

"Strong," my mother says, patting her own flabby triceps.

Pantomime is my mother's main form of communication, except for yelling at my father in Russian.

Lexi and I never learned to speak it besides a quick "spasiba" and hurried "preevyet" shouted at our grandparents.

Typical, lazy, American kids.

Always relying on English.

That's what my grandfather accused us of while my grandmother tried to drill phrases into us "just in case, we had to go back to the old world."

But Lex and I always preferred American cartoons and pop culture to the awkward Russian dances sponsored monthly by the local Owl's Club chapter.

My family often accuses me of not being invested in my Russian roots.

Those accusations reached a fever pitch in high school when I changed my last name from Filchenkov to Finch and started going by Lana.

My uncle did the surname switch first, and I jumped aboard right after him.

Lexi and I both go by Finch now, and our parents absolutely hate it.

But the way I see it is that we were born in this country so they can't take away our affections and loyalty to it.

I've never been to Russia, and I'll probably never be able to afford to.

I'm as ethnically Russian as you can be, but I'm a motor city girl who's Motown at heart.

I like who I am and I wouldn't change it for the world.

But changing my name made things easier.

It cuts through the judgmental shit.

So Finch it will be, whether they like it or not.

Two hours later we're piled into Alexei's escort crammed in between hundreds of rolled-up Detroit metro newspapers.

We let my parents go back to bed, promising to take care of the route, but now my eyelids are heavy and it's starting to rain.

"Coffee, comrades?" Lexi asks when he puts the car into gear and backs out of our driveway.

Our house looks like it's on the verge of collapse.

The paint is practically all peeled off the fa?ade.

It was once a sweet Robin's eggshell blue, but now it's an old gray bird molting all of its feathers.

But I grew up there, and it's the only roof over my parent's heads.

I sigh out loud, and Mozey reaches across the seat of the car and flicks my knee through my jeans.

I look up at him surprised, and he smiles at me through his long, dark lashes.

"This is fun! I'm glad I came, really, Sweat Lana."

I pick up a rolled newspaper and thwap him on the head.

But just one little touch from him makes me start to think about all the naughty things I would do to him if we weren't separated by age or by my job or by my connections to Pathways.

We chuck most of the papers, and Mozey is good at it.

Turns out he's not only strong, but he's got a good pitching arm.

I pass the papers to him from the back seat, and Lexi drives slow and steady trying to avoid having to break.

We're a pretty efficient paper delivery team.

The only part that sucks is I have to jump out when his aim is off and dart through the rain, to get the paper by the mailbox or the doorstep and I feel like a fool doing it.

"Drive faster, Lex.

I want to go home and go to bed!" I can't believe my poor parents do this seven days a week; it's not an easy task.

"How come they don't do this in LA?" Mozey asks.

"I'd be good at this job."

"Because no one reads an actual physical paper any more, people just look at it online."

My brother rambles on about the disappearance of print while the rain gets heavier bent on melting the snow.

I fall asleep in the car, listening to Lex and Mozey's murmuring voices.

I feel so strangely content, as if we gained another family member.

And maybe Lex a new friend; he's so relaxed around Mo.

I've never seen him like this.