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Sometimes I ask myself, nu, Pasha, how is the trade? That for this? After all, you know?
    “But look here. When I come home, I see that woman.” A big, hairy thumb pointed to Aunt Viv. She inspected them from the sides of her eyes. Belatedly, Slava realized that it was her lathering that had sent Uncle Pasha into action. “And she sets everything straight. Out there”—now it was America outside the window—“it’s someone else’s. But with her? I’d go into a foxhole with her. She’s one of us. You follow?” The sausage fingers rested inside the black waves of Slava’s hair. “You know what I’m talking about, Slava.” One of Uncle Pasha’s thumbs pivoted inside Slava’s shoulder blade until Slava was staring at Vera. “You’re off taking care of a man’s business, I understand. You think I liked listening to my mother? I went into the Red Army half to get out of that house. Six o’clock in the morning, she’d pull the covers off me. One morning, God bless her, she emptied a vase over my head. But you know what happened when I got into the army? Six in the morning would have been a gift from the skies. How about four-thirty in the morning? And they don’t pour water on you if you stay in bed; they break your legs, especially if you’re a little Yid with a big nose. They’ll take any excuse to give you something to remember them by. I missed my mother a lot in the army. You don’t know what you have until you’ve given it up, like a young idiot. Don’t be an idiot, Slava.”
    Slava didn’t say anything. You just had to let the pitch run its course. Uncle Pasha held Slava’s shoulders like a rudder. They gazed emptily at the strange horizon before them.
    “I have to go to the bathroom,” Slava lied.
    “Slava, Slava,” Pasha sighed. He nodded and kissed his nephew with big blue lips. Then he slapped Slava’s shoulders and walked back to Aunt Viv, the army of love in retreat.
    Slava rose and ducked into the kitchen. He opened the faucet so it looked like he was doing something and watched the water come down, a solid, unwavering cylinder. With a tick of irritation, he noticed another body enter the room.
    “I haven’t seen you in forever,” Vera said in an English swollen by both Russia and Brooklyn.
    Slava looked up at her with a wild, dumb expression. “You remember me,” he said.
    “How do you mean?” she said, confused. “You look the same.”
    “You, too,” he rushed to lie.
    She had a round face with long, lined eyelashes, and her black skirt was tighter than you would find in a funeral etiquette book. Slava could see the unstarved ball of her knee behind black panty hose. He felt a warm liquid slosh in his stomach.
    “Your grandmother—” she started to say, then the tips of her nails flew up to cover her mouth, and a second later, she burst into tears. A second after that, she was weeping into Slava’s shoulder, a shudder with each sob. Her palms pressed his shoulder blades, her breasts pressed his chest, and her tears dripped into the shoulder seam of his dress shirt. Frantic, he arched out his ass to put some distance between his groin and her groin.
    She pulled away. “I got mascara all over your shirt,” she said, laughing through the tears. He reached to brush it off, but her fingers closed over his. “No, no,” she said. The cubes of her heels clicked past him. She leaned into the fridge, giving him an uncensored view of her rear end, and withdrew a bottle of seltzer, whereupon she began to dab his shoulder with a paper towel soaked in bubbles. His hard-on retreated.
    “I must look like hell,” she said, and blew her nose into the bubbly paper towel.
    “N-no,” he mustered.
    “She’s in heaven now,” she said through phlegm.
    “Do we have a heaven?” he said. He saw a celestial elevator physically hoisting the deceased.
    “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Do I have—” She pointed at her eyes.
    “No, it’s fine,” he said. She was an expert