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always here.”
    â€œI know, Anya, I do.”
    I didn’t want to go out with my cousins, though I loved them.
    I wanted to be alone.
    By myself.
    â€œSee you next Saturday night, Toni. I’m so glad you’re coming. We want everyone to be together. All the Kozlovskys. JJ is turning into Stephi, did you hear? She’s going to have a one-night stand. And don’t worry, I’m going to bring the antiseptic spray.”
    â€œAntiseptic spray? For what?”
    Anya gasped. “So I can spray down the table at the restaurant before we sit down! Do you know the kinds of germs that lurk on restaurant tables?” She made a gagging sound, authentic, as she was gagging at the thought, and explained these germs to me in high-level bacterial detail. “Do you understand now?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œLove you so much, Toni. See you soon.”
    * * *
    My family is huge. Do not try to keep track of all of the members. It’s impossible.
    We have all immigrated to Portland from Moscow. We are in and out of each other’s lives constantly. My father calls it “The Great American Kozlovsky Escape, Praise America.”
    My father’s father, Konstantin Kozlovsky, was murdered in the Soviet Union. I can’t say more about that now. His mother, Ekaterina Kozlovskaya, died about a year before that.
    My father has three brothers. They are all tall, barrel chested, and grizzled. Black hair turning white. They would not win beauty awards. They all used to box, and none of them have straight noses. They all have scars, small and large, on their faces, and they wear the stoic expressions of Russian men, their jaws hard.
    Beneath the rigid stoicness, soft, loving, and tender hearts reside. These are men who believe in, and love, our family.
    My father’s oldest brother, Uncle Vladan, came here first when I was very young. He had been to college but worked in a factory as he refused to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. He spoke out against the government. He wanted more money for factory workers and their families who were crammed into dormitories. He wanted a free press, freedom of speech, a fair justice system, and freedom to worship. He was, as all Kozlovskys were, a secret Christian.
    The government didn’t like that, to say the least. Uncle Vladan was imprisoned. He escaped into a winter storm. He froze on his escape but kept running, and later had to have two toes removed and a finger. He went to Poland, Czechoslovakia, then Germany, then came to the States. He was in poor shape during his journey and worked any day job he could get, even through pneumonia, starving, and an infection where his toes used to be. He met my aunt Holly, a hilarious and loud person, here.
    When Aunt Holly met my uncle, she was a kindergarten teacher, and he was starting a landscape business, which meant he was mowing a lot of lawns.
    Uncle Vladan met Aunt Holly when he was mowing her parents’ lawn. His English was poor, her Russian was zero. They fell in love anyhow. He told Holly, “I give of my word to you, I make fine husband. I not always be a lawn mower.”
    Uncle Vladan kept his word. He owns a huge landscaping business now, for residential and corporate clients. He never mows lawns anymore. He cried when he bought his house ten years ago, brand new, with a sunset view. “I promised my Holly I buy her pretty home one day, and I did it. What you think, Holly?”
    Holly hugged him. “I think I love you, and when you told me you would not be a lawn mower forever, I believed you.” We all laughed.
    Aunt Holly and Uncle Vladan have two children. The oldest is my cousin Anya, the actress and hypochondriac.
    When Anya told Uncle Vladan in high school she wanted to be an actress, he gasped, hand to heart, and yelled, “What? Woe on my life. You on the stage? No. Not my daughter. You not loose woman. You go to college, you get married, have the babies, like nice