by Mara White
“No. I know that guy!” I say, slapping his arm. Not to mention I’m attracted to him.
“Wow, really? That is so cool! Go act like you’re excited to see him, it looks like he arrived alone.”
I swivel back around and gobble the Danish, self-conscious of my own existence. Why the hell are we in the same place? I’m here for housing court. It’s not like we’re both traveling home for Christmas! Act normal. Act normal! Stop devouring day old baked goods. Do I acknowledge him? No, I pretend I didn’t see him. I explicitly told him he could not come! He obviously didn’t listen to me.
But I don’t have to worry about what to do next because my asshole brother stands and gestures frantically to him.
“Get down!” I say, yanking on his arm and trying to pull him into his seat.
Ohmygodohmygodohmyf-u-c-k-inggod! This may very well indeed be my worst moment.
Mozey strides over toward Lexi, looking confused but then breaks into a smile when he sees me. He waves, and I salute him, feeling suddenly nauseous.
“Finch! I thought that was you. Shit, I’m so glad I found you! I thought I’d have to do a lot more looking than this. I didn’t expect you to pick me up at the station. Especially without knowing I was coming!”
He’s confident and flippant. How else would I expect him to be? He’s a chronic rule breaker—that happens to be how I know him. Delinquent to social worker. We are not friends.
I sip more coffee and wipe the sticky Danish from my lips while I nod at him like I’m crazy.
“How do you know each other?” Lexi asks, his head rotating back and forth between us.
“Work,” I say, looking at Mozey. “This is my brother, Lex.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mozey says, moving his backpack to the other shoulder while he pumps Lexi’s hand.
Lexi is dumbfounded, and I’m speechless. Not to mention I also feel like I might pee my pants from excitement.
“What are you doing in Michigan?” I ask him, suspicious of his presence. Like he’s following me because he’s a secret agent or a government spy sent to evaluate me and my program. We’ve already touched on the undercover thing, and he swore that he wasn’t. But what spy says he’s a spy? Aren’t they supposed to deny it forever?
Maybe he’s supernatural, he’s some kind of an alien wearing human skin, and when he kissed me, he implanted a homing device. I pass him my coffee, with my head cocked, thoroughly examining him. He takes it from me, looking confused.
“Drink it!” I say.
And he takes a tentative sip while Lexi and I stare at him. I don’t know what I’m expecting to accomplish with this. Maybe he’ll melt away at the contact of the hot liquid or change color or turn to stone—somehow reveal himself to me. He’s an enigma this man—I can’t believe he’s standing right in front of me. But he just licks his beautiful lips and smiles…
“God, Lana, that tastes really, really awful.”
I take the cup from him and chug the rest still waiting for some kind of revelation to help this surreal encounter make sense. His English is perfect. He’s so smart and articulate. He’s a phenomenal artist and has a wrestlers body. I’ve never met anyone like him in the real world before, let alone the line-up of messed up kids paraded through my office. NEVER anyone like him. Never anyone like Mozey—not even remotely.
“Did you set this up?” I ask, turning to Lexi and narrowing my eyes at him. Is this a prank show? Is someone fucking with me?
“Answer me, Cruz. Why are you in Michigan?”
“Remember when we talked the day before yesterday and you said I couldn’t come?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I didn’t think you could do it alone. So I just didn’t listen to you. I got on a bus that night. Been riding for three days.”
“I have my family to help me. If we have to vacate, we’ll hire movers,” I say, eyeing him incredulously. But what I’m really thinking is—what the hell? Someone put you up to this?
“Okay, sure, but now you’ve got me too.”
And I want him. I want him. I really, really want him. But I don’t want him to know it. Not to mention I’ll get fired for this. I’ll lose my fucking job—the only one in my family.
“You came all the way to Michigan? How were you going to find me?”
“How many Lana Finch’s can there be?”
Gulp. Because that’s not really my name. It’s my legal name at least, but not what I’m known by to my family and friends. He never would have found me.
Lexi stares on completely enraptured by our exchange.
“Do you have a place to stay? Did you let your probation officer know?”
“No and yes,” he says, pulling out a folded piece of paper. “He signed off on a week. I told him it was for community service. So that makes you a community, and I came to Michigan to service you.” His smile is ridiculous, both gorgeous and flirty. He adjusts his pack again and groans. That thing looks really heavy.
“I’ll just stay in a shelter or something. I’m used to finding a place to sleep on the lam. It’s only fair that I help you, Lana. You’ve already helped me so much.”
I feel woozy at his words, and my heart swells like a Pillsbury oven time lapse sequence with something that feels like pride.
“Mozey, I get paid to help you. That’s what I do at my job.”
He looks down at the floor and shifts his feet. He nods his head and pulls the beanie off, and his hair cascades over his face. I look up in time to see Lexi’s reaction. He’s impressed with the hair; I knew he would be. Lex and I used to listen to some hair bands way back in the day. We pretended to shake it even though we never had quite the right hair or attitude to shake.
“You can stay with us. For as long as we have the house, which might not be much longer. We’re fighting the bank at this point, and they just want us out,” Lex says out of the blue all on his own. My brother who never has a voice, who I’ve spent my whole life trying to wrangle words from. Who feeds me his empty shrugs and vacant stares in response, has a whole goddamned sentence for Mozey. Not to mention, an impressive one.
Fuck! Thank you, asshole brother. But at the same time, THANK YOU. I would have never had the nerve to invite him myself.
I’m wearing my grandmother’s jacket, which is decidedly dowdy, and I’m gross from flying and a late night of packing. But somehow with Mozey, I don’t feel self-conscious about my looks, about my weirdo brother, his junker car or my crazy parents and arriving at their run-down house. I’m sure he’s seen worse, and he’s probably seen better, but for the first time in my fucked up life, I feel like I can let my guard down around a man. Maybe it’s something about his ease with Lex or maybe it’s the fact he practically crossed the whole country in defiance to stand by my side. Or maybe it’s because he’s so hot that if I tried to keep my guard up, the stress from his hotness might make me pop a damn hormone.
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, over-pronouncing 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 façade. 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.
“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.
Chapter 11
Housing court is two days later, and our extension isn’t granted. We’re given two days to vacate the house and move my parents in with my uncle Viktor, the one whose last name is Finch and who doesn’t get along with my dad. My mom thinks his wife, Aunt Kirsten is too artificial and that she doesn’t care about her kids. I think she intimidates Mom, somehow makes her feel inadequate and old-fashioned.
