Page 15 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
The problem is that I see him every day.
“There’s no problem,” I say. “I’m letting it go.”
Mara looks at me the way she has always looked at me when I am saying something we both know is not true. She doesn’t push. She picks her pasta back up, and we watch television for an hour, and she lets me pretend, which is the kindest thing she could do.
Roman is already in his office when I arrive. His jacket is on the back of his chair, and he’s on the phone, standing at the window with his back to the glass. He glances at me when I come in to leave his briefing on the desk, and then looks away, and then looks back.
That second look.
It’s not long. Half a second at most. But I feel it between my shoulder blades all the way back to my desk.
This is the thing that has been happening for two weeks, and I don’t know what to do with it. He’s not exactly different.
He’s Roman, the same Roman he has always been, clipped and precise and completely unreadable to anyone who doesn’t know how to read him. But I do know how to read him, and somethingin the frequency of his attention has shifted in a way I cannot account for and cannot stop noticing.
The morning moves the way mornings move. Emails, calls, and a document revision that needs to go back to legal before noon.
I move in and out of his office four times, and each time the air in the room does the thing it has been doing, and I keep my face level and my voice even, and I don’t let any of it show.
At three o’clock, he calls me in to go over the agenda for Friday’s board meeting.
I sit across from his desk with my tablet, and he sits behind it with his reading glasses on, and we go through the agenda item by item, the way we have gone through a hundred agendas before, and everything is completely normal, and I am dying.
He is right there. The glasses, the open collar, the way he drags one hand across his jaw when he’s thinking through something. I have cataloged all of it over two years from a careful professional distance, and that distance was always enough, it was always manageable, and now it is not, and I don’t have anything to replace it with.
“The Morrison item,” he says, without looking up. “Move it to the end. I want the Rezenkov numbers presented first while the room is still paying attention.”
“I’ll have the revised agenda to you by five.”
He makes a small sound of acknowledgment and turns a page, and I look at my tablet screen and type a note I don’t need to type because I will not forget it. I never forget anything he tells me, and the room is very quiet except for the sound of him turning pages and my own typing.
Then he looks up.
“Is there something else?” I say. My voice is even. I am extremely proud of my voice.
He holds it for one more second. “No,” he says. “That’s everything.”
I close my tablet and stand and walk to the door, and I don’t hurry because hurrying would mean something, and I am not giving this room anything it can use against me.
I make it back to my desk, sit down, and press one hand flat against the surface of it and breathe.
Five o’clock cannot come fast enough.
My father’s house in Queens smells the same as it always has. Garlic and something baked. I stand in the hallway for a moment after I close the door and let it settle over me the way it always does, like something I didn’t know I needed until I was already inside it.
Papa is in his chair by the window. He looks up when he hears me, and his face does the thing it has always done, opening into something warm and immediate, and I cross the room and kiss his cheek and pull the footstool over and sit close to him the way I have sat since I was small.
He looks tired.
A tiredness that lives in the eyes and in the set of the shoulders and doesn’t go away when he smiles.
“You look thin,” he says, which is his version ofI missed you.
“You look like you haven’t been sleeping,” I say, which is my version ofI’m worried about you.
He waves a hand. “I sleep fine. How is work?”
“Work is work, Papa.”
