“I’m sorry I woke you,” Alex said.
“What is it?” Max said nervously.
“Nothing,” Alex said. “But now that your grandfather’s put away the tent, how are we to talk man to man? But I have something to ask you.”
Max blinked several times, chasing away sleep.
“Do you love your mama?” Alex said.
“Of course,” Max said.
“When you go away like you did today, Maksik, you make your mama so upset. She cries. She won’t eat.”
“Why won’t she eat?” Max said.
“How can you ask? Because she loves you. She’s afraid you’re not okay.”
“But I got back okay.”
“But what if something happened? You’re lucky, that’s true, I can see that. It’s a great quality in life — maybe the greatest. But you need more than luck. You need this.” Alex tapped Max’s head lightly with his finger. “Do you understand what I mean?”
Max shook his head no.
“It doesn’t matter,” Alex said. “You can’t do this anymore, son. Even if you want to, you can’t. You have to stop yourself. You have to think of your mama — and of me, and of your grandparents, who love you — and you have to come straight home from school. I am talking to you man to man about this. Do we have an agreement?”
Max didn’t say anything, but when his father also didn’t speak, he nodded.
“That’s what I like to hear. You know, if Mama and I had a daughter, I would love her just as much as I love you. But I’m glad we have you.”
Max blinked twice. “What about the tent?”
“No more tent, Max. Grown boys sleep in bed. Grown boys don’t play around in the grass like animals. You’re growing up.”
Max slid back down under the blanket and turned to face the wall. His father apologized once more for waking him. He waited for Max to say it was okay. Instead Max said: “Did you run away when you were little?”
“Never,” his father said.
“Ever?”
“Ever. Kids who don’t care about their parents run away. Who think about themselves, and only themselves. I was not like that, and neither are you.” Alex waited, then said again, “I’m sorry for waking you.”
This time his son exonerated him, and he retreated. Flushed with a positive feeling that had been difficult to imagine downstairs — he felt it most often when he finally got some time to himself, or to speak to his son without his wife’s interference — Alex shut the door to his son’s bedroom and took the steps to his own, where he discovered his wife, fully clothed and lights burning, asleep on a pitiful edge of their bed, her mouth open in fantasy. Turning the light switches with care, he went into the bathroom, where he opened the faucet only a trickle and left the toilet unflushed. When he came out, he slid the house slippers from her feet, but otherwise left her in place. This left him a smaller portion of the bed than he usually used, but he fit himself around his wife. He kissed her hair, and realized she had been smoking. Maya, Maya, he sighed. Sometimes, he felt as if he had two children. Four children.
+
After their son vanished upstairs, Eugene and Raisa sat noiselessly at the dining room table. It was late, and they felt old. Eventually, Eugene, feeling the male’s responsibility to act, stirred and gently took his wife by the soft meat under her elbow.
“Zhenya, I want to look at him one more time,” Raisa said. Eugene shrugged to say of course — how could he refuse his wife. He cherished moments like these, which usually arrived as soon as his daughter-in-law — or his son; true, his son, too — left the room. Suddenly, the proper course of action was unmuddled, the language of the room clear and direct.
They climbed the stairs, Max’s door opening for the third time since he had fallen asleep. He was wheezing softly. With satisfaction, Raisa noted that the boy remained where she’d left him. Then she remembered everything else and reclined her head against Eugene’s shoulder, rolling it back and forth in dismay.
“Did you think, when you said you’d go ice-skating with me fifty years ago,” Eugene said, “that we would be standing in America looking at our blond grandson after he spent the afternoon dunking himself in a river like a beaver?”
“I’m frightened, Eugene.”
He touched her shoulder quietingly and strode into the bedroom. “Eugene!” Raisa hissed. “Let him be.”
“I’m awake,” Max said.
“He’s awake,” Eugene forgave himself, but in a whisper, because if Alex heard, Eugene would get an earful. “I want to talk to my grandson. When can I talk to my grandson without everyone else interrupting?”
Raisa threw her hands at the ceiling: “Should I leave you two alone?”
Eugene studied his wife’s silhouette in the doorway. He perceived just how much Raisa had to restrain herself so as not to antagonize their son and his wife. He wished to give her some great freedom. In seventy years, had she not earned at least that? He said to her, mocking the sudden sincerity but also sincere: “I am no one without you.”
Max watched them solemnly.
“What are you staring at, Columbus?” Eugene turned back to his grandson and lowered himself to the bed. A knee cracked, and Eugene wailed comically. He tickled Max’s belly through the blanket. “How long are you going to sleep in pajamas, heh? Are you a grown-up or what? Grown-ups sleep in briefs and nothing else. Grown-ups make the room cold, so their lungs get bigger in the night. Do you understand? Who’s going to have the biggest lungs in the world?”
“Me,” Max obeyed.
“That’s right. Now let’s talk business.” Eugene reached into the back pocket of his slacks and pulled out his wallet. “This, by the way,” he said, pulling out a square photo with foxed edges, “is your grandmother fifty years ago. Heh? Look at that.”
Max sat up and ran his fingers over the photo’s ancient matting.
“She was the most beautiful girl in the world,” Eugene said. He looked at the doorway. “And still is.” Letting Max hold on to the photo, he reached back into the billfold and withdrew twenty dollars. “Now listen. Every week you don’t do what you did today, you get one of these. You follow? You go back to sleeping in your bed and you stay there, you get two of these. Shake with me, because once you’ve shaken, it’s a shame to go back on it. Give it here.” Eugene stuck out a paw. Max placed his hand inside it.
“Do I need to teach you how to shake?” Eugene said.
“Eugene, leave him be,” Raisa pleaded from the door.
“Woman, don’t interrupt,” Eugene said playfully. Max dropped his hand, giving up.
“Come on!” his grandfather badgered him, but then let it go, shaking his head. He reached under Max’s bed and pulled out the board with the pouches of grass. He opened the one in the upper-left-hand corner and clawed out the wisps of dried grass. Raisa approached and took them from his hand as Max watched apprehensively. Eugene rolled up the twenty and stuffed it into the pouch.
“Until every one of these is filled with a twenty, you can’t touch the money, okay?” he said. “I see the money gone, I see the grass back, it’s all over. You forfeit all the money, lose the game. Does a Rubin lose?”
“No,” Max said.
“The only person I lose to is you,” Eugene said. “Do we have a deal?”
“I am about to pull you away from him by the ears,” Raisa complained.
“My commanding officer has ordered me to retreat,” Eugene said to Max. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Max said softly. He watched his grandparents go.
+
With no Rubins left to interfere with his sleep, Max sped down a creek astride a muskellunge pike, its scales sparkling under the water. Maneuvering around deadwood and stones, the fish split the creek with the speed of an arrow, the black buttons of its eyes occasionally sweeping up toward the riders. The other passenger was the odd boy from the house — he had circled his arms around Max’s waist and dropped his head against Max’s shoulder. He was burbling something—bah, bah, bah—but didn’t seem to be afraid.