Page 5 of Aftertaste
SOUR
YEARS TRICKLED BY, his life fermenting.
HE WAS FIFTEEN, walking home. Fat textbooks slung across his shoulder, pounding into his hip. His stomach clenched and unclenched, a fist. Empty.
His mom had blown the grocery money, traded their neighbor the food stamps Kostya had painstakingly applied for—hours of bureaucratic paperwork—in exchange for six cartons of Virginia Slims. He should have smoked them himself out of spite, or resold them cheap in the school parking lot, but he didn’t like the taste, and didn’t need any more help becoming a social pariah, thank you very much.
His abdomen moaned as he passed the Russian store—the smell of Rizhsky rye and loops of dry salami such exquisite torture—and the McDonald’s—oh God, fries—and stopped at a traffic light on the corner, beneath the awning for the Olympia Greek Diner.
Kostya peered inside long enough to confirm that it was busy, most of the tables occupied, waitresses whizzing in and out of the kitchen. He pushed through the door and beelined to the coffee station, a table between the bar and bathroom that housed pots of coffee and sugar and sweetener and single-serve pods of half-and-half.
He shoved the creamers into his bag, followed by Dominos packets, and—his lucky day—a stack of individually wrapped saltines. Breakfast of Champions.
When he got home, he was so hungry that he dumped it all into a mug, mashed the saltines and sugar and creamer together before he realized that—no! no!— the half-and-halfs had turned.
He stared at the concoction, at the white chunks dotting the crackers, at the thin, sour whey pooling in the bottom of the glass.
He was so hungry he ate it anyway.
HE WAS EIGHTEEN.
An adult, technically. He had a job, stocking shelves in a bodega. Had a license, though there was no car to speak of. He could buy porn and fight a war and sign a lease if he wanted. But he still missed his dad like a little kid.
Kostya had always assumed it would get better, but it only got different. His pangs of loss had receded into a numb, ever-present ache, yet every new experience—each minor tragedy or major milestone he wished he could share with his father—soured him, made him feel as if his dad had just died, was dying all over again, like he always would be.
When the kids from school fucked with him at that party, it happened. When he had to convince the social worker that his mom was fine, it happened. When he walked across the stage at graduation, the superintendent mispronouncing his name, it happened. When he had his first drink, cashed his first paycheck, first kissed a girl, it happened. When he nursed his first heartbreak, his first hangover, his string of rejections from colleges and jobs and relationships, it happened, and happened, and happened again.
But that afternoon, when Kostya opened the door to find their landlord, to learn that he had sold their apartment—the last place Kostya had seen his dad alive, had heard his voice, had hugged him—sold it to some new guy who was raising the rent so high they couldn’t possibly stay, Kostya had wept, wept unabashedly, ugly-cried. The landlord apologized, said it was nothing personal, said his dad had been a good guy, reminded him of his own father. Kostya had been about to tell him where to shove his platitudes when he felt the puff of air, the flavor materializing in his mouth— delicate flakes of frozen limoncello, scraped with a fork, spooned into a hollowed-out rind— and felt, without really knowing how, that the landlord was being sincere. That he really was sorry. That he’d lost someone once and remembered how it ached.
HE WAS THIRTY.
Two decades fatherless, peeled back a year at a time, the segments of a lime. He had another job now—two in fact, both of which sucked. A shitty apartment, and a Craigslist roommate who’d become his best friend. A life, or something like one.
But too often, instead of looking forward, Konstantin found himself looking back.
To when he was ten, waiting at the kitchen table.
Or nine, walking through the neighborhood at dusk, sucking the wet wooden stick of a Popsicle.
Eight, holding both his parents’ hands, the thrill in his stomach as they swung him high in the air, Coney Island Cracker Jack lodged in his teeth.
Seven, lying on a patch of green grass, his dad picking wild mushrooms, peeling open their caps to show him inside.
Six. Six. The one he always came back to.
A Kyiv park, sunlight overhead, a pouch folded from newsprint weighted on his lap. Full of soft, overripe fruit. Sour cherries, their skin so thin, their flesh the bright red of a bleed.
“ Chereshnya ,” Kostya said, placing one into his mouth, the juice squirting down his throat, wonderfully tart.
“Nyet.” His father shook his head. Smiled. “Vishnya.”
They came from different trees, he explained. Had different fruit, different pits. His father’s grandmother had grown vishnya in the countryside of Ukraine, the mottled bush spilling fruit everywhere, smearing the ground with red come summer. Konstantin had never met his great-grandmother, couldn’t now that she was dead, but he could almost taste her in this bag, inside each sour cherry.
“One day,” his dad told him, “I’ll take you there. To see her village, her old dacha. To taste fruit from her tree.” He spat a pit into his hand, perfectly beige, sucked clean of flesh. “ Kostochka ,” he told Kostya, “a cherrystone.”
“Like me.” Kostya had grinned.
“Like you,” his dad agreed. “My cherrystone. So much waiting in so small a thing.”
BUT THE PAST his father promised him was gone.
His future had soured, its possibilities curdled.
Now Kostya kept his secrets, his aftertastes, in the unremarkable present. In a bland, haunted loop. He’d stay that way awhile.
But not forever.