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SWEET

THREE MONTHS AFTER his dad’s death. Konstantin’s birthday. Terrible timing.

It was fall, the leaves beginning to bronze, the air to cool, their lives to set into the strange new shape they would mold to now, Jell-O, without him.

There was a knock on the door, which was impossible, because they hadn’t had a single caller since the funeral and no one cared that Kostya had turned a year older, or that his mother hadn’t risen from her bed in days, or that there was no food in the fridge and precious little in the cabinets.

It was a delivery guy.

Flowers in his hand. A note.

His father had ordered the bouquet in advance, had settled it with the florist, had written out the card just like always, never expecting that he wouldn’t be at the door to receive it, to present it to Kostya’s mother himself.

The arrangement filled the room with thick, sweet musk. The flowers of his mother’s perfume: patchouli, lily of the valley, tuberose. The same blooms his father had given her every year since Kostya was born.

Their scent seeped through the apartment; it marinated the walls. Mama smelled it from her bed and stumbled, disbelieving, into the living room. When she saw the vase on the table, the small card stapled to it, the handwriting Sergei’s—her Sergei’s!—she gave a cry.

Kostya had been trying to read the note, struggling to decipher the slanted Cyrillic dashed across the square of card stock. He’d been lured by the recognition of his name— Костя —amid the squiggles rendered in his father’s hand. But his mother snatched it away and read it and wept like she was losing him all over again, this gift from his ghost a cruel crumb.

She hurled everything into the trash—the card, the flowers, the vase cracking in two against the bottom of the bin. But Kostya couldn’t bring himself to lug the can to the curb. It would stay there for weeks, the flowers rotting inside, their stems dissolving into mush, their petals withering brown, the odor indolent, more like death each day.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER he stole the card out of the trash, Kostya also stole a cake.

A Kyiv Torte, hazelnut meringue and thick, chocolate buttercream, from a bakery on Avenue U. He sat on a park bench in the dark and gorged himself on rich frosting, on the crispy crumble of stiff-peaked egg whites, on the way they ground to sweet, white dust between his teeth. He ate with his fingers, the sugar sticking to his skin, chocolate staining the palms of his hands.

It was too sweet after the first few bites, difficult to swallow, but he shoveled scoop after scoop into his mouth anyway, trying to fill something inside. He ate even as his body warned him to stop, and then he ate more, more , every morsel in that blue bakery box, everything, everything , all at once.

My Sweet, My Vera! the card in his pocket read. When Kostya was born, my greatest gift, I did not think I could love you more, but like always, you have proven me wrong. Today is Kostochka’s celebration, but I celebrate you. Thank you for our perfect son, and for your love, and for our lives. More than life itself, S.

Kostya had sounded it out one slippery letter at a time, the words like sugar to a cavity. My greatest gift. Our perfect son. He’d never forgive himself for how profoundly he had failed to earn that praise.