Our Country Friends(8)

“We’re related?” It was such an adult question. But Karen could see where it came from.

“Sure,” she said. “In a sense.”

“My daddy said Uncle Ed was coming, but he doesn’t like to play with children.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“But I don’t remember you at all.”

“Let me drive you up in my car.”

“Mommy said I should never get into a stranger’s car.”

“Mommy’s supersmart about that. But I’m not a stranger.”

“That’s what a stranger would say.” The logic on her.

“True. But I really think they might be worried about you. It’s going to be dark any second.”

“Okay, but I have to say goodbye to the sheep and the sheepdog.”

“Cool. I’d like to see that.”

The child went up to the fence separating her from the barking, braying animals. “Goodbye, sheep. Goodbye, Luna,” she said. And then bowed rigidly, like a boy-band member accepting an award. The animals seemed to calm down instantly, as if they had seen this routine before. Luna, her growl now hoarse and simmering, followed them to the brightly lit car with its clever Mancunian voices on the satellite radio.

“I don’t really know how to buckle in a child,” Karen admitted to herself as much as to Nat. “Also, I realize you and I shouldn’t be too close.”

“Because of the virus,” Nat said.

    “Yeah, until this is over. Which will be really soon.”

“Or not,” said the girl. Smart like her mother, Karen thought, and just as optimistic. She buckled her into the back realizing she had never smelled a child’s sweat before and that everything they said about it was true. “Thanks, Aunt Karen,” the child said politely. The last time she had seen Senderovsky he had complained at length about his daughter’s difficulties and the fifty-nine-thousand-dollar tuition at a school that not only tolerated differences but, according to its card-stock brochure, celebrated them, to the point where Karen turned on her friend and with an eye roll that was a standard part of her vocabulary said, “Gee, maybe you should send her back to China.”

She drove slowly up the long driveway, checking on her passenger in the rearview mirror. Even in the dusk, she could spot the white branches littering the front lawn like an arboreal Gettysburg. All these years and Senderovsky still couldn’t take care of himself. That thought made her grin. Same, same Sasha. Her headlights caught an unfamiliar figure running toward them from the house, screaming very distinctly, “Nat! Nat! Nat!,” and Karen’s passenger announced, “That’s my mommy.” Karen squinted. She had always held the image of Masha from the early days when they were all worried that she didn’t eat enough. Masha, in her motherly haste, almost ran headlong into the car, so that Karen had to pull over into the grass, a giant white oak branch crunching beneath a wheel.

Masha opened the back door and began to unbuckle her daughter, fingers fumbling, as she half shouted, half cried, “Where were you? Where were you? Where were you?”

“She was singing to the sheep,” Karen said, quietly, having learned how to deal with unhappy parents in her formative stage, though that wasn’t fair to Masha. “It was cute.” They had all exited the car now, and Masha was on her knees on the gravel, bits of it stinging her feet, holding the child by the shoulders.

“You don’t do that!” she shouted. She grabbed the long tie, one of Sasha’s, most likely, and began to unwind it with fumbling fingers.

“No!” Nat cried. “Mommy, leave it on!”

“You’ll choke yourself,” Masha said as she ripped off the tie and shoved it into the pocket of her kaftan. The girl started crying loudly. Karen could now see Sasha descending from the house in what she refused to believe was a dressing gown. She did not understand Masha’s fear. Had she really thought her daughter had run away from them? Where would she go?

    “I probably should park the car,” she said.

“Ah! Ah! Ah!” Senderovsky shouted. “Karen! Nat!” He looked disheveled and emaciated, and had carried himself like a fifty-year-old since he was eighteen. “You found her!” he said to Karen. “Oh, thank you. We thought she had run away. We almost woke up Ed to help with the search.”

“Ed can’t even find himself,” Karen said. “And he’s looked literally everywhere.”

Senderovsky laughed. “So good to see you,” he said. “If only we could hug.”

Karen blew him a kiss. They looked at his wife and his daughter on the gravel, Masha whispering to her in Russian, words that only Senderovsky could understand, a calming mantra she deployed only in the most dire of circumstances: “I have a wonderful family and wonderful friends. I can do anything if I work hard and am kind to other people.”

The mantra must have worked. The girl leaned over and kissed her mother several times on the brow and had her kisses returned. Senderovsky, with a creaking Russian oy, bent down and did the same, his dressing gown now draped in mud. “We do that to make sure we’re the right prairie dogs,” the girl explained to Karen.

“I’m sorry?”

“Prairie dogs have to kiss each other to make sure they’re related because there’s so many of them,” Senderovsky said.