Heart Condition

Chapter Twenty-Four: Dish

I hugged Mrs. Malone, who took a step back and looked at her bashful son’s face.

            “See?” She smiled, “I told you I’d behave. Now, I’ll let you show her around the house. Elle, come with me and help put the silverware on the table.”

            When she took Nellie’s hand, I turned to Sasha and waited for the sound of drawers and dishes. I smiled,  “So. Alexander.”

            He shook his head, “Never. Not here, not at school…” He walked toward the living room, and I was enamored; the house was beautiful. But of course, it was supposed to be, because his mother probably insisted.

            Everything was warm about the house; tan plush furniture, golden brown walls and maple mantles. Splashes of maroon and burnt orange made it feel like autumn would never leave. It reminded me of the sky during the Harvest Moon, and the way it looked as the sun set over the Bay.

            “Where did the name come from?” I asked, watching him lead me toward the stairs.

            “My room’s up here.” He said absently, returning to the topic at hand “My Bubbe gave it to me when I was little.”

            I stared, and stopped at the top rung “Your Bubbe?”

            He smiled, “My grandmother, on my mom’s side. She was from Poland, and in the old country, she had an uncle named Alexander who they called Sasha. He got them passage out of Ciechanów.”

            The way he said the word struck me; he spoke it easily, as if he’d been speaking Polish his entire life.

            I whispered, “So you’re only…second generation?”

            He smiled, nodding, “We still celebrate Hanukkah, and we used to participate in Yom Kipur. You’d think that I’d feel weird not showering for twenty-four hours, but I mean, we’d done it for so long, I barely noticed.”

            “I bet it was bad if it landed on game days.” I smiled.

            He nodded, “That was the worst. But Dad never let me miss a game on that day; he isn’t Jewish, which meant he didn’t partake. Therefore, I had to wear leather, because of my cleats. So I guess that makes me a bad Jewish person.”

            We walked down the hall, and I asked, “Do you…go to the church with the rabbis and all of that?”

            “Since my parents separated, not so much.” He furrowed his brow, “I mean, even growing up, we didn’t celebrate all of the holidays. After my Bubbe passed away, we stopped going to temple. I had my Bar Mitzvah, but we’d just moved to San Francisco, so it wasn’t a big deal.”

            I leaned against the railing at the top of the staircase, resting my chin on my forearm. “You didn’t always live in The City?” I asked, watching him take a moment of preparation to dive back into his past.

            He shook his head, “No. My parents are originally from Mariposa, which is about an hour southwest of Yosemite. I lived there until I was about two or three, and then all the technology stuff started taking off, so my dad got a job here in San Francisco, and we’ve lived here ever since.”

            I stared, wide-eyed “Wow. Yosemite. That’s so crazy; no wonder you hiked Half Dome.”

            He started to walk down the hallway, his voice carried “Oh, yeah. It’s so beautiful there; you wouldn’t believe it.”