Free Calamity and Other Stories by Daphne Kalotay

dark lipstick, tan stockings, and matching outfits from twenty years ago to go see a movie with her friends. Her ankles puff over the tops of little fur-lined boots.
    The change machine is broken again, but Mr. Tyne has already left, his bag heavy with loot. Sergei hopes Val won’t raise the stakes again this Friday. The third man is a retired physicist named Miro. He has bad luck with poker and mutters to himself in Belorussian. His wife does things in the kitchen all night long, and every half-hour or so calls out some comment or other, always something brief, anxious, and inconsequential.
    When Sergei sits in Miro’s dark apartment on a Friday night, dealing out the worn plastic cards, he thinks to himself that all over this city young people must be having fun and making love. For some reason—the long hours at Sunshine Cleaners, he supposes—he has yet to find those people. American ones, that is. Not the Russians Val has introduced him to, and whom he sees frequently: glossy-haired Yelena, her sister; her cousin; their neighbors and friends. He’s in America now; why should he hang around with them all the time? When he walks home from work at seven every evening, Sergei wishes there were a bar to stop into on the way, where he could meet other thirty-yearolds. People outside of his circle, friends to make on his own, nothing to do with Yelena. But it’s a college town founded by Puritans; the only bar on his route is a big one with booths and fried food and students in baseball caps.
    Sergei wonders about the tall girl, what she does when she isn’t reading magazines or copying poetry or telling Sergei, “You disgust me!” Perhaps her friends, like Sergei’s, are aging geniuses. Sergei doubts it. He pictures them young and female. He has run out of quarters.
    He will have to run down the block to change a twenty. Lida has gone on her lunch break, so there is no one to leave in charge; on a piece of paper Sergei scrawls “Back in 5 Minutes” and tapes it to the glass door, which he locks behind him. He hurries to the nearby liquor store. There is rarely a line there, at most someone asking for the on-sale cigarettes or buying a lottery ticket.
    It happened once that he hurried back, nearly out of breath, to find the tall girl scowling in front of the door, her hands on her curved hips, and a plastic bin of dirty clothes in front of her. “People have lives to get to,” she said in that firm voice of hers. “People don’t have all day.”
    “Neither do I,” said Sergei.
    “You have time to run to the liquor store,” the girl said. Her hair was pulled back in a clip, so that her skin looked especially luminous. “I see where you go. Don’t bother denying it. And meanwhile your customers have to wait.”
    Sergei felt his face heat up. Why didn’t he say anything then? Why did he just unlock the latch and, feeling his heart pounding, walk ahead of the tall girl without holding the door? From inside Sunshine Cleaners he watched her bend down to lift her laundry, and, without even trying, saw right up her denim skirt. He pretended not to notice as she struggled with the bin of clothes and an unwieldy bottle of detergent. Afterward, he had a horrible headache.
    Sergei replays this in his mind as he enters the liquor store. The manager recognizes Sergei, knows why he’s here, greets him in a not-unfriendly manner. Sergei hands over a bill and takes back coins. How many times have their hands touched this way? Sergei leaves the store, passing shivering trees and an enigmatic sign announcing APRIL 25: HAZARDOUS WASTE DAY! He takes up his restrained run, his back at a tilt, pants parachuting. He considers that people may be watching him.
    He does not understand that his red satin bomber jacket looks like a remnant of high school varsity and is insufficient for a New England winter. He does not realize that people who come to Sunshine Cleaners suppose he is Lida’s son, or that they suspect he is slightly