Free What Changes Everything by Masha Hamilton Page B

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            "We‟re just a couple girls from the motherland—we always said that—and we have to stick together." Yvette put down her empty cup and picked up the Shemyakin book, tapping her fingers gently on its cover without speaking for a few minutes before reaching over to squeeze Stela‟s hand. "You‟re not healed yet. You‟re not ready to make a big change. You hear me?" Stela shrugged.
           "Okay. Okay. I‟m getting the silent treatment. I have to get going anyway." Yvette stood up. "You‟ll do what you want in the end. But don‟t do anything before tomorrow, Stela, promise me that much. We need to talk more, after you‟ve found your tongue again."
           Stela ducked her head gruffly in reply.
           When the door closed behind her, Stela let out the sigh she‟d been holding. She wished she‟d been quick enough to figure out a way to cut off the real estate agent before she began spouting information like a busted water pipe. How could she discuss this with Yvette before she was sure herself? The shop sometimes felt like a prison hut in Siberia, as she‟d told Yvette. But she‟d also loved these old books longer and more deeply than she‟d loved most people—yes, the stories themselves, but even more, the history of the hands that had smoothed these covers, bent back a corner, underlined a series of words, dripped ligonberry jam on a page. She loved the estate sales that made Yvette recoil. Buying volumes others had tucked beneath their arms and then bringing them back here to her new home made being in her bookstore like a trip to the ocean; it gave her a sense of timelessness. It reminded her that she was nothing more than a comma in a sea of endless sentences. It made her feel less alone. It sucked the salt from her wounds.
           She slid the books off the note she was writing. She should have been a writer—she knew how to tell a story, and she loved words. But it was too late for that; all she had now was the letters, so she kept at it, buying stamps in an age of emails, using the Internet solely to track down street addresses, sending out letters to everyone she thought of, and never really hoping for a reply. Except from Danil.
           And no letters were more futile, probably, than the ones she wrote to her son. But she couldn‟t stop, no matter what she told Yvette. He was still angry with her, she suspected. He might not open her letters, if they even reached him via the only address she had. And yet, he was her son; of course she wrote. She kept no copies of her letters, but she suspected if she could look at them as a whole, they would parallel the path of her grief.
           It was crazy: the dead son she could visit. She could rant and cry over his body below the ground and try to come to terms with the loss. The other one, alive, had slipped entirely from her reach. Sometimes even, immediately upon awakening, she confused in her mind who was gone and who remained; she imagined calling the youngest to lament over the passing of the oldest.
           "Yvette just came in," she wrote now to Danil. "She asked about you as always. She is moving more slowly, but has the loyalty of a collie, though please don‟t mention that comparison to her. If you—" She crossed out the last two words and rewrote: "When you come home, I‟ll make you pirozhki an d invite her to dinner."
           She put down her pen and went to pour herself another cup of coffee, placing a sugar cube on her tongue; she still found it comforting to drink coffee in the old way. "We are having an Indian Summer, which Yvette calls a St. Martin‟s Summer, and she‟s explained why, but I‟ve forgotten. I am grateful for this last breath of—" She crossed out the last line. Why should she discuss the weather and dance around the real topic? This was her son; he‟d come from within her own body.
           "Oh Dani," she wrote. "We are left behind,