Page 5 of Aftertaste

An adult, technically. He had a job, stocking shelves in a bodega. Had a license, though there was no car to speak of. He could buy porn and fight a war and sign a lease if he wanted. But he still missed his dad like a little kid.

Kostya had always assumed it would get better, but it only got different. His pangs of loss had receded into a numb, ever-present ache, yet every new experience—each minor tragedy or major milestone he wished he could share with his father—soured him, made him feel as if his dad had just died, was dying all over again, like he always would be.

When the kids from school fucked with him at that party, it happened. When he had to convince the social worker that his mom was fine, it happened. When he walked across the stage at graduation, the superintendent mispronouncing his name, it happened. When he had his first drink, cashed his first paycheck, first kissed a girl, it happened. When he nursed his first heartbreak, his first hangover, his string of rejections from colleges and jobs and relationships, it happened, and happened, and happened again.

But that afternoon, when Kostya opened the door to find their landlord, to learn that he had sold their apartment—the last place Kostya had seen hisdad alive, had heard his voice, had hugged him—sold it to some new guy who was raising the rent so high they couldn’t possibly stay, Kostya had wept, wept unabashedly, ugly-cried. The landlord apologized, said it was nothing personal, said his dad had been a good guy, reminded him of his own father. Kostya had been about to tell him where to shove his platitudes when he felt the puff of air, the flavor materializing in his mouth—delicate flakes of frozen limoncello, scraped with a fork, spooned into a hollowed-out rind—and felt, without really knowing how, that the landlord was being sincere. That he really was sorry. That he’d lost someone once and remembered how it ached.

HE WAS THIRTY.

Two decades fatherless, peeled back a year at a time, the segments of a lime. He had another job now—two in fact, both of which sucked. A shitty apartment, and a Craigslist roommate who’d become his best friend. A life, or something like one.

But too often, instead of looking forward, Konstantin found himself looking back.

To when he was ten, waiting at the kitchen table.

Or nine, walking through the neighborhood at dusk, sucking the wet wooden stick of a Popsicle.

Eight, holding both his parents’ hands, the thrill in his stomach as they swung him high in the air, Coney Island Cracker Jack lodged in his teeth.

Seven, lying on a patch of green grass, his dad picking wild mushrooms, peeling open their caps to show him inside.

Six.Six.The one he always came back to.

A Kyiv park, sunlight overhead, a pouch folded from newsprint weighted on his lap. Full of soft, overripe fruit. Sour cherries, their skin so thin, their flesh the bright red of a bleed.

“Chereshnya,” Kostya said, placing one into his mouth, the juice squirting down his throat, wonderfully tart.

“Nyet.”His father shook his head. Smiled.“Vishnya.”

They came from different trees, he explained. Had different fruit, different pits. His father’s grandmother had grownvishnyain the countryside of Ukraine, the mottled bush spilling fruit everywhere, smearing the ground with red come summer. Konstantin had never met his great-grandmother, couldn’t now that she was dead, but he could almost taste her in this bag, inside each sour cherry.

“One day,” his dad told him, “I’ll take you there. To see her village, her old dacha. To taste fruit from her tree.” He spat a pit into his hand, perfectly beige, sucked clean of flesh. “Kostochka,” he told Kostya, “a cherrystone.”

“Like me.” Kostya had grinned.

“Like you,” his dad agreed. “My cherrystone. So much waiting in so small a thing.”

BUT THE PASThis father promised him was gone.

His future had soured, its possibilities curdled.

Now Kostya kept his secrets, his aftertastes, in the unremarkable present. In a bland, haunted loop. He’d stay that way awhile.

But not forever.

PART TWOBITTERS & HEAT

But when the past is gone, after the people are dead, after their things are destroyed… smell and taste still linger on, like souls, ready to remind us….

Marcel Proust

Swann’s Way

APERITIFSThe Konstantin Duhovny Culinary Experience

ALRIGHT, ALRIGHT!Can everybody hear me? Can y’all see me?

Let’s just do a little mic check. If you’re here for the Konstantin Duhovny Culinary Experience, you’re in the right place. Anyone in the wrong place?

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