Natasha and Other Stories Read Online Free

an omelette and quartered a tomato. He ate quickly, downing his tea. His bare feet set a steady rhythm going in and out, in and out of his slippers. I told him about tryouts for indoor soccer. I described the fuzzy yellow ball. Midway through the omelette, he got up and retched into the sink.
    He left the apartment stolidly, as if he were going off to war. In a rare moment of overt affection, my mother gave him a kiss. My parents hugged in the hallway, because it is bad luck to kiss someone at the threshold.
    At the window, I watched as he backed the massive green Pontiac out of the parking lot. It was the end of March and still cold. The heater in the car didn’t work, and as my mother joined me at the window, we could see the long streams of my father’s condensed breathing as he turned onto Finch Avenue.
    “God willing, God willing,” my mother said.
    Three weeks later we received the letter from the Board of Directors of Masseurs. A certificate would follow shortly, the sort of thing my father would frame and hang in his office. We celebrated the news by going to the Pizza Patio restaurant in a strip mall not far from our apartment building. I spoke for the family and ordered a large pepperoni and mushroom pizza. We toasted to our future with fountain Cokes.
    The next weekend my father signed a lease for a one-room office at the Sunnybrook Plaza, where we bought our groceries and I got my hair cut. For eighty dollars, Yuri from Smolensk built a sturdy massage table wrapped in burgundy Naugahyde and secured with shiny brass rivets. My father paid half that for a desk at a consignment shop in the East End, and ten bucks apiece for two used office chairs for the waiting area. On the recommendation of someone at the Italian Community Center, he also took out a one-year subscription to Readers Digest. And to create the impression of clinical privacy, we drove to Starkman’s Medical Supply on Davenport where my father bought a green three-paneled room divider. The final touches were made by my mother, who purchased a sheet of adhesive letters from the hardware store and carefully spelled on the door: Roman Berman, Massage Therapist, BA, RMT.
    After the initial excitement subsided, the reality of the situation asserted itself. Aside from the handful of Italians at the Community Center and some of my parents’ Russian friends, nobody else knew that Roman’s Therapeutic Massage existed. Boris Krasnansky from Tashkent, whose employer offered a modest benefits package, was my father’s first patient. He went for as long as his benefits held out and insisted that my father kick back a third of the money since he was doing him a favor. Joe Galatti, a dry goods wholesaler, showed up each time with a bottle of homemade wine and told my father about his troubles with his son. Joe had a heavy Italian accent and my father’s English was improving only slowly. The session would end only when the bottle was empty. Sal, a semi-retired contractor, came with his wife’s cousin, who had arrived from Naples and fallen off a scaffold after his first week on the job. The cousin spoke no English and couldn’t drive a car. Sal felt guilty and drove the cousin over on Saturday afternoons to give his wife a break. My father would massage the cousin, and Sal would sit outside the partition with a Reader’s Digest. Guys like Joe and Sal had good intentions, and they liked my father. But after a few visits, they stopped coming. The Community Center, with the sauna and the familiar comradery, exerted its influence. Another Russian masseur had taken over my father’s position and, although they swore he was “no Roman,” it didn’t help. After a short time, inconvenience superseded loyalty, and my father found himself staring at the walls.
    Fearing just this sort of thing, my father had held on to his job at the chocolate bar factory. It was driving him crazy, but what was the alternative? To move from this factory job to another was