a heart will always stay one day too long

Ilyushka comes back from kindergarten one day with a very strange look on his little face. “Mama,” he says as he sits on the bench and ties on his skates, “I met a boy in my class who also skates every day after school.” He says this in Ukrainian; unlike Alyosha, he speaks almost no Russian. “He invited me to play ice hockey with him.”

“That’s nice,” Irina says absently as she unpacks the jumble of cones that her teenage assistant had been eager to collect for her. She begins to re-sort them by color. “Do you want to skate with him?”

“Of course I do!” Ilyushka says indignantly. “But I don’t have hockey skates.”

“We can rent some,” Irina says. “Why don’t you invite him to come here?” Because if they come here, Irina won’t need to actually rent the skates–one of the many perks of being on the rink’s coaching staff–and she’ll be able to feed them snacks from home instead of having to give Ilyushka pocket money. Things aren’t quite so dire now as they had been when she’d first immigrated to Canada, but Irina has found that penny-pinching, like her excellent posture, is a habit she can’t easily shake off. There’s always a little calculator running in her head, punching in numbers and comparing the sums to the bottom line she knows they need to make it to the end of the month.

“If we come here Alexei will be mean,” Ilyushka says sulkily, kicking his feet.

“Don’t kick when you’re wearing skates,” Irina says sharply without looking up. “You know that’s dangerous.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Ilyushka demands. “Alexei will be mean and then Shane won’t want to be my friend.”

“Tell me about your friend,” Irina encourages. She tries to say this name, Shane, and she can hear that she’s doing something to its syllables that Ilyushka is not. Alyosha is old enough now to be slightly embarrassed by Irina’s accented English so she’s been trying to practice more. “What’s he like?”

“He likes hockey and red crayons, but only the ones where the paper isn’t ripped,” Ilyushka says. “He can write his name two ways, just like me, except not like me because the letters are very weird. Did you know that Japanese people write their names in little houses?” He sketches a rectangle in the air with his forefinger.

“Is Shane Japanese?” Irina asks, surprised. She’s coached three little girls with older brothers named Shane, and they’ve all been bog standard Westerners—toothy white grins, floppy brown hair, crisp blue jeans.