“Luda,” Keith said. He smiled, his hand outstretched and she took it, a soft, insubstantial thing in his palm.
“Hello,” she said. “I brought something to eat.”
“Really?” Keith said.
Peter was holding a plate in his hand. “Please,” he said. He held the plate out and Keith could make out triangular sandwiches lining it and he took one and bit into it and realized that he actually was hungry. Had he eaten? He could not even remember. “Thank you,” he said, his mouth chewing. Peter pulled the plate away and Keith said, “Wait a minute,” and Peter brought it back and Keith took another and set it on his knee. “It’s good,” he said.
“I am glad you are enjoying this,” Luda said. “I apologize for coming here. I did not mean for intrusion.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” Keith said. “Come and sit.”
“I have to get back to children. They are asleep but who knows. They maybe wake up and I am not there.”
“Yes,” Peter said. “You should go back home.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine for a minute or two,” Keith said. “Come and sit. Have a beer.”
Luda looked at him. “I should go.”
“It’s OK to stay,” Keith said. He hardly knew what he was saying now and had he looked at Peter he might have seen a look of irritation on his face but he did not or could not and Luda stood in silence. “Have a beer,” Keith said. “The sofa will be gone any day and there will be a house here and that’ll be the end of it.”
Luda looked at her husband and he smiled, perhaps resigned to the situation, and motioned to the sofa. She nodded and said, “OK, but not so long,” and sat next to him. Peter stood by the telescope, watching them, still holding the sandwich plate in his hands like some errant waiter.
Keith reached down and pulled a beer out of the cardboard box and handed it to her and she took it and unscrewed the cap in one quick motion and, to Keith’s surprise, flung it toward one of the tractors and actually hit it, the bottle cap ringing out against the metal machine like a silver coin and then zinging off into the darkness.
“Well done,” Keith said, smiling.
“I am sorry for tractors,” she said.
“She means she is sorry for me because of these tractors,” Peter said.
“Yes, that is right,” Luda said. “I am sorry for Peter that tractors come. And you also too.”
“Well, thanks. Not much we can do.”
“Yes, but bad news for you,” she said.
“We’re not very happy about it,” Keith said.
“My Peter is very sad,” Luda said.
“Luda,” Peter said.
“You are very sad,” she said, looking at him now.
Peter did not move from his station by the telescope, still holding the sandwich plate in his hands. “Our friend maybe does not want to hear this talk,” he said.
Keith waved his free hand in the air. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m pissed off about it too.”
“Maybe you find some other place to set up telescope?” Luda said.
“Probably,” Keith said.
“Not the same,” Peter said.
“Not same but maybe even better,” Luda said.
“You keep saying that to me but you don’t know,” Peter said.
“Maybe bigger field with no lights anywhere,” Luda said. “Like Golosiiv.”
“You know nothing about this,” Peter said. He said something in Ukrainian under his breath and at the sound of it Luda sucked in her breath and muttered something in return.
It was quiet now, husband and wife there in the darkness, Keith looking back and forth between them as if trying to discover something otherwise unspoken, his mind already drifting from what had been said in whatever language it had been said, drifting from their silence. Had he been sober he likely would have excused himself from the field and would have returned to the quiet emptiness of his house. But he was not sober so instead he cleared his throat and said, “Give me another one of those little sandwiches.”
Peter handed him the plate and then reached over next to Luda and retrieved his pipe and the little black bag and returned to his position by the telescope and lit it and smoked. Luda said nothing, watching him.
“These are good sandwiches,” Keith said.
“Thank you,” Luda said. She continued to stare at her husband.
“How are the kids?” he said.
“Good. Sleeping.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
Peter’s voice came abruptly: “You think you know what this is but you know nothing.”
Keith looked up at him, still chewing. “What?” he said.
“I am trying to help you,” Luda said.
“Yes, you try to help me but you do not know how to help me. Then you say ‘like Golosiiv,’ but you do not know what you say when you say this. There is no like Golosiiv. There is only Golosiiv and nothing else.”
“Peter,” Keith said.
“You hear her? Like Golosiiv? You know there is no Golosiiv here. Only this empty place. So we find another empty lot but this one is mine to come to. Fucking shit.”
Keith could not understand Luda’s subsequent response nor Peter’s and in his inebriated state it took him several minutes to realize that the conversation had shifted to Ukrainian, their voices rising in intensity and volume and speed, and when he realized this he lifted his head from the sofa and coughed. “Uh, hey,” he said, the Earth drifting under him, “I can’t understand Ukrainian.”
They both fell silent instantly. There were cricket sounds but they were distant. Peter was a dark shape by the telescope.
“We are being rude for your friend,” Luda said. Peter answered in Ukrainian and Luda shook her head. “I tell him come home to talk but he will not do this,” she said.
“I am not coming home,” Peter said, in English now. His voice was a sharp angle in the night air. “You go home to kids.”
Luda stood abruptly and said something to him in Ukrainian and Peter did not answer. “I try to help you but you do nothing,” she said. “Only complain.”
“Because here is nothing.”
“There is more here than Ukraine.”
“No,” he said. “That is not true.” His voice cracked over these last words and a long trembling hush descended upon the three of them, Keith apparently forgotten on the sofa, his head resting in the crater of padding.
“What do you want to do?” she said at last.
“I want to go home,” Peter said. His voice shook. A faint glimmer of tears streaked his face. “I only want to go home.”
“Then we go home.”
“I want to go home to Ukraine.”
“Is that what you really want?” she said.
From far away, over the houses and roads came the constant shush of cars from the interstate, shuffling over the endless courts and dead ends that enmazed the landscape all around them. Keith quiet, the triangle sandwich held in his frozen hand, not even breathing, the sofa rocking slowly under him as if moving over a gentle sea.
“I do not know what I want,” Peter said, his voice a hollowness floating in that static.
“If you really want, then we go back,” Luda said.
Peter did not answer.
“You are my husband,” she said.
“You would do that?”
“Of course I would do that.”
He said something in Ukrainian again.
“We do what is best for family.”
“But you think America is best for this family.”
“America is best for this family,” she said. “But this family is you too.”
Peter did not respond for so long that Keith had begun to wonder what had happened. Then he realized that Peter was crying, a quiet sound at first and then breaking in heavy waves through his frame and he covered his hands with his face in the darkness and Keith finally understood that he should not be there, that he should have left almost immediately and he shifted his weight to stand but then Luda rose from the sofa and went to her husband and embraced him. “Petruso,” she said.