You are sixteen. The middle of June. Your grandmother is dead. The kitchen is full of people you mostly know.
Your mother is at the stove with someone from the church making more coffee. The pot is the percolator-pot Oksana brought from Brighton Beach in the seventies, the metal one with the heat-warped handle, and your mother is treating it the way Oksana treated it, which is to say with the kind of impatience that is also love. Your aunt from Albany is at the table cutting the kolach into slices. The kolach is from Veronika's bakery in Yonkers, which is the bakery Oksana drove an hour for, because the bakery in Brighton Beach used too much sugar.
You are at the door of the kitchen with a paper plate in your hand. You have not eaten anything yet today. You should eat something. You are trying.
There is an icon on the wall above the radio that has been on that wall since you were small. The Mother of God of Pochaev. The brass-leaf around her dulled by the kitchen's grease. There is the embroidered runner on the table that your great-grandmother made in Lviv, which you have been told the provenance of every visit since you were seven. There is the green plate of stuffed cabbage that Oksana would have made if she were alive to make it; today Mrs. Petryk made it the way Oksana taught her in 1988, and the recipe is correct, and the smell is correct, and the absence of the woman who taught the recipe is the only thing in the room that is not correct.
A man is at the sink.
He is drying glasses with a tea towel.
You do not know him. He is maybe forty-five. He is wearing a button-down with the sleeves rolled up. He is holding the towel the way a man holds a towel when he has held this towel before. He knows which drawer the towels go back into, because when he is done with the glass in his hand he opens the third drawer down without looking.
He sees you in the doorway. He nods. He says nothing.
He turns back to the sink.
You do not ask your mother who he is. You think you will ask her later. You do not. You eat a piece of kolach standing up. You leave the kitchen.
In the living room your father — who came up from Denver for this and is leaving again tomorrow — is talking to a woman from the parish about Oksana's first months in America in the fifties. Your half-sister Charlotte is one year old, on Karen's lap, asleep.
You go upstairs.
You sit on Oksana's bed.
Seven years from now you will be reading a ledger in a reading-room in Lviv with a pencil in your hand, and the ledger will contain a name, and the name will arrive into your hand the way a man's hand arrived into the third drawer of a kitchen he had been in before.
Your body knew then.
The kitchen below is making the sound a kitchen makes when the people in it have been working since before the funeral.