The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 by Laura Furman

Author:Laura Furman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Naira Kuzmich

The Kingsley Drive Chorus

ON THE CORNER OF Kingsley and De Longpre, we lived our lives pressed against the glass. Our husbands—carpenters, jewelers, mechanics, and laborers—spent their days without us. When they came home in the evenings, they were quiet and so we were quiet, too. Our girls retreated into schoolbooks with words beyond our knowing and our boys spilled onto the winding streets of Los Angeles. We had done what we could, all the things we told ourselves we could have done. We resigned ourselves to our windows. We wiped down the glass. We waved.

The first time Carmen Oganesyan’s son, Zaven, called her from jail, she did what any of us would do: She blamed his friends. She told us she had a feeling when he first introduced Robert and Vardan to her, all those years ago. They were Mariam’s boys. They lived in #3. Robert and Vardan were a little too skinny in the arms, as if they hadn’t lifted a single weight in their entire lives. Their hair was spiked. Robert, fifteen at the time, was a tall boy who tried hard not to be. He wore oversized sweaters and pants that added bulk to his thin frame and he slouched when he walked. We all thought he’d have back troubles by the time he was thirty, but he found himself with bigger problems much earlier. Vardan was a quiet child, then thirteen, Zaven’s age. Vardan’s quietness made us uncomfortable. You’d say hello as you passed him in the garden and he’d glance down at your heavy grocery bags and say absolutely nothing. These were not the kind of boys Carmen wanted her Zaven to befriend, but she had been glad that he was at least making an attempt to fit in; she and her husband had pulled him out of his happy life in Yerevan just months before.

When Zaven called, Carmen was in the kitchen, preparing her famous kyoftas. Just imagine little eggs of beef, filled with more beef. They taste great with a squeeze of lemon. New Year’s Eve was approaching, and we were all busy making the same food, each of us hoping ours would taste different, better than everyone else’s. But no one could make kyoftas like Carmen. She had beautiful hands. After dipping her long fingers into the bowl of cold water, she’d mold the ground mixture into a shell, thumbing the beef and bulgur into place. The shells were thin, but never broke, and she’d stuff them with filling before closing them, always leaving an exaggerated tip that hardened after cooking. Everyone broke off that piece first. She’d joke that to make the perfect kyofta you had to pretend you were washing a child’s head. You had to be careful, certainly, but more than that, you had to do it with love. The egg always knows, she said.

Only eighteen, Zaven was out on bail the next day. Carmen was a proud woman, but not enough to let him stay in jail. She asked us for loans, a hundred dollars here, a hundred there.

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