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“Shane,” Ilya says, once they are seated in Shane’s non-boring Land Rover and cruising back to Ilya’s new place, “are you sure your mother likes me?”
“She does!” He pauses. “Well. As much as someone who was alive for the Summit Series can like a Russian hockey player. Why do you ask?”
“I think she is trying to poison me.” Ilya sounds pained. “Every time we go over for dinner, she makes food that could fuel nuclear fusion.”
Shane pokes him the bicep. “Can’t take the spice, can we?”
“My ancestors did not use spices. They sold them for money. I do not understand, I thought she is Japanese, they do not do spicy, no?”
“They do a little, but she’s Zainichi. Well, like, half-Zainichi.”
“Zainichi?”
“Korean immigrants to Japan while they were part of the Japanese Empire. Her grandpa was conscripted by the Japanese during World War 2, so my grandma was born in Japan. They couldn’t go back because, uh, they were from North Korea. Not that they knew that. They just had the one Korea back then, until they didn’t. Didn’t you learn this in school? You guys were involved. Quite frequently.”
“I am sure we did, and I am sure I was not paying attention.”
Shane gives it up as a bad job and moves on from East Asian post-war geopolitics. “Well, whatever. They stayed and grandma integrated. Married a Japanese guy. But mom learned all the good Korean shit from her. She can’t really cook Japanese food at all except, like, curry from a box. In fact, she’s kind of useless at everything except Korean food. I don’t really understand? She can do a twelve-hour pork rib braise no problem but every time she tries to make Kraft Dinner she creates a non-Newtonian fluid.”
“Sounds like someone I know,” Ilya mutters. Shane decides to take the chirp on the chin, given that Ilya is unfortunately correct. Shane can follow a recipe just fine, he just can’t go beyond it. Hic sunt dracones. “But why does she make it all so spicy? Surely there is some Korean food that is not going to burn my tongue out of mouth.”
“’Course there is. Tons.” Shane remembers sitting on the deck of the cottage, swinging his feet in the cool water while slurping down the ends of the bowls of icy cold naengmyeon his mom brought out to him. “But the spicy stuff is my favourite, so she makes it for me specially. Sometimes in the summer on the lake, if my dad caught a fish and decided to keep it instead of getting all kumbaya and releasing it, my mom would make mulhwe. That’s my favourite. But it’s cold, so you can’t eat it here except, like, two days a year. Kimchi jjigae is my second favourite so that’s why she makes it so much. Plus, lots of protein, good macros, etcetera.”
“Such a momager.” Ilya falls quiet for a while. Eventually, he says, very softly: “She really loves you.”
“I’m very lucky. I can ask her to make something less spicy, next time?”
“No, that is stupid. You like it so I will learn to like it. I will just man up. Promise, I will have spice tolerance of salamander.” Ilya puffs his chest and cheeks, flexes like a strongman and then starts coughing. “Fuck! Water!”
Shane tosses the bottle at his face, laughing. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
The next time they play in New York, as is now tradition (against Ilya’s wishes) they go out to dinner with Scott and Kip. Normally they let the two locals pick a spot, but Ilya, this time, insists on going to Brighton Beach.
“The only thing I miss about Boston is deli in Bazaar,” he tells them as they stump onto the beachside boardwalk. “Good pelmeni. Ottawa is, how do I say, culinary desert.”
“It’s not that bad,” Shane insists, out of a desire to defend what he knows is fundamentally indefensible.
“It is. Sorry, Hollander.” Scott pats him on the shoulder.
“I mean, the poutine is nice,” Kip says, hesitantly. What a nice boy, Shane thinks. Shane’s mom loves him too. He thinks she kind of wishes he’d gotten to him before Scott did.
“Is limit on how much poutine you can eat.”
“There is not!”
Shane and Ilya argue good-naturedly all the way to the restaurant, Scott and Kip tagging along behind egging them on. The restaurant is solidly 90s, without a single word of English on any signage. Ilya stewards them through, takes a selfie with a starstruck waitress, schmoozes the owner and before any of them know it the table is full of food, bowls of beetroot-red soup dotted like a Seurat with sour cream, trays of moon-like dumplings, pale and curved and glistening with what seems like moon-shine, skewers of meat still bubbling with juices, and more besides.
“We don’t get to order?” Scott raises his eyebrows.
“Mamochka knows best,” Ilya says, superior. “Eat, come on, will be cold. Except this should be cold. You try first.” He shoves a bowl of pearly-white soup at Shane. “You will like this. Greasy American.” He indicates a strange eye-like pastry filled with cheese and an egg to Scott. “Kip, you New Yorkers like halal cart, no? This is better.” Kip very politely serves himself from plate of golden-yellow rice tumbled with chunks of what Shane thinks is lamb.
“How do you say bon appetit in Russian?”
Ilya sounds it out for them; they echo him until the restaurant owner, loitering nearby, nods approvingly, and then they dig in.
“Food was good,” Shane says, back in the hotel room, Ilya sprawled over him like an oversized lapdog, both of them scrolling idly, too full and too tired and too old to get up to anything. Shane doesn’t miss being twenty-one and skulking around hotel rooms with Ilya, terror and lust scrambling his brains, but he does miss the energy. And the flexibility. When he thinks about some of the ways Ilya would bend him, he’s shocked he didn’t slip a disc.
“Mmm.”
“I liked the soup you picked out for me. The cold one. What was it called again?”
“Okroshka.”
Shane has gotten very good at identifying the particular tenors of Ilya’s voice – happy, sad, horny, angry, disappointed, frustrated, confused, trying not to laugh, all the little sidelobes of emotion he can pack into a single grunt. This one is harder to parse for Shane, but it feels – empty.
“Didn’t you like it? The food? Company wasn’t bad either.”
“I did,” Ilya says. “Kip is nice guy. Hard to wind up. Pity about his boyfriend. Food was good. Maybe plov too salty.”
“But…”
“No but.”
Shane flicks his shoulder. “Don’t lie to me.”
He can see the words bubbling up inside Ilya as he constructs his sentences – still, Shane thinks, in Russian first, then English. “It was good. It was. But it was not my mom’s. And I thought – I thought it would be. I do not know why.”
“Maybe when we talked about my mom’s cooking?”
“Maybe,” Ilya allows. His jaw is tense. Shane cups it, presses his fingers into the tense pad of muscles under his ear, the point of his chin. Ilya turns into his hand.
Ilya doesn’t talk about his mom much. Shane decides to risk it, once the tension in Ilya’s jaw has ebbed slightly. He runs his hand up through his hair. “What was your favourite thing she made?”
The silence, punctuated by their breath, the distant rumblings of the city that never sleeps. “She made her mom’s shchi. With vegetables from her garden. She loved working in it. She tried to teach me to care for it, but I prefer then to catch worms.”
“Did she teach you how to make it?”
Ilya shakes his head, rueful. “Why would she? I was a son. No need to cook, just to play hockey. Not wrong, eh?”
No, Shane thinks. Not wrong indeed. Multiple teammates have tried and failed to snipe Yosra, Ilya’s nutritionist, out from under his nose. “Does anyone else in your family know how to make it? You’re not a bad cook. You could try.”
“My aunts. Her sisters. Two. But it would not be same,” Ilya says, miserably.
“Of course, but… Don’t you think she’d be happy to see you try?”
Ilya doesn’t say anything after, but he takes Shane’s hand by the wrist and kisses the centre of his palm. That’s enough.
A week later, Shane lets himself into Ilya’s to find the kitchen looking, frankly, like a bomb site, and sounding like it too – some appliance is beeping in a manner designed to be helpful but which is mostly making Shane antsy. A pot bubbles merrily on the stove, gouts of steam issuing from a valve. Shane turns it down instinctually. “Ilya? You in here?”
A faint noise comes from the butler’s pantry. Shane finds Ilya mostly inside his very fancy freezer, the one everyone thinks is a beer fridge only to come back three hours later and find their expensive IPAs popped. It is also the culprit of the infernal beeping. Shane covers his ears. “Can you stop that noise?”
Ilya doesn’t respond until Shane pokes him with the tip of his foot. He spots him with his ears covered and jerks into action. “Oh. Sorry, babe.” He closes the fridge and comes up to Shane, gently removing his hands from his ears and lacing their fingers together. “Noise gone. You are ok.”
Shane takes a few breaths, practices some of the box breathing bullshit his PT loves. It works. The solid, reassuring warmth of Ilya’s hands in his (even though they still have a whiff of that disgusting hockey glove smell, no matter how many times Shane scolds Ilya for not drying his gear properly) helps, too. “Why are you in the freezer? Why is the kitchen like that?”
“Ah.” Ilya grimaces. “Dinner?”
“Yosra on holiday?”
“No, I…. I emailed my aunties to ask for the shchi recipe, like you said. I thought, you know, they would call me pussy, pederast, tell me to fuck off, but they were very nice. Told me they watch my games if they can get a stream. Attached some pictures of my cousins. Auntie Lyusya is trying to convince me to let her ship me a big box of frozen varenyky, so Auntie Lena is saying she’ll send pelmeni. Then they started fighting over what sort of dill their mom used for shchi.” Ilya rolls his eyes. “Women, eh?”
“Clearly you’re the favourite nephew.”
Ilya snorts. “Like that is hard. Anyway. I took stab at it.” Ilya walks backward into the kitchen, towing Shane along with him. “Should be edible.”
Shane side-eyes the mess. “Ever hear of clean as you go?”
“Not for me. Go find spoon.” Ilya releases him to uncover the soup and ladle a small portion into a bowl, dolloping on what Shane thinks is sour cream – the writing on the tub is Cyrillic – and finishing with chopped herbs. He presents it to Shane, who, spoon in hand, samples. It’s sour and somehow refreshing and nostalgic, though Shane’s never eaten it before. It’s a little like…
“Kimchi jjigae,” Shane says. “Just, not spicy. More herbal. How my mom used to make it when I was real little. She’d wash the spice off, or make it with the plain kimchi before she added the spices.”
“If I was being exceptionally good boy,” Ilya says, softly, “which was not often, my mom would make pirozhki to go with this.” He waits until Shane is eating again to covertly wipe some tears from his eyes. Shane of course notices, because he notices everything Ilya does – he cannot do otherwise, like his body is an antenna attuned to a single frequency. “It is not the same. I knew it would not be. But it is close.” He sniffs and clears his throat. “Also, I made shit-load, so we are eating this for foreseeable future. Maybe crack window at night. Could be farty.”
“Fine by me… if I can eat it with rice.”
“Jesus Christ, Hollander.”
In a month or two, Ilya learns, at the same time as Shane, that Shane’s mother is not, in fact, incapable of making anything other than Korean food. The pirozhki are impressive, but it’s the shchi that make Ilya cry a little. Just a little. Enough to make Yuna incandescently happy and David a tad uncomfortable.
“How did she get the recipes?” Ilya asks, later, face illuminated by the glow stars stuck to the ceiling of Shane’s childhood bedroom.
“The password to your email is janesbitch100591.” Shane flicks his nose. “Very sweet. Very insecure.”
“How am I supposed to remember a secure password?”
“Use a password manager.”
“Boring!”
Shane kisses his nose. “I thought you liked boring.”
“I do.” Ilya kisses him, properly, until Shane is a little breathless and regretting agreeing to stay over at his parent’s. “Thank you,” he whispers. “I don’t deserve you.”
“That makes two of us.”