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“Hey, don’t forget that my parents asked us to come for dinner tomorrow night,” Shane called across the kitchen from behind his laptop. Ilya was sitting on the couch, scrolling his phone with one hand and absently scratching Anya behind the ear with the other.
“I did not forget, Shane. Your mother called me first to see if we could come. I knew about this before you did,” Ilya called over his shoulder without turning around all the way. He turned his attention back to the video playing on his screen.
Shane popped his head up from behind the screen to look in Ilya’s direction, frowning in a bit of confusion. Since when did his mother start making plans for them with Ilya and then just looping him in when the plans solidified? He shrugged. Whatever. He was happy to share the burden of being their social coordinator. They were married now, it didn’t have to solely be his job to be the one who makes all of their social plans. And besides, it made him happy that everyone got along so well. Having his mother love his husband like this was something he could have only dreamed about his life being like two years ago.
“She said she has something for us after we eat,” Ilya said, “She would not tell me what though. I tried to get her to answer and she said, ‘Can you just have a surprise for once?’”
Shane smiled and shook his head a little, “That sounds like her,” he said without taking his eyes off the email he was writing on his computer. He was also curious what kind of surprise she had though. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what she had planned.
___________
“Mom? Dad? Your sons are here!” Ilya yelled as he opened the front door to David and Yuna’s house. He held the door open for Shane to come in behind him as he kicked his sneakers off and lined them up using his socked foot with the other shoes next to the door.
Shane used to playfully correct him with a little shove and remind him that they were his parents but he started noticing that when he did it, it looked like it made Ilya look a little sad. Like he was claiming them as only his own, not for anyone else. When he really thought about why he noticed that it looked like it made Ilya sad, he felt like a huge jerk. Ilya had nothing that resembled a family anymore. The Hollanders are his family now. Really, the only one he has left. So Shane decided that if Ilya calling his parents mom and dad instead of David and Yuna was what made him feel loved and part of something, then he didn’t care. Besides, as an only child, it was nice to have someone else around that his parents loved just as much as they loved him to take some of the pressure off. Their love, especially Yuna’s, could be overwhelming at times for Shane.
Yuna rounded the corner, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. She beelined for Ilya first and wrapped him in a huge hug. Ilya turned her in a circle to make eye contact with Shane. He had a huge grin on his face and made sure to wiggle his eyebrows in the most obnoxious way at Shane, saying haha your mom picked me first without actually having to say it outloud. Shane scowled playfully at him.
“Hi honey!” Yuna exclaimed, squeezing Ilya tight, “Ooh, this shirt is so soft,” she remarked, touching the sleeve as she pulled away.
“Yes, Shane uses exact right amount of fabric softener. He has an actual measuring cup by the washer,” he chirped, still grinning widely.
Yuna moved to Shane and wrapped him in a hug. He also twisted her around in a circle to face Ilya so he could flip him off behind her back, “Yeah and it’s also a four hundred dollar shirt, so I’m sure that can’t hurt either,” he retorted, voice dripping with sarcasm.
Everyone retreated into the kitchen for before dinner drinks and appetizers. David had grilled marinated chicken, served with roasted herbed potatoes and roasted vegetables. After everyone had their fill, the dishes were cleared and the dishwasher was humming away, scrubbing the remnants of dinner off the plates, Yuna clasped her hands together.
“I think,” she said, pushing her chair into the table, “That it’s time for the little surprise I mentioned.”
She stood up and walked to the other room and came back with a stack of photo albums. Shane looked up and it immediately registered to him what was happening.
Yuna was hefting every single picture she had taken of Shane from birth right through to last year in several leather bound picture albums into the kitchen. He was positive that there was already pictures in there from their wedding last summer in this pile. She set them down on the table with a loud thud.
“Mooom,” Shane groaned. He thunked his forehead onto the table in front of him. Was she seriously going to put him through this humiliation ritual?
Ilya furrowed his brow, “What is this?” he asked Shane.
“Only every single picture my mom has ever taken of me in my life and now she’s going to make you sit here and look at them.”
Ilya stood up and moved across the table to sit directly next to Yuna and her mountain of photos.
“Start when he was a baby, please.”
She pulled the book from the bottom of the stack in front of her. The very first photo was a photo of a days old Shane, swaddled in a light blue striped muslin blanket, wearing a white hat with little gold stars printed all over it. Underneath it, written in Yuna’s perfect script with a dark blue flair pen was the phrase, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, How We Wonder Who You Are.
Ilya tapped the photo just under the cuff of the hat, “Shane! You had so much hair!”
Yuna smiled, “Oh he came out with a full head! We had to trim it when he was 4 months old. It was hanging in his eyes and everyone kept referring to him as her,” she recalled, laughing.
She ran her fingers along the script at the bottom and tipped her head toward Shane, who had also moved to the other side of the table to sit at the chair on her other side. “I could have never imagined what you’d end up being when I wrote that. Far exceeded anything I could have ever hoped my child would be,” she said. Even though he was a fully grown adult, it still felt good to hear that you’d made your parents proud of you.
She flipped the page. The next page was a collage of photos of his first few weeks of life, various family members excitedly holding the family’s newest member. Aunts, uncles, grandparents were all represented in these photos. Ilya was certain that these types of joyous photos of him and his extended family did not exist. Or if they ever did, they were long gone or destroyed by now.
The next page had a photo of Shane in a dark green feety sleeper. He was sleeping on a blanket, hair standing straight on end with a block next to his shoulder that said One Month Old. He had the smallest hint of a smirk pulling up at the corner of his mouth on one side. Ilya melted a little inside. Shane was really a cute baby. Jet black hair, chubby in all the right places, squishy little face. If they ever decided to have kids, he decided right then that he wanted Shane to be the biological father. He needed a miniature version of his favorite person.
They flipped quickly through the rest of his first year–pictures of him sitting up, trying his first solid foods, learning how to crawl, his first Halloween (he was a bumblebee), pictures of him standing and scooting against the couch with a huge smile on his face, so proud of his new trick.
She snapped that book shut, slid it to the side and pulled the next one out. The first picture was of a toddler Shane, taking his first steps to David’s outstretched arms and smiling face. After that was a photo of his first ice cream cone. He was holding it while it dripped melted vanilla soft serve all over his hand. He was giving the camera a huge open mouth smile while holding his outstretched arm out to the camera, “Oh look, first and last time Shane let himself enjoy ice cream!” Ilya quipped. It earned him a punch to the thigh under the table over Yuna’s lap.
Yuna laughed, “Leave him be. He’s disciplined.”
“Yeah,” Shane retorted, brattily. “Thank you, mom.”
Soon enough they had made it to the part where she had put Shane on skates for the first time. Yuna hadn’t ever necessarily forced hockey onto him but she was bound and determined that he was going to be a good Canadian and learn how to skate before he was too big and too afraid of falling to learn. Once he figured out the skating part, the hockey followed and he was a natural.
Ilya smiled at the picture. Shane had a little helmet on and knee pads to protect his little baby knees for when he inevitably fell. He was smiling with every single one of his perfect little toddler teeth. Yes, definitely, without question, Shane had to be the father of their eventual children. This was too cute for Ilya to stand.
They flipped through the rest of his toddler years quickly, Ilya eager to watch the progression. He saw pictures of his first day of Timbit hockey, his first day of kindergarten, the first day he figured out riding a two wheeler. One of Ilya’s favorite pictures was one where Shane was smiling brightly, still wearing his youth hockey jersey, mouth bleeding down his chin, with a gaping hole where his two front teeth used to be.
“That was his first big fall,” Yuna recalled. “I was a wreck, but he was unfazed. He was so excited to come home and put two teeth under his pillow for the tooth fairy.”
Ilya jerked his head away from the photo.
“The what? A fairy? For dead teeth?”
Shane smiled, “Yes. You put a tooth under your pillow and the tooth fairy comes and leaves you money.”
“That’s…” Ilya trailed off, “disgusting.”
They flipped through photos from the grade 2 school Christmas party, a grade 3 field trip to a farm where Yuna had snapped a picture of Shane and his friends petting a cow. They paused on a photo of David, Yuna and Shane in the stands at a hockey game for his tenth birthday. He was wearing a Metros jersey and smiling excitedly.
“Do you remember that game, Shane?” Yuna asked.
He nodded, “Of course I do. I told you I was going to be a Metro one day that same day.”
She nodded her head, “Sure did. We knew you were good at hockey by then but I think watching that game switched something on inside of you and you just became….”
“Obsessed,” Ilya supplied.
She laughed, “Well, I mean, yeah. Kinda.”
“Thank you for bringing him to that game,” he said, seriously, realizing in that moment that every single event from that day forward had led to them all sitting around this very table right now.
After flipping though literal hundreds of photos, they finally made it to Shane’s early teenage years. Shane recognized the album that held the photos that he knew were coming up and covered the album with his hand.
“Can we just like, skip these? The other ones were cute but these ones are just…not.”
Yuna scoffed, “Shane, what’s the problem? They're fine!”
Shane huffed and turned to his husband, “Welcome to my awkward phase,” he grumbled and moved his hand away. Ilya, on the other hand, was ecstatic to see what the most gorgeous man he’d ever laid eyes on considered awkward.
They flipped a few pages, through photos of a New Year celebration, an epic snowfall where Shane and David were pictured shoveling their long driveway, photos from a winter break trip to a tropical location where Shane and his parents were wearing leis.
“Shane, what is awkward here? Everything is just as cute as when you were little baby, just..bigger.”
Shane, eager to get it out of the way, flipped ahead and jabbed at photo he was looking for. Ilya leaned forward and squinted to study it, “Ah. I see where the perfect teeth came from now,” he said, smiling. In the photo Shane pointed to, he could see a small peek of the braces he’d had for three years in the smirk he’d given the camera.
“Three years, Ilya!” he exclaimed, “Which is why I always wear my mouthguard during games. You should try it sometime,” he said cheekily, knowing half of Ilya’s teeth were implants or crowns.
“Yeah, we paid a lot of money for those teeth,” Yuna said, “You better wear that guard. And your retainers too.”
Ilya yelped. “He does not! I have never seen those things a day in my LIFE,” he tattled.
Shane scowled at him, annoyed he was tattling about something from his teenage years to his mother.
Yuna gaped at him, “Shane Hollander…You know what? That’s a you problem now.”
They flipped forward a few more pages. The next picture that caught his eye was of Shane laying on the couch, probably about 17 years old, a book propped open on his chest. He was the one that did the jabbing this time.
“What is that? On your face?” he accused.
Shane bent forward and looked carefully. He’d been caught in the first little fib he’d told Ilya.
He contorted his face into the adorable scrunch where it crinkled his freckles that he knew Ilya couldn’t resist. His cheeks pinkened a little knowing he’d been caught.
“Okay so, I got glasses a little earlier than I told you...”
Ilya did quick math in his head, “Yeah, NINE years earlier, Shane!”
Shane dipped his head a little, “I didn’t want to tell you the truth because I didn’t want you to feel bad that you didn’t know about something so basic about me after knowing me for so long. Not that there’s any way that you could have known because we weren’t really like, telling each other stuff then. It was just easier to let you think that I’d forgotten to take them off because it was something new for me.”
Yuna interjected, “That’s actually so sad.”
Shane shrugged, “It was just how it was then, Mom. We didn’t have the time for the getting to know you stuff.”
Yuna stared at him, then bounced her eyes to Ilya.
“Okay, do not say anything. I know how that sounds. We had time for certain things. Me telling Ilya I wear glasses to read was not at the top of my priority list.”
They continued flipping forward until they got to a photo that made everyone take pause. It was a photo of several players on the ice taken from high up in an arean. All three of them were studying the photo, trying to remember who was who, reminiscing about where certain players had ended up being drafted that year.
Ilya sat straight forward in his chair.
“Shane. We are BOTH in this photo, look.”
Shane leaned over the back of Ilya’s chair to take a closer look. Squinting, he realized Ilya was right. It was technically their first photo “together”.
“Yuna, will you make us a copy of this to put in a frame, please?” Ilya asked quietly.
She nodded and slid it out of the protective sleeve it was in and set it to the side to remind her to make them a copy.
____________
After they said their thank yous for dinner and said their goodbyes, they got in Shane’s car to leave. Once in the car, Shane felt the need to profusely apologize for the night.
“I’m really sorry about that. I don’t know how looking at pictures of me all night qualified as a surprise,” he said, frowning.
“Stop,” Ilya said, punctuating it with a sweet kiss to Shane’s lips. “I loved tonight. I liked seeing you as a baby, and how you changed growing up. It makes me a little bit sad that I cannot do the same thing for you,” he said, his voice catching a little.
Times like these intensified how sad he felt about how his life went after his mother died. He would never regret leaving Russia to play hockey because it had saved his life in so many ways, gotten him out of a shitty family situation and he’d met Shane, but the pangs of sadness for not bringing more of his history with him when he left so many years ago hurt. Surely, the few photos he would have wanted to share with Shane did not exist any longer.
“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Shane said, putting the car into drive and pulling out of the driveway. “I’m also glad we found that picture of us. I haven’t seen that picture in years. I can’t believe we’re both in it.”
__________
Once they were home again, after showers and changing into what they were wearing to bed, they both climbed into bed. Ilya pulled Shane close to him, so Shane’s head could rest on his shoulder. He kissed the top of his head.
“Do you want to have a baby?” Ilya blurted.
Shane coughed on his own spit that he just choked on.
“What? Right now? We…” he sputtered.
“Hollander. Relax. Not right this second or even this year. Just…do you want one?” Ilya asked again.
Shane nodded, “I do.”
“Okay, good. Because after seeing those pictures tonight, I need to have a little Shane Hollander. I want it to look like you.”
Shane laughed loudly, “Are you sure you can handle two of us? Double the boring?”
Ilya smiled into his hair and said, “I have never been more sure of anything in my life.”