Flabbergasted, I stared at him. He couldn’t possibly think I was a drag queen. While I was attempting to tear him apart with my glare, I noticed his hair wasn’t slicked back with Brilliantine like so many of the other men in attendance, including me. The Peach’s red locks were tangled atop his head in loose waves, a style that wasn’t popular but damn if it didn’t look right on him. “I’m not a belle.”

“So you’re a blind?” he questioned, glancing at my ring finger, visibly surprised when he didn’t see a ring. “No ring.”

“I’m not married,” I scoffed as though the idea was ludicrous, “and I don’t know why you think I’m like you …”

I hated how the conversation made me feel compelled to answer questions about myself that I’d never had the wherewithal to ask. Every time I had engaged in an evening with a bitch from The Gallery on State it had been a silent night, the only discussions to be had being about logistics. They’d never asked me to define myself or reflect on my condition, not like the Peach was doing.

“You know, in this day and age, it’s acceptable to be like me,” he said, discontent taking a hold of his melodic tone. “There are worse things to be.”

“Like what?” I asked, my inquiry more genuine than I intended it to be.

Throwing the remainder of his whiskey down his throat, he gritted his teeth, glared at me, and uttered, “Like you.” He slid his glass across the bar top and stood to make his way away from me.

Instinctively, I grabbed his wrist and frowned when he shook me off. As he walked away, I could not help but notice he already looked dimmer. After five minutes with me, the Peach had become busted Christmas lights, shoveled snow, and the most formidable challenge I had ever known.

And there’s a hand my trusty friend and give me a hand o’ thine. And we’ll take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne.

4

April 1930

Being that America was a land of immigrants, I shouldn’t have felt like such an outsider being one. While many came to the States with “My Country, Tis of Thee” on their lips and red, white, and blue blood pulsing through their veins, it was never that way for me. Instead, I hummed the death lullabies my father sang to me as a child and yearned for Mother Russia, the only matriarch I knew. The move should have been easier for me. I was only five when my father, Igor, and I boarded a boat and made the voyage across the Atlantic, but I had left too much behind to look forward with idealism, even at my young age.