Way Off Plan (Firsts and Forever 1)

After a minute, she seemed to decide that Dmitri didn’t pose an immediate threat to her grandbabies. Maybe the fact that there were two cops in the room helped her reach that conclusion. She said, “I’ll just go get us some coffee. I’ll be right back.” She was physically incapable of having guests in her home without supplying them with coffee and baked goods.

“Thank you, Mrs. Nolan,” Dmitri said quietly, looking up at her and holding her gaze.

She hesitated for a moment, watching him closely. His expression was open, sincere. I could see her warming to him, the rigid line of her shoulders relaxing ever-so-slightly. “You’re welcome, Dmitri,” my mother said. She shot a warning glance at my father and whispered, “Be nice, Ray,” before heading to the kitchen.

I turned to my father then and blurted, “So Dad, we’re here because I need your advice.”

I heard my mother drop something in the adjacent kitchen, and fought the urge to roll my eyes. Ok, so I’d never actually uttered those words before, but did it really warrant the dropping of pots and pans?

My father was fairly shocked, too, which he conveyed with a single raised eyebrow. “You do? You’ve certainly never wanted my advice before,” he said, and cut a glance at my boyfriend. Last time I’d seen my father, he’d not so much offered me advice as offered to kill me if I kept going out with Dmitri.

My usual response when dealing with my father was total defensiveness. It was hard to let that go now, but I made myself say calmly, “I really need your help, Dad.”

That was another combination of words that had never actually passed from my lips. It had a curious effect on my father. He blinked at me, then tried to find a reason to get mad, then blinked at me again. Finally he seemed to concede that we were both in totally uncharted territory here, and leaned back in his chair as he said, “Ok. What do you need?”

“Maybe we should talk in the kitchen,” I said, glancing at my nephews.

My father nodded and hauled himself up from his recliner, and I got up and held a hand out to Dmitri.

“Me too?” he asked softly. I nodded, and he deposited the kids on the carpet with that magic phone app and took my hand. The boys didn’t even look up as we went into the kitchen, and the dog curled up to go back to sleep beside them.

My mother was pulling coffee mugs out of the cupboard when we came into the room. She glanced at Dmitri’s and my joined hands. And she dealt with it. Finding out I was gay hadn’t been the highlight of their year, but my parents were coping. Far better than I could have hoped for, actually.

My father and I sat at the kitchen table, and my mother quickly ran a sponge over the flowered vinyl table cloth. Dmitri asked if he could help her (putting my dad and me to shame in the sexism department), and when at first she refused, he gently cajoled her until finally he was given the task of arranging the cookies on the platter while my mother rounded up sugar and creamer and coffee cups, placing them on her ‘special occasion’ silver tray. She might have her doubts about Dmitri, but she was treating him like an honored guest, and that was nice to see.

When finally we were all seated around the table, I gave my parents a concise summary of Dmitri’s involvement in the Russian mafia, then told them in detail about Gregor Sokolov and the veiled threats he’d delivered this afternoon. When I got to the part about not being able to get a search warrant because Sokolov had a couple cops in his pocket, a vein bulged out in my father’s forehead and he said in a low growl, “I need names. That shit can’t go on in my department.”

“I may have a way of finding out which cops are working for my uncle,” Dmitri said quietly. It was the first time he’d spoken since we’d sat down at the table. I looked at him questioningly, and he told me, “Joe Rudin. He does the payroll, he’d have names. Maybe he’s bribable. Or maybe we have an in with him, now that Catherine’s dating him.”

My father stared at Dmitri for a long moment. And then he nodded. He liked that. But he wasn’t ready to welcome Dmitri to the family with open arms just yet. Instead, he turned to me and said, “See? This is exactly what I was worried about when I found out you were dating someone in the mafia. All of a sudden, you’ve got lowlife criminals showing up at your door, making threats against you, against your family. I know Sokolov. He’s been on my radar for more than two decades. He’s a total sociopath and a slippery son of a bitch. We’ve never been able to pin anything on him.”