Then he moved away after completing ninth grade.
Dina remembered their farewell: her tears, which she could not hold back, his kiss on the lips, which she treasured for a long time.
“We’re moving really far away, to another country,” said Valera to Dina, making her swear an oath to keep this a secret, “so I won’t be able to write to you.”
Dina started writing to Sergey again.
The correspondence with Sergey somehow faded away on its own, and resumed only when Dina received a wedding invitation from him when she was already at university. She did not come, of course, for it was too far away and too expensive. She did not have the time either, not with all the lectures and exams. Nevertheless, she wrote him a warm letter and they continued to occasionally exchange news and photos.
Since then, Sergey had already gotten divorced and was not planning to marry again – or so he wrote in his letters to Dina. Dina sometimes imagined them meeting somewhere, and their old tender friendship blossoming into love, and then…
So she knew that a family started with love. This meant that someone she loved needed to be at her side. Love was forever. She did not take her mom’s experiences into account. Her mom was just unlucky for some reason.
* * *
When Dina was very young, she once asked her mother, “Mom, why don’t we have a dad?”
Her mother answered very calmly. “Our dad died. Never ask me about him again because it upsets me very much.”
Dina did not want to upset her mother so she did not ask any more questions about her dad. If any friends living nearby or at the kindergarten asked her, “Where is your dad?” she told them what her mother had said.
One day, her mom came home with a new man and said to Dina,
“This is Uncle Tolya. He’ll live with us now.”
Dina was very excited and asked, “Can I call him Daddy?”
Uncle Tolya was delighted by this and said, “Of course, Dinochka, call me Dad.”
Everything was wonderful at the start, they went to the movies together, to the zoo, and skiing.
Dina was proud of her dad and happy for her mom, who laughed a lot and dressed up.
Then Uncle Tolya started disappearing somewhere for a few days at a time, while Mom went around with red eyes and her hair uncombed, and told Dina that she was sick and that Uncle Tolya had gone away on a business trip.