Papa left his tongue on the boat—let Ukrainian rot with the wood. If he was lucky, maybe it would float back across the ocean. To the shore of Odessa. Back to Wasyl and Hania, wherever they were now. Maybe it would even find his father, wherever he may be—it would slither across the trampled ground to his feet, or climb into his shirt pocket as his body was lowered into a grave—Papa didn’t know. No one did. He didn’t speak at all those first years. Was he to interrupt these Canadian boys, playing ball hockey on their concrete, lifting their hockey nets up like well-trained dancers whenever a car crept up the street? When his father eventually found them in Montreal, the two of them made their own choreography comprised of not speaking to each other, pushing potatoes across their plates at a kitchen table the landlord had left for them. If not, it was to have been left on  the curb. Papa was now taller than his father, but he still whimpered in his twin bed each night. How does a boy become a man? Papa eventually approached the sweet small blonde lady at the laundromat, the one who found his bushy eyebrows endearing; the other girls hid behind the dryers when he entered, giggling, saying, “this one’s yours, Louise, this one’s yours.” She was studying to become a teacher and that was absolutely perfect. They married, vacationed in Myrtle Beach, even got a film camera and made a photo album, and although his accent remained thick like a cloud of smoke, Papa’s Ukrainian faded. At night, with his wife snoring next to him, he tried to make out shapes in the dark and remember their Ukrainian names, pairing the curves of an unfamiliarized alphabet alongside the new crib in the corner. They had two children, Terry and Julie; Taras and Yulia in the whispered dark. His son, with the slack jaw and a love for Spiderman comics, and his daughter, winning spelling bees and playing the piano halfheartedly in the sunlit hall. Promptly after his own father died, Papa decided to enroll his children in the Ukrainian dancing lessons taking place at that one Ukrainian church, which he walked by sometimes on his way to the store. He had never learned to dance, but, as a child, he had always enjoyed the hopak, the way the dancers glided and shot through the sky, and how the ground shook beneath them in a way that, for once, was exciting. He insisted—a lesson after dinner on Thursdays, pushing bedtime, and his wife protested, saying they had enough to do, and why couldn’t they just learn the ceilí as she had if he wanted dancers for children. Anyway, she concluded, the red leather dancing boots were far too expensive. Papa picked up yellow billy boots and red spray paint, and he filled their small kitchen with nuclear fumes that then crept into everyone’s lungs. “Boots,” he declared. At the spring recital, his wife complained that the music was too loud, but Papa ignored her, sat in his folding chair, watching the stage with boyish wide-eyes—he never realized just how many Ukrainians there were in Montreal. His heart swelled when Terry and Julie stood centre stage and began stomping their feet. And when he tells the next part of this story, only when we ask, he insists that it’s funny: as his children jumped along with all those other second-generations, the red paint started to fly off their boots. Flecks like painted eggshell fell into his lap, until the kobza started to sound sinister, until there were two small Canadians on a stage staring at their father, yellow rubber an open wound.