Excerpt from The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"You ask every woman you meet in cleaners on dates?" Sveta said, swallowing a bite of cheesecake. Her blouse was the same salmon shade as her lipstick, and riding up her wrist were gold bracelets that clinked when she set down her fork.

"Absolutely not! I've worked there my entire life and you're the first."

"You work at cleaners your whole life?"

"Not just one cleaners—I own five. The original store on Houston, one in Murray Hill," I said, counting them off on my fingers, "two on the Upper West Side and the one on 33rd where you met me. It's been in the family since my grandfather. He was a tailor in Kiev, came here and started the business. If my grandfather had been a brain surgeon, I'd be a brain surgeon now, too."

"You are from Kiev?"

"Not me, my grandfather. I've never stepped foot there."

But Sveta didn't seem to be listening. "I am from Kiev!" She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. "Our people are coming from same place."

Our people? My people were from Ditmas Avenue. My people had left Ukraine before the Cossacks could impregnate their wives. As a boy, I'd been dragged to visit my grandfather in White Plains, where our family kept him in assisted living. I'd been forced to sit on the tip of his bed, the smell of green beans and condensed milk heavy in the air, and listen to his stories of moldy potatoes for dinner, of the village beauty's jaw shattered by the hoof of an angry horse. I'd heard stories of windows smashed, of my great-grandparents' tombs knocked on their sides, the stones broken up and used to build roads. I'd imagined pasty faces wrapped tight in babushkas, soldiers charging through the streets with burning torches. I'd heard those stories so many times that they became only that to me: stories.

But I didn't say that to Sveta. I didn't say that, until I met her, I'd studiously avoided so much as looking for Ukraine on a map. I said, "What an amazing coincidence!" because I could understand how happy she was to meet a man who shared her roots on this side of the globe—and mostly because she was still squeezing my hand, and I would have done anything to stop her from letting go. "What brought you here, then, from the marvelous land of Ivan the Terrible?"

"My husband found work here."

"And your husband doesn't mind your going out with every dry cleaner you meet?"

"How would he know? He's dead." She spooned sugar into her tea and—was this really her deft way of changing the subject?—-read the quote on the tea bag aloud like it was something to ponder.

"If you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth," she read. "What you think it means?" I had no clue. And anyhow, I wanted to hear about the dead man. "You know where they come up with these quotes? At some warehouse out in San Francisco. Same place they make the Chinese fortunes for the cookies. The person who wrote this knows jack about truth."

"This person," said Sveta, "is Gandhi."

Of course I'd opened my mouth just when our hands were touching. It was during these moments in life that I feared I'd become one of those old men I always saw here in the coffee shop, alone at a table, slurping soup.

The check came and we both reached for it. "Let me," we said in unison.

"I had good time," Sveta said, slapping down a bill before I'd even opened my wallet. I assumed she said it out of politeness after my Gandhi comment, but when we walked outside, she grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me, hard. "Where you are living?" she whispered. I pointed west, toward the Hudson. "Good," she said, taking my hand.

Inside my apartment, I led her to the kitchen. Not the sexiest room, but I really wanted to show off the view above the sink: I rarely had the opportunity anymore for guests to see it. While Sveta stared out at the boats dotting the river, the bright white lights of Jersey in the distance, I looked at her full cheeks and jagged teeth, remnants of lipstick escaping the corners of her mouth. In one long slow moment the room went quiet. I pulled her close. We were quick with each other, untucking, unbuckling, unzipping, until we were pressed naked against the dishwasher except for socks and watches and my glasses, which Sveta, at the last moment, set on the counter.

Excerpted from The Unamericans: Stories by Molly Antopol. Copyright © 2014 by Molly Antopol. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.