Sixty-Two

For three days, Umma calls out sick at work. She lays in bed watching Korean dramas into the night. Only the sad ones, where everyone dies in the end. She cries along to every scene, sobs wracking her body, as if she’s the one who is dying.

If she cancels the wedding now, instead of on the day of, she might be able to get at least a partial refund. But every time I bring it up—gently, so as not to hurt her feelings—she starts bawling, so I’ve stopped saying anything at all.

Even now, she hasn’t given up on the decorations. She puts on her wedding dress and the crooked veil and sits in front of the TV to fold paper flowers. It’s a simple yet tedious task. One turn of the wire to the left; that’s the first leaf. Wrap it in green tissue paper. One turn to the right for the second leaf. At the top, fold the wire into five medium-sized loops and wrap them in pink and purple paper.

“Using two colors adds dimension,” Umma says.

At the end, tape off the bottom so that nothing comes loose. Cover the tape with green ribbon and tie it off in a bow. The flowers were clumsy to begin with, but now, because she keeps crying all over them, they’re completely unusable. The pile of ruined flowers continues to grow at her feet, but she doesn’t stop.

Umma used to tell me that she knows Ji-hyun and me better than anyone else. “I made both of you in my stomach and grew you for nine months,” she’d say. “I created every part of your bodies. No matter who you meet, no matter what you do, I will always know you and your sister best.”

As a child, I thought this meant that my mother could read my mind. She knew when I was lying. She knew when I did bad things. But, as I grew older, I came to realize that this was one of Umma’s many untruths. She didn’t know what I was thinking or how I was feeling. If she did, she wouldn’t have acted this way. She wouldn’t have done things that hurt me, that made me sad, that made me cry. Most importantly, she wouldn’t have brought George into our house.