TIME OF THE YEAR

 

 

ON A SNOWY MORNING IN DECEMBER, Father gave up trying to fix things with Mother. There was no drama: No dish flew across the dining room in a spinning rage, no door got slammed hard enough to fall off its hinges. Instead it was a quiet, subtle shift in the way he greeted me in the morning. Since we’d been rooming together, I heard a tinge of sorrow and shame every time he said, “Good morning, Joon-a,” but on this day it was gone. This day, he was perfectly happy to tell me that this living arrangement, where a father and son shared a room while a mother and daughter shared another, all under the same roof, could constitute a good morning.

“It’s not normal,” I told my sister. “Normal people don’t live like this.”

“Then I guess we’re not normal,” she said. The old Noona would not only have said that with a sarcastic bite, but followed it up with some other nasty remark. The new Noona, however, delivered the line with compassion and understanding. Since Yun Sae started calling every evening, Noona had become unrecognizably calm; it was as if Noona and Mother had switched places. Maybe I just wasn’t aware of a curse on our family where one female was required to act irrational at all times. “Be patient,” she cooed. “Things will be right again.” Then the phone rang and she was gone.

I doubted things would be right again. They might improve, but they weren’t going back to the way they were. Not that our lives before were so spectacular, but they sure beat this mess.

On the day Father officially quit on Mother, I woke up to piercing brightness. It was the first day of the two weeks when Peddlers Town, in preparation for the Christmas season, opened daily with extended hours. The sun, unencumbered by clouds, reflected itself every place where there was snow, the front yard sparkled like a field of diamonds. From my window, I saw only the tippy-top of the ruler I’d stuck in the snow heap on the balcony last night, a foot.

I saw the clock: 6:55. I wondered why I was up so early. Last night they’d already closed the schools because of the snowstorm, so somebody must’ve woken me. I vaguely recalled being shaken awake, but it could’ve been a dream.

“Good morning, Joon-a!”

Father stood at the foot of my bed. He was wearing his boots, his big black coat, and mittens. He even had the furry hood of the coat over his head. It all seemed very strange, very unreal.

“Wha . . . ?”

“Did you fall back asleep?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Well, brush your teeth, wash your face, and help me clean off the car. We’re going tree hunting!”

Tree hunting? Maybe this was still a dream. Why weren’t my parents at the store? I crawled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. Splashing cold water on my face cleared my head.

Over toast and cereal, Father explained that a water pipe had burst in Peddlers Town overnight, so the whole building was closed for the day. This was apparently good news, because all the merchants were covered by insurance for the lost day of potential shopping. Through some complicated calculation involving the rent, the size, and the tenure of our store, we would benefit $850.

“Considering the amount of snow we got, that’s probably eight hundred dollars more than we would’ve sold if we had opened the store,” he said.

So not only did Noona and I get a snow day, my parents did as well. But instead of doing nothing like I’d hoped, I now had to shovel out the car to go get a Christmas tree.

“Is it just you and me?” I asked, seeing the closed door of my old bedroom.

Father crunched on the last bit of his toast, then wiped his buttery fingers on a napkin. “Unless you want to wake them,” he said. He was using that word a lot lately, them, whenever he referred to Noona and Mother.

I shrugged. I didn’t want to wake them. What I wanted was to be a girl. If I were, then I would be in that room, too, snoozing and dreaming underneath the warm covers.

Shoveling wasn’t bad. There was a lot of snow, but it was fluffy and powdery. A plow had already come through the apartment parking lot, so we only had to move enough snow for our station wagon to get out. By the time our car was free, I had to unzip the front of my winter coat to cool down. After scraping the windows, I jumped into the passenger seat.

“My good son,” Father said, tapping his hands to the song coming out of the stereo, “Jingle Bells.” The “Jingle Bells” refrain was in English, but everything else was in Korean, which, when I thought about it, was really stupid.

 

______

 

The local roads were rough, but the highway was clear. Staring out the window and seeing every tree and bush white with snow, I almost couldn’t tell that I was in a different country. The last big winter storm we had in Korea was about this time a year ago. Noona and I had built a snowman at our neighborhood park, a short and stout one like a fat grandmother. How long before it had all melted away? It stayed bitterly cold until we left for America, so maybe it lasted until the spring thaw. And maybe, by some cosmic coincidence, somebody else had built a snowman in our old spot, and she was back there right now, taking in the scenery through a pair of coat-button eyes, the cold sunshine turning her snowy skin into an icy crust.

Our eventual destination was Herman’s Garden off Route 35 South, a nursery with a deceptively small entrance. Once you drove in, the place stretched back for maybe half a mile, just rows and rows of potential Christmas trees waiting to be chopped. There was nobody there, not even Herman. Instead we were greeted with a hurried cardboard sign written in black magic marker:

Good morning. I might be running late, so if you want a tree,
take it and deposit $25 into my gray box. Scout’s honor.

—Herman

In the barnlike structure that stood before the field, there was a machine to net the trees for easier transport. A stack of bow saws hung on the wall. Father picked one out, a thin rusty sawtooth blade with a bright orange handle.

“We should cut our own,” he said.

I pointed at a canopied cluster of precut trees leaning against the barn. “Don’t you think that’s a better idea? The trees out there have a lot of snow on them.”

“Come on, Joon-a. We’ll shake the snow off. Don’t you want the whole experience?”

And off he went, strolling down the main path to pick out the perfect tree. I sprinted to catch up with him. It was windier out in the field, my nose was running almost instantly. My cheap yellow boots not only looked unfashionable, they did little to keep my feet warm.

We found our tree on the eighth row, a perfectly conical six-foot Douglas fir. Its sharp needles poked me like a torture device. Father handed me the saw and I started cutting, the fresh scent of pine bursting with every stroke of the blade.

“Want me to give it a shot?” Father asked after I’d sawed about a third. I was glad to let him take over; it was tough work. In half the time I had taken, Father cut down the tree. We shook off as much snow as possible and dragged it over to the netting machine. Though neither of us had ever used one, it seemed fairly straightforward.

“Push in and pull out,” Father said, pointing at the mouth of the machine.

“Sounds good.”

The tree came out squeezed and shrunk; it really was just that simple.

We were less sure of tying down the tree to the roof of our car, but luckily, a truck pulled in and an old man with bulldog cheeks stepped out of it.

“Need any help?” he asked. He was wearing overalls with a name tag that read ERMA. The H and N were covered up with red paint.

He was a pro, looping little nooses at each end and running a line through them all. He cinched that line and tied our tree flush against the car, like magic.

“When you get home, all you need to do is release the main line,” he said, handing it to me.

Father gave him twenty-five dollars. “Merry Christmas,” Herman said.

 

With the tree mounted on top of our car like a green warhead, we swung by Kmart and picked up a tree stand, two sets of white lights and two sets of colorful flashing lights, two dozen round glass balls in various metallic shades, and a box of plastic icicles. Just when I thought we were finished, Father put the brakes on the cart and turned it around.

“We need to get an angel for the top,” he said.

By this time, I was beyond tired. Waking up early, shoveling, sawing, shopping—all against my will, and what for? Back home there was nothing but silence and hate, and a fully decorated tree wasn’t going to remedy any of that. In the middle of the automotive section, I simply stopped. When he realized I wasn’t following him, he rolled the cart back.

“Should I get a star instead? Why don’t you pick?”

There were boxes of motor oil along the wall, so I sat on one. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the hard concrete. I didn’t want to go home and I didn’t want to stay here.

“All right,” Father said, “I won’t be long.” He left the cart with me and shuffled off in search of his angel, his star. I watched him as he walked up and down the aisles, and at one point, I saw one hand raise his glasses away from his eyes while the other quickly wiped away tears.

On the way home, he said, “You know, I’ve lost everybody else. You’re all I have.”

I said nothing. He hadn’t realized he’d lost me, too.

When we got home, Mother and Noona were in the kitchen, and they were surprised to see the tree, but not angry. In fact, Mother seemed glad to see it, even if Father was the one who’d brought it into the house.

I assembled the stand and Father placed the tree in it. When it stood up straight, he tightened the bolts and sat in front of it, no pride or joy in his eyes, just weariness.

For lunch, Mother and Noona made bi-bim-baap, egg-fried rice with kimchi and soy-marinated spinach on the side. They didn’t realize that they’d unwittingly used Christmas colors for their meal.

“It’s red and green,” I said, but no one seemed to care.

After he finished eating, Father went into our bedroom and closed the door.

“What’s his problem?” Noona said.

“I think he’s just tired,” I said.

A string of lights didn’t work out of the box, so we had to fiddle with it until all fifty lights were lit. With the three of us pitching in, it took less than an hour to hang up all the ornaments. Noona dragged one of our dining room chairs to impale the sweet-faced angel on top of the tree. She had a halo on top of her head that lit up with the rest of the lights when we flipped the switch. We stepped back and took it in, our fully decorated Christmas tree.

“It’s beautiful,” Mother said, walking around the tree, admiring it from different angles. “Where did you get it?” I related the morning’s events to her, and for the first time in a long while, her face resembled the one I’d known all my life.

It didn’t last long. Next morning, we discovered that sometime during the night, the tree fell.

“It must have slid against the wall,” Noona said. “Otherwise, we would’ve heard it.”

“My fault,” Father said. I’d never heard him sound so thoroughly defeated. “I must’ve not tightened it enough on the bottom.”

No one was more shocked than Mother. The tree looked dead, laying on its side. She picked up the broken ornaments (luckily, most were fine, cushioned by the carpet) while Father heaved the tree back on its feet. Noona got three big towels from the closet and tried her best to soak up all the spilled water. That’s all the time we had, because they had to go to work and Noona and I had to go to school.

When Father and Mother came back from the store that evening, we’d just finished redecorating the tree. The most time-consuming part was getting all the lights to come back on: this time, two of the strings had gone out. Noona put her artistic touch to work by replacing the broken ornaments with little winged angels she drew on cardboard cutouts.

“We think the tree was too heavy on one side,” Noona said.

“It’s even prettier than last night,” Father said, but it was obvious he was just saying that to make us all feel better. The tree looked like crap.

Father turned off the lights in the living room and brought in the “Jingle Bells” tape from his car. We sat around the tree until the tape played the last song, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which, like all the other songs on the album, was in Korean except for the title.

“Why do they do that?” I asked Father. “Sing just that part in English?”

“So they can pretend to be where we are, in America,” Father said.

“Really?”

“Who knows. That’s my guess.”

“It just sounds weird, is all.”

“Didn’t you ever dream of being here?”

“No,” I said. “I was happy where I was.” I didn’t care if that hurt him; it was the truth.

Father unplugged the lights and the tree went dark with the rest of the room, but the full moon illuminated the nighttime sky with its steely glow. As we headed to bed, the morning’s horror was forgotten, chalked up to uneven weight distribution and a smidgen of rotten luck.

Next day, as we stood around the once-again fallen tree—this time on the other side, leaning against the left wall—no one said anything. Father looked at the tree as if he wanted to chop it into little pieces and burn it up. “Wait until I get back tonight,” he said before leaving. It wasn’t accusatory, the way he’d said it, but Noona and I still blamed ourselves.

When our parents returned that evening, Father went to work immediately. He twisted four hooked wall screws around where the tree would stand, paired near the top and bottom, then looped a thick, green cord around the trunk then tied it to a hook. He repeated this with the other three, and when he was finished, the tree was strapped at four corners.

The tree didn’t fall again, but it looked odd all bound up, especially during the day. Father thought the twine would be camouflaged, but under sunlight, the color was weirdly off, reflecting a lurid, fluorescent green.

“It looks like a hostage,” I said.

“Now it’s stuck here,” Noona said, “just like the rest of us.”

 

For Mother, I bought a canary-yellow dress with short-sleeved arms and a scooped neck. She wouldn’t be able to wear it until the summer, but it was a quality dress, according to Mindy, who found it for me. I thanked her and whipped out the little red box I’d been hiding inside my back pocket. It was Christmas Eve, so I wouldn’t be seeing her until the holiday was over.

She looked surprised more than happy, which both mystified and concerned me. I hoped I wasn’t doing anything to offend her.

“You open the box?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said, flipping the velvet-covered case until it clicked up with a pop.

It was just a dumb necklace we sold at the store, a gold chain with a jade pendant in the shape of a curled-up kitty. “I love it,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. I was hoping for one on the lips, but we were in the middle of the clothing shop and people were everywhere.

On the way back to her store, we passed by A Second Chance, where she yanked my hand and pulled us both to a stop. “Wait here,” she said, and jumped into the store. I saw her take a white hardcover book from the front display, but its title was too small to read from where I stood, and then I got it: She was getting my present. She hadn’t thought of it in advance like I had, which peeved me somewhat.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. At Animal Attraction, Mindy found a roll of gold-foiled wrapping paper underneath the register counter.

“What’s shakin’, Dave?” Sylvia, her mother, asked. Since she’d come to know me, she no longer simply said hello or hi—it was always whether something was shaking, cooking, up, going down—I could probably fill a notebook with her numerous variations. I liked the way she called me Dave in her easygoing drawl; it made me feel as if we’d been friends forever.

“Not much, Sylvia,” I said, my usual response.

“Looks like you’re about to get a nice Christmas gift.”

“It is a nice gift,” Mindy said.

“Oh, honey,” Sylvia said, seeing Mindy struggling with the paper, “you don’t need to use that much.”

“Will you just leave us alone?” Mindy said.

“Fine, fine,” Sylvia said, retreating to the rear of the pet shop. She picked up a cylinder of fish food and sprinkled the top of one of the aquariums. A kaleidoscope of tropical fishes gunned for the surface, and Sylvia watched them eat with motherly satisfaction.

Mindy was doing a terrible job of wrapping; she’d cut off too much, so now she had to shear another little piece of wrapping paper to patch up the bottom of the book from jutting out. She wasn’t a very graceful girl, which had been Mother’s biggest complaint when she still cared enough to have opinions about someone besides Father. She said Mindy was too tall and compared her to a horse, citing her big, flaring nostrils and long face.

“She does not,” Noona said, and for a second I’d foolishly thought she was defending me. “She looks more like a . . . giraffe! You know, with all her spots on her skin!”

While she and Mother had a good chuckle, Father took me aside. “Don’t listen to them, Joon-a. They’re just jealous.”

“You don’t think she’s too tall?”

“American girls, they’re big. You’re small right now, but you’ll get big.”

Looking at my father didn’t exactly make me a believer. If I took after him, I’d be doomed to a life of gazing up at people.

Mindy had a long neck, and her skin was littered with brownish freckles, packed all over her face and arms, a mosaic of brownish spots that, up close, broke apart into a myriad of strange shapes and sizes, but I still liked her fine.

“Merry Christmas,” Mindy said, handing me my gift.

The cover of The Little Prince featured a blond kid with spiky, unkempt hair standing on top of what looked to be a ridiculously small planet. There were illustrations throughout—an elephant stuck underneath a hat, a bright star over a barren landscape, a single rose against a lonely moon.

“I love it,” I said, because that’s what she’d said about the necklace. In actuality, I felt uneasy—because even from the little I saw as I flipped through, I skimmed by a bevy of words I didn’t know.

“We can read it together,” she said, as if reading my mind. “If you want to.”

My Mindy, my giraffe.

 

Ten minutes to closing time, Mr. Hong walked into our store, his face ashen.

“I’m leaving for the hospital right now,” he said. “I just came by to wish you a Merry Christmas.”

“Hong,” Father said, but didn’t know what else to say. He just nodded and wished him the same.

As we pulled down our canvas curtains for the day, Father asked me, “Don’t you think we should be there, Joon-a?”

“It’s Christmas Eve and I want to go home,” I said. I dropped the last curtain and picked up a handful of locks. I crouched down at the farthest curtain and started chaining and locking up the ends.

Father picked up the remaining locks and followed me. “It won’t be for long, just to stop by and wish her a good Christmas, too. Don’t you think she deserves that?”

I kept silent, concentrating on the sound the locks made as they snapped shut.

“I mean if you were really sick, wouldn’t seeing your friends cheer you up?”

I couldn’t take much more of this. With every passing day, my respect for Mother’s level of patience grew: How had she been able to live with him without picking up a baseball bat and bashing him until he stopped talking?

“If you want to go, then go!” I said. It was almost exactly what I’d heard Mother say to him a hundred times.

Hearing my outburst, Noona walked over. “What’s going on?”

“He wants to go to the hospital,” I said, pointing at Father. “He wants to spend Christmas Eve there.”

“We’re not going to be there all night,” he said, making it sound like I was crazy. “I just said we’d stop by.”

“We’ll be there all night,” I muttered to myself. It was then that I felt a hand on my neck, it was the hand of my mother, her tenderness—in the dusk of her almond eyes, the warmth of her palm, the quiet sag of her shoulders.

“We’ll go,” she said. “It’ll be all right.”

We closed up the store and left at seven.

 

The hour and minute hands of the round clock on the wall of the ICU waiting room were about to converge into one solid black line on the twelve. I waited until the red second hand completed its circular journey.

“Merry Christmas,” I whispered to Noona. She said nothing, just sat there with her arms crossed, her eyes closed.

In this drab gray room lined with hard gray plastic chairs, we sat with the rest of the bleary-eyed families, watching the ceiling-mounted television screen, flipping through outdated magazines, picking at our fingernails. The room was poorly lit, some of the fluorescent bulbs either missing or burnt out. There were only four other people besides us: two Latino men who looked alike, one white-bearded old man thin enough to be on a hunger strike, and a chain-smoking twentysomething girl who constantly had some part of her body in motion—a tapping finger, a shaking foot, a bobbing head.

Since we weren’t immediate family, none of us was allowed to go into Mrs. Hong’s room at this time of night. Every hour, Mr. Hong pushed through the large double doors to give us an update. It was obvious he didn’t want to do this, but Father wouldn’t leave, despite Mr. Hong’s insistence, so he felt as if he had to keep us in the loop.

“I don’t think her condition is going to change,” Mr. Hong told Father. “You really should go home. Look, it’s past midnight, it’s Christmas.”

“We’re staying right here,” Father said, squeezing his shoulder.

Mr. Hong gestured to the three of us. “I think they want to go home.”

“We’ll wait until Yun Sae gets here,” Father said. Yun Sae was driving up from Maryland with Mrs. Hong’s sister; they were due to arrive at any moment, or at least that’s how the story went.

“I bet you every cent I have that even when Yun Sae arrives, we won’t go home,” I told Noona, who had dozed off.

Ten minutes later, my claim was put to test, for Yun Sae arrived. He woke up my sister with a peck on the cheek.

“Why are you guys here?” he said.

“Support,” Father said.

Yun Sae nodded. “How is she?”

“We’re not allowed in,” Noona said. “Because we’re not family.”

He flagged down the attendant and spoke to her quickly. He grabbed Noona and whispered quickly into her ear, and she nodded. The three of them talked for a bit more, then the attendant came over to us and apologized.

“What did you say to them?” I asked Yun Sae.

“I told them In Sook’s my fiancée and that I’m a lawyer. Come on, let’s go.”

 

What hit me first was the smell of the room, the smell of death, a low, rotting scent of a body on the brink of passing. Nothing could prevent this odor from surfacing—not the bouquets of flowers, not the bowl of potpourri. Mrs. Hong was dying.

“Yun-Sae-ya,” Mr. Hong said, embracing his son.

“I drove as fast as I could,” Yun Sae said.

“You got them all in?” When Yun Sae told him the story, Mr. Hong managed a laugh. “We can get more chairs.” Mr. Hong and Father went to the empty room across the hall and brought four folding chairs. Mr. Hong, Mrs. Hong’s sister, Yun Sae, and Noona sat on the left side while Father, Mother, and I sat on the right.

Yun Sae kissed his mother on the forehead. “She doesn’t look good.”

“The doctor says . . .” Mr. Hong had trouble getting it out, but he got himself under control and continued. “The doctor doesn’t think she’ll make it through the night.”

Two clear plastic tubes ran into Mrs. Hong’s nostrils and a yellow tube burrowed into her arm. She wore a blue cap to hide her radiation-induced baldness, and her bony face was completely drained of color. Three months ago, which was when I last saw her, saying she was leaving for Korea to visit her relatives, Mrs. Hong had been a short, plump woman with a perm who liked to read, and now here she lay, unrecognizable, her face a skeletal mask. To her left was a heart monitor, the green line doing the familiar jump as it made its way across the screen, beeping softly with every heartbeat. When she’s dead, I thought, that’s going to flatline. What then? Mrs. Hong would be here one second, and in the next, she wouldn’t be, never to return, her soul detaching from her lifeless body and rising, invisible.

Mother walked up to her and touched her cheek.

“Hello, Jenny,” she said.

“Hello, Emma,” Mrs. Hong said.

Then Mother turned away quickly, hiding her face from everyone.

At 1:14 A.M., Mrs. Hong stopped breathing. The EKG fell silent, the dot running from right to left in a straight green line. Everyone put their heads down but me. I kept alert for something, anything—a sudden flicker of light, an inexplicable chill in the air, the ringing of faraway bells—but nothing. There was one less person in this world and nobody outside of this room knew or cared.

We all took turns hugging the Hongs, then we drove home.

 

Usually it took a serious amount of yelling or shaking or even water splashing to wake me up in the middle of the night, but for whatever reason, when Mother tiptoed into our room, I woke up instantly. I didn’t feel even a hint of grogginess; it was as if I hadn’t been asleep at all. Maybe it was because I’d gone to sleep so late, my body rhythm out of sync.

I heard her walk past me to Father’s bed. “Yeuh-boh,” she said as she shook him awake, “yeuh-boh.”

“What time is it?” Father whispered, his voice thick with sleep.

“Four-thirty.”

“You couldn’t sleep?”

“We should talk.”

After they left for the living room, I slunk out of bed and opened my door a crack as quietly as possible, just enough so I could hear. My bare toes curled against the icy floor.

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” Mother said. “I know you’re sorry. You kept seeing her. I can somehow deal with you and her when we weren’t here, but how could you? When we, when I, was here, right here?”

A minute, maybe more, passed by before Father answered. “I just didn’t know how to break it off. I know I should’ve, but I just . . . didn’t know how.”

Another long pause. “I’m giving you another chance,” Mother said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was seeing Mrs. Hong tonight. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“She’s younger than both of us.”

“It’s just . . . not fair.”

The next moment of silence was so long that I thought they were done, but then Father spoke. “So does this mean we go back to the way we were?”

Mother didn’t say anything, but she must have nodded, for Father let out a long, thankful sigh.

“I think Joon-a hates me,” he said.

“This has been hard on both of our kids,” Mother said.

“So tomorrow we move back?”

“Yes,” Mother said. Then she added, “are you going to fuck up again?” It was the first time I’d heard her say that particular curse word, and I felt stung. Coming from Mother, that word seemed especially harsh.

“No,” Father said, “I won’t fuck up again. I won’t.”

As I slipped back into bed, I wished I felt happier than I actually did. In my mind, I’d expected their reconciliation to be more loving than what I’d just heard, with both Mother and Father apologizing, running into one another’s open arms, pledging to each other they’d never do something so cruel again.

 

On Christmas Day, while Mother and Noona slapped lunch together, Father went to work on the living room coffee table.

“Come on, Joon-a,” he said. “You can help me count.” He opened up a pouch and out came stacks and stacks of twenties, like he’d held up a bank. I’d never seen so much cash in my life. “A lot of money, huh? It was a pretty good Christmas.”

I sat down on the floor next to him and sorted the piles in decreasing denominations, starting with the hundreds and ending with the ones. There were so many twenties, we had to make five pillars of them. Even though my fingertips were turning dark, I loved every second of soaking in the rich scent of paper currency.

“Let’s count,” Father said, so we counted. We counted three times, coming to a grand total of $24,984 for the two weeks leading up to Christmas, an average of $1,800 of gross sales per day.

As we were snapping rubber bands around the bills to take to the bank, Father raised his eyebrows, his best conspiratorial look. “You wanna know a secret?”

If I didn’t hear another secret for the rest of my life, that would’ve been just fine. He must have seen this in my face as he cleared his throat and said, “It’s nothing bad, in fact it’s something quite good.”

It probably had to do with what I’d overheard last night, so I nodded, but Father changed his mind. “I’ll announce it over lunch,” he said. “It’s worth waiting for.”

We washed up and sat down at the dining table. “Why don’t you sit over there?” Father suggested, leaving the chair open for Mother, a seating configuration we hadn’t used in a while. It was Father and Mother on one side and Noona and me on the other, all of us busily digging into our respective bowls. When we were finished, Father spoke.

“We’re going back to the way things were,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true. All he and Mother would be doing is sleeping in the same room again. “And Joon-a,” he added, “you’re going to have your own room.”

There was no way I could have another room, unless they shoved a bed into the bathroom. Unless, of course, we were moving. Looking at the cash on the table, twenty-five thousand dollars of cash, the idea suddenly didn’t seem so preposterous. It would be enough for a down payment on a small house, not around here because houses were too expensive, but the next few towns over weren’t so bad.

“Are we getting a house?” I asked, looking from Father to Mother and back to Father.

“That’s not what he meant,” Mother said, trying her best not to sound annoyed. “We’re going to set up half of the living room as your space.”

“It’s almost like a room,” Father said. “We’ll move the piano to the other wall. We have a plan, you’ll see.”

“Did you know about this?” I asked Noona.

“Mother told me when we were making lunch.”

Of course, I was always the last to know, even when it came to things that directly affected my life. “When?” I asked.

“Soon, I guess,” Mother said, looking at Father. Father shrugged, disappointed at my disappointment.

After lunch, he took me aside and explained that on our coffee table was a quarter of what we earned for the whole year, and it would have to last us through the slow winter, like squirrels depending on their reserves of gathered nuts. How retailers survived before Jesus Christ died on the cross, nobody knew.

“A good chunk of that also goes to the rent, and of course, to our wholesalers for the goods we sold,” Father said.

I nodded, but I wasn’t really listening. My mind was on the living room, how it could be configured to accommodate me and my stuff. It made the most sense to move me into the corner by the sliding balcony window, maybe get one of those vertical blinds to block the sun.

“You’ll get your own room,” Father said, “a real one. Business is good, and we’re saving some money. The houses in Neptune aren’t too expensive.”

Again, I nodded. His predictions and promises were full of good intentions but rarely came true. I saw no reason why this would be any different.

 

Instead of walls I had rice-paper screens, two standing side by side and one perpendicular, framing me into a rectangle. They transformed the corner of the living room into a place of my own, where I slept, read, and dreamed. At first, it was strange to not have anybody else in sight, but it didn’t take long until I looked forward to stretching the screen across my “doorway,” bathing in the milky-white translucence of my room. With my earplugs in, it was as good as being alone.

I was alone a lot after Christmas, when Father and Mother moved back in together and I got my space. Two weeks of quiet and harmony was all I’d get, as they soon resumed their usual bickering about money and everything else. I was learning to hate them in that special way only an adolescent can hate his parents. I missed being with Noona, but she was different now that she and Yun Sae were together. We were growing up and growing older, whether I liked it or not.

I told all this to Mindy as we sat in her pet store, surrounded by chirping birds and barking dogs. She usually put things in perspective, but today she said nothing to comfort me. Instead, she had this to say: “We’re moving.”

I almost choked on the Raisinets I’d popped into my mouth. “Where?”

“Vermont,” she said, snapping the book shut. We’d been on the second chapter of The Little Prince, where the author meets the prince for the first time. The prince wanted him to draw him a sheep, and that’s as far as we’d gotten.

“When?”

“I don’t know,” she said, then bitterly, “ask Mom. I hate her.”

“Why you moving?”

She munched on a handful of Raisinets, washing them down with a Coke. I sipped on my lemonade, which tasted way more sour after the sweets. “I don’t wanna go,” she said, but we both knew she had no choice. She explained that her grandmother was retiring from the bed-and-breakfast she owned and ran, and it’d been agreed for a long time that her mother would take up the reins.

“When?” I asked her again, because I thought she knew but just didn’t want to tell me.

“A month,” she said. “Maybe two weeks.”

“We will write?” I asked. It was stupid. I knew how to construct simple sentences, but what would I say?

She nodded quickly and dabbed her eyes with the sleeve of her fuzzy pink sweater. “I wish I could grow up,” she said. “Like really fast, you know? So I could make my own decisions, go where I wanna go, and stay where I wanna stay.”

It was a slow Saturday evening, the dead time of dinner when only the restaurants get business. On the counter were a pair of rubberized chew toys for dogs, in the shape of a moon and a sun. Faces were painted on their round surfaces, and initially I’d thought they were both smiling, but upon closer examination, they looked more like expressions of concern than good humor.

“You know what is today?” I asked. Mindy shook her head. “One year before today, I came to this country, on the airplane.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said, sounding hurt. She must’ve felt left out that I hadn’t told her in advance. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“What do you think?”

“About?”

She rolled her eyes, punched me on the arm. “Don’t be smart. You know, do you like it here now?”

It would suck when she left, and I didn’t want to think about that. Instead I thought about now, right now, being here with a girl I liked, who liked me back.

“Could be worse,” I said.

 

 

It was the truths that made the people grotesques.
—Sherwood Anderson,
Winesburg, Ohio