Chapter 1 #2
“What if,” Lauren began, “you did have someone. Just for Korean Thanksgiving.”
“Don’t call it that.”
“What? It’s—”
“It’s Chuseok.”
“Focus.” She tapped the screen with her manicured nail. Bright orange with a navy lightning bolt nail art. Fresh.
The app’s logo read STDY, which Cassiel guessed was STUDY with the vowel removed, though perhaps STEADY made more sense given the context.
“You bring someone. A hired professional. Your mom sees you with a date, everyone calms down, you eat your pancake things in peace.”
She’d used it herself, she explained, after one of the breakups.
Cassiel did not recall which. Every man she’d ever dated was, as far as he could determine, the same person in slightly different jeans.
He’d told her this once, and she’d ignored him, and then three days later called him and said, “The jeans never fucking FIT.”
“The point is it works. Show up with someone presentable, normal, your mom sees you thriving—”
“I’m thriving now,” he said.
“You eat the same lunch every day.”
Cassiel looked up at her. What thriving had to do with his lunch was beyond him.
“Because I found the good one,” he said.
Lauren’s solution was hers alone, because her problems were about legibility.
She needed to be seen doing well. But Cassiel suspected what his mother wanted was a son whose life proved that the solitude was just his personality, not symptoms of something else that had calcified around him while she watched helplessly from Fremont.
The indoor job, repairing watches while ignoring the world, the apartment on 4th Avenue with no one else in it.
No hired date would change the underlying problem.
But something about Lauren’s idea was lingering. Someone whose job it was to be there and not because they wanted to, which was the miserable honesty of it, and its only mercy. Patience as a contractual term.
“I’ll think about it.”
Lauren squinted. “I was ready for a shutdown.”
“It might be a shutdown,” he said.
She smirked and picked up her phone with satisfaction that the conversation had not earned. She pivoted to a different message from the ongoing ex situation, or possibly a different man whose name Cassiel had chosen not to retain. There was no way to tell.
He turned off his brain and ears and started tidying the Demilitarized Ass Zone around her.
* * *
The rate wandered when he stood the watch on its side.
He’d heard it before the timegrapher confirmed it, a drag in the Seamaster’s swing that surfaced crown-up, vanished dial-down.
Hairspring bent at the outer coil. Not enough to stop the movement, just enough to push the balance off-center in the jewel.
The watch ran. That was not good enough.
Cassiel’s desk lamp threw a clean 5000K across the work surface—daylight, high CRI, one correct thing about the shop’s lighting.
The coil cooperated on the third pass. He set the tweezers down, fitted the balance cock, then placed the movement on the timegrapher.
Lines drew across the screen—amplitude recovering, rate settling, beat error within spec.
He watched them longer than required because the correction had been good and the lines were clean and there was no reason to stop looking at something that was good and correct.
Then the service log. Mrs. Reyes’s Seamaster, hairspring correction, regulated to +2 sec/day. He wrote the date and capped the pen, then uncapped it and capped it again for the click and the sound.
Peter Pratt—his boss, the Pratt in Linden & Pratt—appeared in the doorway. He wore his usual Patagonia fleece vest, his reading glasses dangling from a cord around his neck.
“Mrs. Kaur called about the Rado. Walk-in out front, battery swap.” He leaned on the frame. “You want it?”
“No,” said Cassiel.
“That’s the spirit, Casio.” Peter knocked the doorframe twice and left.
Cassiel’s thumb found his fidget ring. The beads moved, small and plastic, meant for a child’s finger but open enough to accommodate any.
Jaewon had worn it for a week after fishing it out of a gift bag at another kid’s birthday party.
Then, bored of it, he’d placed it in Cassiel’s palm and attempted to barter for a Pororo drink.
The ring had been sticky. Cassiel kept it because his nephew gave it to him, and his hands found a use for it later.
He took off the ring, placed it on his tray for safety, and got back to work.
* * *
Lunch was the chicken katsu sandwich from Okaeri on Clement Street.
Extra cabbage, Japanese mayo, bread pressed thin enough to hold structurally without crushing the cutlet.
Four times a week for seven months. He’d eat this sandwich until the place closed, raised prices to an unacceptable degree, or changed the bread.
The bread was the right bread. The ratio was the right ratio.
These were the things that made it good.
Cassiel ate standing at his bench, and the bread held firm.
His phone lit up with his mother’s name: Miyoung Kang. A small contraction in his chest accompanied it—not dread, just his body’s reaction to the weight of her attention.
“Hi, Umma,” he answered.
“Minseok-ah, did you eat?”
“I’m eating now.”
“Eating what?”
“Sandwich,” he replied.
A pause. “Minju says you haven’t replied about Chuseok.”
Cassiel had not replied about Chuseok. He had read the group chat and placed the event in the category of things he would respond to when he had decided what the response was going to be. It was the 7th of August. Chuseok was September 17th.
“I’m still figuring out work, Umma.”
A rustling noise from her end. Two seconds, a pause to decide whether to continue pursuit.
“Make sure you eat something warm tonight. Not just a sandwich.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Something with rice.”
“Yes, Umma.”
* * *