Chapter 5 #2
His mother laughed—bright like birdsong—surprised out of her.
She touched May’s arm briefly and told him to call her Mary.
Kang Miyoung had an inexplicable agenda about being someone called ‘Mary Kang,’ which had not been a thing since both her children graduated from high school and she no longer had a PTA to sit on.
May played it off with a joke about their names being one letter apart, and then she was pulling him towards the kitchen and the bakery box was on the counter and she was pointing at the egg tarts and saying something to Cassiel’s father, who had appeared in the hallway, summoned from his chair by the energy of his wife’s delight.
His father shook May’s hand.
“Welcome,” he said in English, and his eyes moved to Cassiel for a beat. His son had brought someone home. This was unprecedented.
Minju emerged from the living room with the baby—with Hayoung—in her arms, wearing a spotless apron. She bounced a little on the balls of her feet, suspiciously animated. “So you’re May.”
“I’m May!”
“My brother’s told me nothing about you.”
“He’s maintaining my mystique, because he’s dashing, I think,” May said.
David appeared behind Minju, lifting a hand in greeting, and May lifted his back. That was apparently all that interaction required.
“Uncle Cass!”
Jaewon materialized from somewhere below eye level, launching himself skull-first into Cassiel’s leg. Cassiel put his hand on Jaewon’s head, round with soft fine hair.
“Jaewon-ah, say hello,” Minju said as Hayoung began to fuss. “David, watch him.”
Jaewon peeled himself off and stared up at May. May crouched down to eye level.
“Hey. I’m May.”
The boy stared. Then: “Hi. You wanna see my tooth?”
“Absolutely I want to see your tooth.”
He opened his mouth wide and pointed at a lower incisor that was hanging at an angle suggesting it had been negotiated with extensively. He wiggled it with his tongue. The tooth moved a full thirty degrees.
“Whoa,” May said, possibly alarmed or disgusted or simply impressed. “Does it hurt?”
“No. It’s got a hearing thing in it and the tooth fairy’s gonna take it from me for money. But then I’ll find her hideout, like in the basement.”
“That’s crazy, bud. How much money are we talking?”
His nephew lifted his chin. “Ten dollars.”
“Ten dollars for one tooth? In this economy? That’s a good grift, man. Do you think me and your Uncle Cass can get a cut?”
Jaewon looked from May to Cassiel then back to May again, his brain churning.
“I have to ask my mom,” he said carefully. Behind him, David shrugged, having been left out of the scheme.
“Tell your mom I’ll put in a wisdom tooth. You get those for being wise.”
Jaewon didn’t know what a wisdom tooth was, but he knew the sound of allyship when he heard it. He grabbed May’s hand and dragged him in the direction of the living room. May went. He caught Cassiel’s eye as he was towed around the corner and winked.
Cassiel watched them go. His ring was still, his hand at his side with the colored beads motionless, the kitchen behind him full of his parents’ voices. His nephew had taken May away and Cassiel stood in the hallway with his shoes off and his world quiet.
* * *
As was tradition, songpyeon happened before the meal.
His mother’s kitchen—the one Cassiel had grown up in, the counter he’d done homework on, the window above the sink where his mother kept a small jade plant—was arranged for production.
Glutinous rice flour dough in two bowls, one white, one tinted pink with beet.
The filling station was sesame seeds and sugar, ground and mixed, in a pale blue dish.
Pine needles lay in a shallow pan for steaming.
His mother positioned May at the counter between herself and Minju. David was exempted—he’d done his songpyeon with his own family over the weekend. Jaewon sat on a step stool at the far end, destroying his portion of dough.
“Like this,” his mother said, and her hands moved precisely. A ball of dough flattened in her palm, the filling placed, the edges pinched into a half-moon with a seam that looked like it had been machined. She set it on the pine needles. Perfect. Twelve seconds.
May watched, nodded, picked up his dough. His first songpyeon took shape and he held it up.
“It looks like a shoe,” he said.
His mother studied it.
“Hold here,” she said, and took his hands. She repositioned his thumbs, pressing the dough thinner at the center, pulling the edges up. Her grip was firm. “Too thick. Thin here. Yes?”
“Like jiaozi,” May said. “Thinner at the edges.”
“Mandu,” Cassiel supplied.
His mother looked at May’s hands with renewed interest. “You make mandu?”
“Jiaozi. At work, when it’s slow.” May tilted his hand side to side. “Auntie’s still deciding if I’m any good.”
“We teach you good mandu, later,” his mother said, having transformed into Mary from the PTA again. She patted his hand twice and then returned to her own station, and May glanced at Cassiel and mouthed later?
Cassiel’s second songpyeon split along the seam. Sesame filling bled onto the pine needles. Minju, beside him, was producing songpyeon that were symmetrical and correctly sealed and slightly smaller than their mother’s. He considered this showing off.
“Oppa, you missed your calling,” Minju said, looking at Cassiel’s tray. On the other side of her, May made a sound best described as snrk.
“Mind your own business,” Cassiel muttered, and focused in.
May’s third attempt was better, lopsided but sealed, the filling contained if not centered. His fourth split. He laughed at the split one, pinched it back together, kept going. His mother was watching him like he was the dough, assessing his structure.
“He doesn’t get upset,” she said to Cassiel in Korean.
“No,” Cassiel said.
“He just keeps trying?”
“Yes.”
His mother made a sound, a short hm that he had learned was versatile, and that he had inherited. This one was a hm of acceptance. She wasn’t looking at the songpyeon anymore. She was looking at May’s hands, still working, still wrong, still going.
Jaewon’s dough had become a snake. The baby slept in the portable crib in the dining room, audible through the monitor as small, rhythmic breaths that David checked every four minutes; Cassiel counted, because Cassiel counted things.
His mother hummed something, not a song Cassiel recognized, maybe not a song at all, just a sound she made when her hands were busy and her house was full.
During the meal, his mother put a piece of jeon on May’s plate. May looked at it, looked at her, and ate the fritter without comment and a thumbs up. Correct response.
“She’s feeding me aggressively,” May said quietly, leaning over to Cassiel’s chair, his shoulder pressing against Cassiel’s arm.
His skin was hot through the thin fabric of his button-down, felt through the blue wool of Cassiel’s sweater.
Contact area: maybe four square inches. Duration: the length of a sentence and its reply.
“That means she likes you,” Cassiel said.
May’s shoulder stayed a beat longer than the sentence required, then withdrew. The contact cooled. The space was his again. Cassiel’s arm stayed where it was.
“So how did you two meet?” Minju asked.
“I work at a restaurant in Chinatown. Lau Kee. He came in while I was out front covering for someone on break, and I just—” The pause was perfectly timed. “I mean, look at him.”
His mother’s hand covered her mouth. Minju made a face. David smiled into his rice.
“The siu yuk rice was good,” Cassiel said. “That’s the story.”
“That’s your story. The real story is you came back four times in two weeks.”
“The rice was very good.”
Minju asked how long, and May said two months. By design, the timeline tracked against the real one cleanly enough that Cassiel’s prepared answers weren’t needed. The embarrassment he felt was real, it was the other feeling he hadn’t prepared for.
Minju looked at him. Her eyes stayed on his face. She picked up her water glass, took a sip, and offered no further commentary.
“He eats well,” his father said. It was the first full sentence he’d spoken since the meal began. He wasn’t looking at May. He was looking at his plate, moving a piece of namul with his chopsticks.
Cassiel put it alongside every ‘drive safe’ and every quiet pat on the shoulder, and the fact that his father had come in once, a year ago, and stood watching him work on a movement for forty minutes without speaking, and then quietly left, satisfied.
One of his father’s rare declarations. All of them short.
All of them meaning something that neither he nor Cassiel articulated.
Only he suspected that his father knew the words and Cassiel, most of the time, did not.
* * *
By 8:30 p.m., the energy in the house had deflated.
Jaewon was on the couch between May and David, demonstrating something on his iPad that required May’s full attention and David’s languid supervision.
Minju was in the kitchen cleaning up while his mother had migrated to the living room.
His father had returned to his chair. The baby was sound asleep.
Cassiel stood in the hallway. The bathroom door was behind him, closed, the light off.
He pressed the back of his head against the wall.
The paint was cool. He counted five breaths.
The hallway light was off. He hadn’t turned it off; it had been off when he’d arrived, and he’d chosen not to correct it.
The bathroom fan hummed at a frequency he could feel in his teeth.
Why was it on? It shouldn’t be on. Cassiel gritted his teeth.
Through the wall, the living room was muffled, but it was the sound of his family with someone in it who fit, leaking through drywall, while he stood in a hallway.
His phone had buzzed twice in his pocket. It was Lauren, probably responding to the egg tarts update with follow-up questions he had no bandwidth for. He left it. She was being a good friend. He was not, and in that moment he did not care.