Chapter 15
MAY
SEOLLAL
He sent Cassiel a text to announce that he was awake, and then fired off a few obligatory Happy New Years!
to various and sundry, then put his phone down on the nightstand and felt around for Kitchen instead.
The book he’d bought at Green Apple, someone else’s pencil marks in the margins, a warm stranger who underlined things and wrote yes next to a passage about worms and defeat and dying and having to live anyway.
He found his page and read, the blanket up to his chin, still having to backtrack to re-read things he hadn’t absorbed but reading, until his phone sang with Cassiel’s ringtone.
* * *
The 9:07 Fremont-bound was half-empty. May had miscounted the seats twice already and still couldn’t tell Cassiel which car had the fewest people in it because he’d gotten distracted by a woman eating a breakfast burrito like she was the God Empress of Burritos.
January 29th. Year of the Snake. His phone had reminded him again three times, in the time it took for him to roll out of bed and meet Cassiel at the station.
Notifications he’d set some time in November when he’d still been imagining he might go to two New Year’s dinners, an impossibility he’d solved by inviting himself to one and being exiled from the other.
CNY!!! and Seol @ Lim house 10:30 AM SEBAE and call Mama, the last of which he hadn’t done and wouldn’t do.
He left them all lingering on the lock screen.
May pressed his shoulder into Cassiel’s arm because he felt like it, because the blue oxford Lauren had given him now smelled like the detergent at Cassiel’s apartment.
He sniffed his own hair, which smelled… herbal.
They’d almost had their second fight—or first official?
—when Cassiel saw the Suave Men 3-in-1 in his bathroom and he hadn’t called May a broke bitch, but he’d said it with his eyes, and May had yelled something about it being “TEN TIMES MORE MOISTURIZING THAN BEFORE!” and Cassiel had just walked out.
Then, like Mark Darcy, he came back thirty minutes later with two bottles of RYO shampoo and conditioner and May asked what he was supposed to wash his body with now, and Cassiel looked like his head might explode, so May kissed him and decided the fight was over.
Outside the BART window, the East Bay hills came in low and brown. The train rocked through the tube and came out the other side into Fremont sun.
“Nervous?” Cassiel asked, not looking up from his phone.
“About what? I’ve been to your mom’s house like four times. I’m practically household furniture. A Pottery Barn ottoman, maybe.”
“You’re not an ottoman.”
“Footrest. Decorative yet functional. People put their feet on me.”
“Who put their feet on you?”
Cassiel looked at him this time. May knocked his forehead against his arm, grinning as an answer.
The fidget ring clicked once above the rumble. Cassiel was thinking.
* * *
A kumquat plant sat on the porch, heavy with fruit, bright orange against the grey stucco. For some reason it made him think about persimmons and a playschool mural.
Miss Mary opened the door before they knocked, which meant she’d been watching from the window, also meaning her short-ribs had reached the stage where they could be left unsupervised and she’d started on the staring out windows.
Mom behavior. She was wearing an apron over a deep blue hanbok top, and she pulled May inside by the arm before Cassiel had finished removing his shoes.
“May-ya, come in—taste this. Something is wrong with jeon and Appa says no problem—”
“Umma, we just got here—”
But May was already in the kitchen, already tasting, already nodding with authority he absolutely did not possess. The jeon batter was perfect. He told her it needed more salt because she wanted to be told it needed something. And it could use salt.
“Salt,” she said emphatically. Her husband shook his head.
The whole house smelled good. The kitchen had been running since, if Cassiel was right, and he usually was, around five in the morning.
Pairs of shoes lined up at the door: Sunny Lim’s orthopedics, Miss Mary’s purple Crocs with flower Jibbitz, Minju’s flats, David’s loafers, Jaewon’s red FNAF shoes May had presented him with over Christmas, getting more wear than May had even hoped.
And now May’s blue canvas shoes, placed carefully at the end of the row.
Cassiel’s shoes were next to his. They touched at the heel.
Jaewon zoomed straight at them, feet thudding along the hardwood with zero regard for the nice things in his grandparents’ house. The boy was wearing his blue hanbok and a pair of socks that were slightly too big and definitely going to be dirty by mid-day.
“MAY-HYUNG!”
“JAEWON!”
May scooped him. This was apparently a dangerous thing in the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, based on a video he and Cassiel had watched together where a manic lady explained the lore in front of a whiteboard.
Jaewon, unaware of any danger, grabbed May’s ears, which was his way of saying hello, and May let him because ears were handles and Jaewon was a future rock climber.
He set him back down before his lower back filed a complaint.
“I wore my shoes but no shoes in the house,” Jaewon explained. He looked at Cassiel. “’Cause of rules.”
Cassiel, still in the doorway, still removing his jacket. “Because of dirt.”
“How come I get to be ‘hyung’ and your uncle gets to be ‘uncle’?” May asked. Cassiel straightened the back of May’s oxford with a tug, quite unnecessarily.
“Because he doesn’t like saying ‘samchon.’ Because if he calls you ‘aunt’—” Cassiel stopped. Half a joke.
“I become Aunt May?” May’s eyes widened. There were layers to the implications. The one he wanted to go into at that moment, though—“Wait, wait, wait, keep going. Marisa To-May—”
“No.”
Hayoung was across the room in Minju’s arms, pink hanbok, bow already crooked, cheeks chubby, a baby who had recently learned to walk and was cruelly not being allowed to demonstrate. Minju looked like she hadn’t slept, which was her default state of being. She lifted her eyebrows.
“Can I—”
Minju handed Hayoung over before he finished asking. Hayoung grabbed the collar of the blue oxford with one hand and went for his ear with the other.
“Hi,” May said. “Happy New Year. This is my only nice shirt, please be gentle.”
Sebae at ten thirty. Jaewon had been coached, had practiced, and performed the deep bow with the intensity of a theater adult—forehead to the floor, hands placed correctly, held for a count that was either respectful or competitive, it was hard to tell with Jaewon.
He stood up and announced, “I DID IT,” and Cassiel’s dad’s face softened like a persimmon.
Love made persimmons of us all, he thought.
Hayoung’s bow was assisted—Minju holding her, guiding the small body through the motion while Hayoung chewed her own fist and stared at the ceiling fan. David filmed it.
The sebaetdon envelopes came out. Grandpa’s for Jaewon first—proper, white, pretty. Then May produced his—the red ones from the dollar store on Clement, three gold pandas on the front, Jaewon’s name written in May’s best handwriting, and included a star next to the name.
Jaewon inspected the envelope. Turned it over. Checked the seal. Looked up.
“May-hyung, this is a Chinese one,” he said.
“Oh. Yeah, it’s a red envelope.”
“Korean ones have this pattern.” He pointed at the one from his grandparents, which had a different set of standards that a six-year-old could apparently distinguish on sight. Or maybe he noticed his grandparents’ ones didn’t have pandas on them and were considerably less flimsy.
“You’re right. Mine’s different. Is that okay?”
Jaewon shrugged.
“I like red,” he said.
“Red is the best color,” May agreed, and his chest did something like acid reflux but the kind that likes you, and he moved on to Hayoung, who received her envelope by immediately trying to crush it in her tiny hands and had to settle for chewing instead. Perfect.
Miss Mary appeared at his side, and May looked down as she pressed an envelope into his hands. White, with a gold snake on the front.
“Sebaetdon. For health and fortune.”
“I can’t—”
“You can.” This was a tone that ended conversations. May tucked the envelope into his back pocket.
* * *
The soup was perfect. Clear broth, rice cakes that stretched when you pulled them apart, eggy ribbons floating on top.
Cassiel’s mom had made enough for two families.
Cassiel’s dad ate steadily at the head of the table and said nothing and refilled May’s bowl when it got low. Sunny Lim liked him. He knew this now.
May ate one bowl, then another.
“Twenty-seven,” Cassiel said from across the table.
“Twenty-five. I reject the premise.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Okay but what if I eat zero bowls. Am I twenty-five forever? Because I’m hearing a loophole, Cassiel.”
Sunny Lim was smiling and nodding. Then finally, he agreed with his son: “Twenty-seven.”
“I can’t do this,” May said, and drank more soup.
By two, the morning had run out of structure.
Sebae done, tteokguk done, dishes stacked by the sink.
Church friends came and went—a couple with a fruit box, a woman who pinched May’s arm and said something in Korean that made Miss Mary laugh.
The house breathed in and out. Minju was eating for the first time all morning, standing at the counter with a plate of jeon, while David walked Hayoung in slow circles down the hall.
May stood in the kitchen doorway and watched Cassiel across the room.
On the couch, Jaewon wedged against his side, both of them looking at something on Cassiel’s phone with the shared focus of two people who took screen content seriously.
Cassiel’s free hand rested on Jaewon’s back.
His shoulders were down and his ring was clicking at idle speed.