Chapter 19
MAY
Sunny’s Dry Cleaning (and Laundry) occupied a strip of Fremont Boulevard between a nail salon and a place that sold hair extension, apparently singular.
He’d walked past the station exit twice before he figured it out.
Cassiel had told him once that Sunday was the day his father worked the shop alone—closed to customers, but the lights were on.
Sunny’s business card was still in his back pocket.
He’d found it after shaking the purple notebook that morning, and after pacing around the kitchen for a pathetic amount of time, typed the address for the shop into Maps.
He didn’t need it now, standing in front of the actual door, but having it on him felt right.
May carried sliced duck from Good Luck Dim Sum on Clement, boxed.
He’d taken the day off and Good Luck was better for takeout anyway.
He also did not want to be the guy who walked out on Seollal and kept bringing food from his workplace.
This was meant to be a first step and it had to mean something that he’d picked the second hardest thing to do.
He approached the shop. The hours in the window said MON-SAT 7AM-6PM.
Through the glass he could see the racks of garments in plastic sheaths, packed tight.
Below the hours sat an amazing clipart sun mascot someone had layered separate clipart sunglasses onto, speech bubble proclaiming it was HAPPY TO SEE YOU.
Another day, he would have taken a picture.
Minju was standing behind the counter, already looking right at him with an intensity that made her look remarkably like her brother.
If May were a coward he might have dropped the bag and run, but instead he smiled and waved by the door.
She walked over and hit the override button so he could step through.
“Hi,” May said.
The chemical smell went straight up his nostrils and tickled his frontal lobe. There was an enormous revolving fan going in the corner closest to the door, probably to mitigate the heat he could feel from the machines going somewhere else in the room.
“Does he know you’re here?” Minju asked, moving back behind the counter. May had been preparing his apology and the question pulled it out from under him.
“Cassiel? Uh, no. I… wanted to come on my own.”
“Okay.” She nodded. Her eyes flicked to the bag in his hand. “What’s that, duck?”
“Good Luck duck,” he replied, sing-song in a way that was obviously forced and didn’t help the tension, but the look in Minju’s eyes had softened.
“Set it on the counter. Appa’s in the back. He’s doing a re-press on a wedding dress that came back with a crease in the train, so he’s in a mood, but… it’s Appa.”
May set the duck on the counter. Behind Minju, the racks stretched back into the shop—suits, dresses, coats, plus a terrycloth bathrobe that someone had apparently decided needed professional attention.
“Minju, I—” he began.
“You don’t need to say anything to me right now, really.” She held up a hand. “Go talk to Appa. He’s been wanting to show someone the pressers and the new UPS guy doesn’t care. Jaewon’s here too, fair warning, he’s gonna try to jump on you.”
May let out a small laugh, nodded, and walked past the counter.
“HYUNG!”
Jaewon rocketed into him at full speed. He was wearing a puffy vest over a long-sleeved shirt and the red shoes, already scuffed at the toes.
He ran into May’s legs. In a feat of athleticism, May braced, caught him, lifted—he’d definitely gotten bigger since the end of January and May could feel it—and set him back down quickly.
“Hey, buddy. Where’s your grandpa?”
“Back! He’s doing a dress!”
“Should we go bother him?”
“Yeah!” Jaewon grabbed May’s hand and pulled. May looked at Minju, who tilted her head toward the back—go—and said something to Jaewon in Korean that May loosely understood as Jaewon, don’t Grandpa’s something.
Jaewon, showing no indication of whether he’d heard his mother or not, dragged him through a plastic strip curtain, and the back of the shop opened up.
Two massive machines flanked the center aisle.
Overhead, fluorescent tubes hummed at a frequency even May could feel in his teeth.
The air was instantly warmer and the chemical smell was sharper, more…
chemical. Clothes in plastic garment bags cycled through the space above them like ghosts in a spooky dark ride.
May thought of Cassiel. Then stopped, because Cassiel wasn’t the point. The man at the far press was—both hands on the guide rails, positioning something white and poofy on the bed.
“Harabeoji!” Jaewon yelled.
Cassiel’s father turned.
“May,” said Sunny Lim, the owner himself. The only sign of surprise on his face was the slight raise of his eyebrows. The man was otherwise as unreadable as ever, like a Buddha statue.
“Uncle.” The word came out before May could second-guess it. It had been offered at Christmas dinner. He’d been carrying it around ever since, and had to assume it hadn’t been retracted. “Hi, uh. I brought duck. On the counter. Not here. Figured you wouldn’t want duck in here.”
“Thank you.” Cassiel’s dad nodded. “I like duck.”
Was that it? Was that the whole thing? May stood there, uncertain. Jaewon had already moved on, climbing onto a stool to watch his grandfather work.
“I wanted to say—about Seollal. I’m sorry for leaving the way I did. And for making everyone worry. And—” May swallowed. “Thank you, for… looking. Cassiel told me.”
Sunny Lim pressed the guide rail down. Steam hissed from the bed. He lifted the rail, inspected the train with his bottom lip stuck out thoughtfully, then adjusted a fold.
“You came back,” he said, glancing back at May. “And you feel okay now?”
May nodded, even though ‘okay’ felt grandiose for what he really was. It was close enough.
“Then good.” The man gestured over at the machine. “You want to see how this works?”
He didn’t wait for May’s nod, just started walking. May followed, the ghost of the apology that apparently nobody wanted on his tongue.
Sunny showed him both presses—the utility press for everyday garments and the specialty press for wedding dresses and coats, then the station where stains were treated before pressing, bottles of solvent arranged by type with labels that looked fresher than the bottles.
There was a tagging system and a conveyor and so on and so forth.
The man explained everything as if prepping May to start working the next shift.
At some point, May found his eyes drawn to a diagram on the wall by the spotting section. How to wrap garments on hangers, two columned and bilingual, laminated and faded at the edges. Tiny illustrations with arrows in thick black marker, filled in with faded colored pencil.
May looked at it for a long minute. Sunny was explaining the difference between a French press and an American press in the background, but May was thinking about Cassiel—the version of him who would have stood here at fifteen or sixteen, same lights, same noise, probably a hundred times worse when there were actual customers inside the laundry part of the business.
A timer beeped from where the wedding dress had been and Sunny looked up, nodded at May—tour-slash-training-session complete—and headed back to his work. May gave him an awkward half bow and turned around.
Jaewon was now drawing on a receipt pad with a pen he’d found, sitting on the floor. May grabbed the stool Jaewon had vacated and watched Sunny Lim finish the dress.
“Jaewon,” May said. “When’s your birthday?”
“July twelve,” came the response from below. “I’m gonna be seven.”
“You having a party?”
Jaewon looked up with an incredulous expression.
“Yeah,” he scoffed. “And the theme’s gonna be demons versus an-matronics and you’re gonna be a demon.”
May considered the logistics of this and decided he could roll with it. He could ask about the demon powers later. He pulled the purple notebook from his backpack and crouched down next to Jaewon, flipping to a fresh page.
“Can you put it in here?”
Jaewon took the notebook with both hands and wrote, in letters so large they took up half the page: JAEWON PARK JULY 12. Below it, he also included a drawing of something with four legs and a tail or possibly five legs and no tail or five tails and no—
“What’s that?” May asked.
“That’s you.”
May squinted and turned the notebook sideways.
* * *
“Minseok’s mom, she’ll want to see you when you come for dinner,” said Cassiel’s father as May was leaving. He’d touched May’s sleeve.
May didn’t ask when. There were more pressing logistics. “Yeah—of course.”
The man nodded, placed his hand on May’s shoulder, and said, “Drive carefully,” and May felt the mental whiplash of hearing the words in English. He knew unjeon josimhae because he’d heard it enough times, and Cassiel’s line slipped out: “I’m taking BART.”
Sunny smiled.
May found Minju still at the counter when he came back through the plastic curtain. She was entering something into the computer, tapping away.
“I’d… like to RSVP to Jaewon’s birthday party,” May ventured. He couldn’t say where the optimism came from.
“The invite’s going through his uncle,” she said without looking up, and there was an implication there, but May couldn’t unpack it on the spot. “But don’t expect anything until May.”
“I’m May.”
She sighed. He smiled.
“See you, Minju.”
“Bye, May.”
May walked to the station, feeling that something had been accomplished, even if not all the way.
Cassiel’s dad had shown him every machine in the shop.
Minju hadn’t been friendly, but she hadn’t spit in his face, and he’d secured a role as a demon at a to-be-seven-year-old’s birthday party.
There was still a house he needed to go back to, but not today.
He blew out a breath, patted his phone in his pocket, and headed to the station.
* * *
The Daly City-bound was crowded for a Sunday.
May found a seat by the window and shoved his earbuds in, leaned his head against the window.
The bay was shimmery copper in the light and he watched it change as the train entered the tube.
The view turned into tunnel wall and dark, just his own rumpled reflection staring back at him.
Today had worked. May had worked. Most everything he set out to do, done, remembered. He could list every moment. He had not used anyone or anything to measure his reality against. His reality was a train car.
The reflection in the dark glass blinked when he blinked.
It had his face. It was wearing his clothes.
He tested one eye and then the other, then couldn’t quite tell if it was the reflection lagging or him.
He tugged at the tip of his nose, then pulled at his bottom lip with his finger and there was a delay, half a second maybe, like audio dragging behind the video track in a bad export.
He closed his eyes and dropped his hand.
The train came out at West Portal where the fog and the city were waiting, same as every other ride home from every other good day. He would write this down later when the saturation came back.
* * *
May turned on the space heater and stood in front of it until he felt it in his shins, then kicked off his pants and crawled under the decorative-but-not-decorative throw blanket on the couch.
At one stage he almost fell asleep, only to be jolted upright again by a foghorn his body should have learned the timing of but never did.
He felt for his phone and pulled it out, closed out a bunch of tabs while he tried to summon some courage, then muttered “Fuck it,” and locked the phone again. He’d do it tomorrow. Then he stood up and made his way to the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face.
He looked at his reflection—or tried to. The I VOTED sticker sat, half-ripped, in the center of the mirror. He scraped at it with his thumbnail, revealing more paper, more residue. The thing was stubborn. So was May.
When it was mostly gone, he could see himself again and he looked about as bad as he felt, dark circled and gaunt and his hair too long. He could only do something about one of those.
May wandered into the kitchen to find some scissors and a few minutes later there was hair in the sink.
Once the hair had been swept up and the sticker had been finally defeated, May sat back down on the couch and dialed Kevin Chao.
Kevin answered on the second ring. Something blender-like was going in the background.
“Wu!” Kevin hollered. “What’s good?”
“Hey Kevin!” May yelled back. The blender noise stopped and he dropped his voice. “I want to talk about Wong Suet Ying.”
“Oh, yeah? So the collector was a dead end. Box was mostly Mandopop, years didn’t overlap. Ben emailed me yesterday—he’s dug up a photo of his grandma backstage in ’72. Could make nice episode art. No record.”
“Right.” May rubbed at his eye. “So… I want to take it over.”
Pause.
“As a producer,” May added. “Let me chase the leads. I’m at a Cantonese restaurant five days a week. Auntie’s been in Chinatown since the seventies, she knows shit. And the Cantopop stuff, I can keep looking. You’ve got other episodes going. Let me give it a shot.”
“Hell yeah, dude. Producer Wu.” He could hear the smile in Kevin’s voice. “That’ll be better than ‘we couldn’t find anything.’”
May exhaled at the ceiling.
“I’m your guy,” he said, jabbing his thumb at his own chest like Kevin could see him.
“Send me whatever you find. Don’t ghost me.”
“Wednesday. I’ll text you Wednesday.”
“Bet, dude. Get it.”
* * *
Just as May was crawling back under the throw, his phone buzzed again. Then again. The sibling group chat was alive once more, only ever in use when Louis had a parental grievance that had to be debated or—
Anna
OK~ So Will and I get in friday night, dinner saturday? Lou you can pick the place~
Louis
bet
@May Huang answer fuckass
—or when Anna was coming to town and May had completely forgotten because forgetting was what May did. He groaned.
He sent I’ll be there, time and place!!!
into the chat. Louis reacted with a thumbs up, Anna with a heart.
May rubbed his face, dug his thumbs hard into the corner of his eyes, then blinked away the stars.
He was a Guy, capital G. He was medicated, had done one difficult thing, given himself a haircut, and removed a sticker.
May opened his messages and found Cassiel’s name. The cursor blinked as his fingers hovered. He had typed Are we into this same field at Sparrow on Thursday and not completed the question. He still didn’t want the answer, but the question was no longer the only question he could ask.
May
Hey! Kinda out of the blue sorry. My sister’s in town next weekend. Dinner? She wants to meet you.
He sent it before he could second-guess. What would Cassiel think? They hadn’t spoken in ten-plus days. May wasn’t good with days but he knew the math on that one pretty well.
The three dots came up almost immediately.
OPPA
Okay. Send me the details.