Chapter 26
CHLOE
The chicken porridge had been simmering for over an hour, and grandma's apartment smelled like garlic and ginger and the kind of broth that fixes things you can't name. I had the heat low, the lid tipped, my sleeves shoved up to my elbows.
In the front room, the TV murmured. Some drama I'd half memorized, a woman in a tailored coat telling a man in a tailored coat that he didn't understand her at all.
Grandma nodded along on the couch, late afternoon light coming through the windowsill, gilding the spider plant she'd kept alive since before I was born.
I was reaching for the salt when the knock came.
Three knocks. Not loud. Polite, but firm. The kind that knows you're home.
I wiped both palms on the dish towel and called out, "Coming!" My sock feet were quiet on the linoleum. Grandma didn't look away from her screen, but I felt her attention tilt anyway. She always knew before I did.
I pulled open the door.
Daniil. And Rhea.
She had Beom-Beom tucked under one arm, the damaged ear pressed against her ribs, her braids gone fuzzy from the car ride.
Her eyes were huge. Behind her, Daniil filled the landing in a charcoal coat with the cold still riding his shoulders, hair wind-flattened on one side, gray-green eyes already on me.
The scar at his temple caught the hallway light.
My heart did a small, ridiculous thing I wasn't in the mood to explain.
Rhea didn't wait. She ducked under my arm and crashed into my stomach with the full weight of a tiny incoming missile.
"I missed you so much," she said into the fabric of my shirt.
I laughed and folded down over her. "I missed you too." I tipped her chin up. "Has Daniil been taking care of you?"
She pouted. Lower lip out, eyebrows down. "He's been kind of busy."
I kissed the top of her head where the part split her braids. "Well, you've got me now."
Then I looked up.
Over the top of her braids, Daniil's eyes were already waiting for mine. He hadn't moved. He was just standing there in the doorway with that look he gets sometimes, the one that makes me forget there's a building around us.
I didn't think.
I stepped forward and jumped.
He caught me in one motion, one arm hooked under my thighs, the other locked around my back.
He laughed, low and surprised, a real one I hadn't heard out of him in days.
Then his mouth was on mine, hard and quick and possessive, the kind of kiss that doesn't ask permission because it already has it.
From the front room, grandma coughed. Pointedly.
"You two forget there is a child here," she said, dry as toast, loud enough to carry.
Rhea tipped her head all the way back to look up at us, deadpan, one hand still hugging Beom-Beom to her chest. "They always forget, Grandma."
I laughed into Daniil's mouth and he laughed back into mine. He set me down gently, and his hand stayed at the small of my back. I didn't want him to move it.
"Come in," I said. "Before Mrs. Park down the hall decides we're running a circus."
The apartment shrank around him, the way every room does when Daniil walks in. Rhea was already kicking off her shoes neatly beside mine, toes to the wall.
Grandma muted the TV. That was its own announcement. She sat up straighter, blanket sliding off one knee, hands folded in her lap like a woman about to conduct an interview.
"Grandma," I said, "this is Daniil. And this is Rhea, his sister. Daniil, Rhea, this is my grandma."
Grandma looked Daniil over.
It was the kind of looking I've only ever seen a Korean grandmother do. Top of his head to the toes of his boots and back up. Coat, jaw, hands, eyes, the way he stood. She took her time.
Then her gaze landed on Rhea and her whole face went soft.
"You," grandma said, patting the cushion next to her. "Come sit beside me."
Rhea went, Beom-Beom still tucked under her arm, climbing onto the couch and folding her sock feet under herself.
Grandma let one beat pass, holding Daniil's eyes a second longer than was comfortable. Then she gave a small, considered nod.
"Aigoo. You are tall."
Daniil inclined his head, the slightest formal bow. "It is good to meet you, Halmoni."
Halmoni.
He said it cleanly. With care. With a softness in his mouth around the syllables that told me he'd been turning the word over for days.
He'd been practicing. I hadn't known. Something small and warm cracked open in the middle of my chest, and I had to turn my face toward the stove so I wouldn't give myself away.
"Chloe-ya, bring the food. Bring everything."
I brought everything.
Grandma's table was built for two, maybe three at a push.
I set out the porridge, cabbage kimchi from the fridge, seasoned spinach, soy-braised eggs sliced to show the yolks.
Rhea perched on the wooden stool grandma kept for guests, chin level with the table edge.
Beom-Beom got installed on the windowsill between the plants, good ear facing the table so he could "hear better," according to Rhea.
Grandma started feeding Daniil before he'd even lifted his spoon.
"Eat more. You are too thin for a man your size. Take this whole bowl. No, another scoop. Eat." She was ladling a second helping in before he'd touched the first. "And the egg. Take the egg."
Daniil's mouth did the thing it does when he is trying not to smile. "Thank you, Halmoni."
"Mm." She turned. "You. Try the spinach. Try."
Rhea tried it. Her eyes went wide. "This is so good. I don't like the spicy cabbage, but I like this. And the egg. The yolk is the best part. My brother says I should eat the white part too, but the yolk is the best part."
"The yolk is the best part," grandma agreed solemnly, and Rhea looked vindicated for the first time in her short life.
Then grandma cleared her throat and got that particular gleam in her eye.
"Did Chloe ever tell you," she said, looking directly at Daniil, "about the time she tried to braid my hair?"
"Grandma. No."
"She was four. Four. Climbs up behind me on the couch with her little fat fingers and says, Halmoni, I will braid your hair beautiful. Twenty minutes. Breathing very hard. Then sniffling. Then crying. Real crying. She climbs down. She says, Halmoni, your hair is bad. Your hair will not behave."
Daniil set his spoon down because he couldn't eat and laugh at the same time. Rhea was making a sound halfway between a wheeze and a shriek.
"Your hair was bad," I muttered. "I stand by it."
"And then, when she was twelve. Twelve. She decides she wants the cat to come to church. She zips the cat inside her cardigan. Buttoned up. The cat is in there. We are in the pew, the pastor is preaching, and the cat starts to sing."
"The cat didn't sing."
"The cat sang."
"The cat yowled."
"Aigoo, it sang. The whole congregation turns. Mrs. Han nearly falls out of her seat. The pastor stops talking. Sister Kim, is your granddaughter all right? And this one just opens the bottom button of her cardigan and the cat walks down the aisle like he is going to take communion."
Rhea was lying sideways on her stool laughing. Daniil's eyes had gone bright in a way I rarely got to see, and he kept glancing at me through it all like he was filing every detail into a place he meant to keep.
"You've told these at every dinner table for twenty years."
"I will tell them for twenty more."
Toward the end of the meal, Daniil set his chopsticks down very carefully across the rim of his bowl. He looked at me a moment. Then at grandma.
"I am lucky to have an angel by my side," he said, "even if I do not deserve her."
The room got quiet, even Rhea, in that quick instinctive way kids do when the adults shift gear.
Grandma watched him. She didn't blink. She didn't soften and she didn't harden. She just watched him the way she watches things that matter. Then she nodded. Once. Small and final.
"Mm."
That was all. But I knew what it meant.
After we cleared the table, grandma announced that the back garden needed cleaning up before the first hard frost, and she was going to do it herself.
"You're not doing it yourself," I said.
"I have been doing it myself for thirty years."
"You've got a cracked rib."
"It is barely cracked."
"That's not a thing."
We compromised by all going down together.
Daniil left his charcoal coat folded over the back stair railing.
I caught a glimpse of the black SUV at the curb when we passed the side window, two of his men inside, one with a coffee cup, both pretending hard not to look up at the building.
I said nothing. Neither did he. The fact of them was just the weather Daniil traveled in now.
The backyard was small, fenced in chain link, a single terracotta pot in one corner and a big maple shedding the last of its leaves over the fence from next door.
Grandma's plot was a narrow rectangle along the back.
A row of collards still standing stubbornly, broad leaves a deep wintered green.
Two spent pepper plants, dry and brown, stems leaning.
An unraked pile of leaves. The air had that late autumn bite that gets into your knuckles within five minutes.
I crouched at the pepper plants and started pulling.
Daniil rolled his sleeves up past his forearms and joined me in the row, kneeling on the cold dirt without complaint, hands going straight into the work.
Rhea elected herself supervisor and arranged herself cross-legged on the back stoop with Beom-Beom in her lap.
"You're pulling that one wrong," she informed Daniil. "Beom-Beom says you have to twist it."
"Beom-Beom is correct," Daniil said, twisting it.
"Beom-Beom also says Chloe is doing it perfectly."
"Beom-Beom is correct again."
"Beom-Beom is biased," I called.
After twenty minutes I was sweating despite the cold. I dragged the back of my wrist across my forehead.
Daniil saw.