1. Chapter One #3
“They are. But they’re funny,” I admit, spearing a piece of radish. “There’s this one girl who insists on correcting my grammar in front of the whole class. In English. She’s convinced she knows better than me.”
“Does she?”
“Sometimes,” I say honestly, and she laughs harder, reaching over to pile another spoonful of rice into my bowl even though I haven’t finished the first serving yet.
She keeps doing that throughout the meal, adding more before I’ve made a dent, like she’s trying to make up for every meal she couldn’t share with me over the years I’ve been gone.
“How’s Yuro?” she asks after a moment, and her face lighting up at the mention of my dog. She’s never met an animal she didn’t immediately fall in love with, though growing up we never could’ve afforded to keep one fed.
“He’s good. Getting fat, actually. The dog walker’s going to take him out a bit more this weekend while I’m out.”
“You should’ve brought him,” she says, a little wistful.
“I didn’t think I’d be staying long enough to justify it,” I admit.
A look flickers across her face before she smiles again and changes the subject, filling the space with talk of the neighbors instead.
Mrs. Yang’s stove broke again, apparently, for the third time this year, and she’s convinced the repairman is deliberately sabotaging it so he can keep charging her for visits.
Old Mr. Han across the street got into another argument with her about the stray cats she’s been feeding by the gate, something about them getting into his garden, though my mother insists the man just likes having something to complain about.
“He’s been alone too long,” she says, shaking her head as she talks about him, without judgement, just a familiar fondness born from decades of being neighbors. “Grumpy old fool. I keep telling him those cats keep the mice away, but he won’t listen.”
I let the conversation distract me, comforted by the mundane hum of it, the deliberate way she steers us clear of anything that might lead toward tomorrow.
Neither of us mentions the reading, the funeral that already happened without me, the reason I’m sitting here at all.
It’s easier this way, I think. Easier to talk about broken stoves and stray cats than the hollow space Mrs. Nam left behind in the middle of both our lives.
By the time we finish eating, the light outside has faded into a soft indigo, and my mother stands to clear the dishes, waving off my offer to help.
“Go wash up,” she says, gentle but firm. “You need to leave early tomorrow. The reading’s at the provincial office, ten o’clock.”
I nod, throat tightening at the reminder, and murmur a goodnight before heading down the hall.
The spare room is dark when I close the door behind me, only the faint glow of a streetlamp slipping through the curtains.
I lie down on top of the blankets, still in my clothes, staring at the ceiling as the sound of the harbor drifts in through the cracked open window, the gentle knock of hulls against the dock, the low creak of rope pulling taut.
It’s a sound I grew up with, one that used to mean home without question.
Now it just makes my chest ache.
I close my eyes and let memory pull me under, thirty years of it pressing down on my sternum like a stone. I feel more alone here, in this house my mother built with money I sent but never visited, in this town that raised me, than I ever felt in the quiet of my apartment in Seoul.
The morning air is still chilly off the water, and I keep my jacket zipped as I make my way down the hill toward the provincial office, my shoes crunching over gravel and old leaves stuck to the sidewalk from last night’s wind.
I’ve got twenty minutes to spare, plenty of time to make the walk without rushing, but my feet slow anyway when I reach the mouth of a narrow side street I haven’t set foot on in years.
I stop there, one hand braced against the corner of a low wall, staring down the length of it.
The street doesn’t look like much, just a strip of cracked pavement between two rows of houses, some of them new, most of them the same faded pastel color they’ve always been.
I chew on my bottom lip, debating with myself over something that shouldn’t require this much thought.
I have time. I could just keep walking to the office and be done with it.
Instead, my feet carry me down the street, moving like they’re on autopilot. The way etched into bone and muscle.
The walk feels shorter than it used to, though I know that’s just because I’m not eight years old anymore, my legs not near as short as they were when I ran down this path barefoot in the summer.
I pass three houses, then four, my chest tightening a little more with every step until I reach the end and stop in front of an empty lot.
There’s nothing here now. Just a patch of overgrown grass and weeds pushing up through cracked concrete, a rusted pipe sticking out of the ground where a gate used to stand.
No walls, no roof, no gate with a name painted across it in faded characters.
Just empty space where a house used to be, swallowed up by weeds and time.
I stand there for a long moment, feeling a kind of quiet settle over me, heavier than the morning air.
My eyes trace the outline of a house that isn’t there anymore, but I can still see it clear as anything.
The low concrete wall that used to wrap around the yard, the faded square where a doghouse used to sit.
The blue gate that never quite closed all the way, no matter how many times someone tried to fix the hinge.
The small dooryard where we used to sit on upturned buckets, eating popsicles from Mrs. Nam’s freezer, dripping down our wrists in the summer heat.
I can still see the doorway too, the frame a little crooked, paint peeling near the bottom where the wood had swelled from years of rain.
I remember standing in it the last time, eighteen years old and furious, saying things to the man inside that I’ve never quite forgiven myself for, no matter how much he deserved every word.
Further back, other memories surface, unbidden, one after the other like photographs shuffled out of order.
A six-year-old boy grinning at me from that same doorway, missing his front tooth, daring me to race him down to the harbor.
Seven, sitting on the low wall with a comic book between us, arguing over who got to read first. Eight, hiding behind the gate from his father’s shouting, both of us too scared to breathe.
Thirteen, gangly and awkward, sneaking out that same door after dark to meet me at the corner store.
Sixteen, taller than me by then, with lean long limbs and a bad haircut, laughing so hard at something I said that he nearly fell off the wall.
Eighteen, standing in the doorway one final time, the hollow look in his eyes that still haunts me some nights.
My chest tightens, air caught behind my ribs.
For a second I can’t seem to take a full breath, the weight of it pressing down until my head swims. I step onto the lot, my shoes sinking slightly into the soft earth where a floor used to be.
I stand right about where the couch used to sit, where a fifteen-year-old version of him used to sprawl with his feet propped up, mocking the daytime drama playing on the small television across the room.
There’s nothing here now. Just grass and silence and the ghosts I brought with me.
I stand there a long moment longer before I finally force myself to turn away, leaving them behind in the weeds where they belong.
The provincial office sits three streets over from the harbor, a squat gray building with peeling paint on the trim that no one’s bothered to fix in the years I’ve been away.
I stand outside it for a second longer than necessary, smoothing down the front of my shirt, checking my reflection in the glass door.
Nicest button-down I own, slacks pressed this morning on my mother’s ironing board while she hovered and fussed over the collar.
I look like I’m heading to a job interview instead of a will reading, but I couldn’t think of what else felt appropriate.
The second I step inside, a small crowd near the reception desk turns toward me like they’d been waiting.
“Seyeon-ah!” Mrs. Cho calls out first, already crossing the linoleum floor with her arms open.
She’s got to be near eighty now, her hair a soft cloud of white, but her grip when she pulls me into a hug is stronger than I expect.
“Look at you. All grown up and handsome. You’re a teacher now, your mother tells me? ”
“Yes, ma’am. Middle school.”
“A teacher!” She pats my cheek like I’m still twelve, beaming up at me. “Your father would be so proud.”
Before I can respond, Mr. Song shuffles over, leaning on his cane, squinting at me through thick glasses. “This the Heo boy? The one who went up to Seoul?”
“That’s me,” I say, bowing slightly.
“Good, good. You look well fed, at least. City life treating you alright?”
“Can’t complain.”
They keep coming, one after another, faces I half-remember from childhood, names that surface slower than I’d like.
Questions pile up faster than I can answer them.
Am I married yet? Do I have children? What’s the traffic like up there?
Is it true the subways are always packed?
Someone asks if I still remember how to fish, and someone else laughs and says of course he doesn’t, look at those soft city hands.
I answer as best I can, smiling through it, though my chest stays tight the whole time, that same tightness that hasn’t loosened since my mother’s phone call.
Eventually a woman I don’t recognize steps out from a side office and calls for everyone to take a seat, and the small crowd disperses toward a row of folding chairs set up in front of a plain wooden desk.