2. Chapter Two #4
He shrugs, not quite meeting my eyes. “In the back room. Just for a little bit.”
I don’t understand why, but the way his voice sounds unsure and quiet and kind of sad makes my chest feel tight anyway.
“Okay,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say. I bump my shoulder against his gently, careful of his leg. “I’ll come every day then. So you’re not bored.”
The corner of his mouth lifts slightly.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
Ryowoon and his mama go back home after five days.
After that, things go back to almost normal.
Almost. Because now every time Ryowoon walks through that door, Mrs. Nam’s eyes go straight to him.
She looks him over quick, top to bottom, like she’s checking.
Sometimes she’ll reach out and tilt his chin up with two fingers, turning his face this way and that under the light, or she’ll grab his wrist and push his sleeve up an inch just to peek underneath.
Ryowoon hates it. He squirms and complains, tells her he’s fine, ajumma, stop it, but she doesn’t listen to him even a little bit. She keeps checking, quickly, and then goes right back to whatever she was doing like nothing happened at all.
I don’t say anything about it. I don’t really get it either, but I notice the days Ryowoon comes in looking normal, no wincing when he sits down, no marks peeking out from under his collar, are the days Mrs. Nam seems the happiest. Her shoulders come down from around her ears and she’s extra nice, tucking an extra rice cake into our hands, telling us to go run around and wear ourselves out before dinner.
We don’t go hungry that whole summer. Not once.
Even on the days it’s so hot Mrs. Nam has to prop both the front and back doors open just to get a breeze going, there’s always a bowl of something waiting for us in that little courtyard.
Cold noodles some days, when it’s really bad, the ice clinking against the sides of the bowl.
Other days it’s rice with the banchan she has left over from selling to customers, tucked into little dishes she doesn’t bother matching up, mismatched bowls with chipped edges that she says have plenty of good years left in them yet.
Then school starts, and everything feels different but exciting.
Ryowoon and I walk together every morning, meeting at the bottom of the hill where the road splits, and he waits for me even on days I’m running late because I couldn’t find my other sock.
We sit next to each other in Mr. Choi’s class, and even though Ryowoon gets antsy during lessons, tapping his pencil against the desk until Mr. Choi gives him a look, we always end up walking the same way home once the bell rings.
And every day, we stop at Mrs. Nam’s.
She sets up a little table in the back corner now, low to the ground with two cushions on either side, and she makes us sit there with our workbooks open while she moves around the store, ringing up customers, restocking the shelves, but always with one ear turned toward us.
“Ryowoon-ah, sound it out,” she calls from across the room when he gets stuck on a word, not even looking up from the register.
He grumbles but does it, dragging the syllables out slowly, and when he finally gets it right she claps once sharply from wherever she’s standing.
“There you go. See? Not so hard.”
I finish my own workbook faster than he does most days, so I lean over and try to help too, pointing at the characters, but Ryowoon shoves my hand away and says he can figure it out himself, thank you very much.
He always figures it out though, eventually, his tongue poking out the side of his mouth.
By October he’s not so grumbly anymore. He laughs more, not just the short huff he used to give when something was funny.
Now when Mrs. Nam does her impression of Mr. Han yelling at his dog with her pinched voice and waving arms, Ryowoon laughs so hard he nearly falls right off his cushion, and I laugh even harder just watching him laugh.
He talks more too. Tells me things he never used to, like how he wants to fix cars when he grows up because he likes taking things apart and figuring out how they go back together.
Tells Mrs. Nam about the drawing he did in art class that his teacher hung up on the wall, how it was of a car, obviously, what else would it be.
She tapes a scrap of paper with his drawing above the register a few days later, right next to a photo of some drama actor, and he acts embarrassed about it but I catch him smiling every time he walks past it.
Some days he even beats me to the answers in our workbooks, grinning wide when Mrs. Nam praises him for it, like he can’t quite believe he’s the one getting told good job for once.
I don’t know why he seems lighter these days, why his shoulders don’t sit so tight up by his ears the way Mrs. Nam’s used to before, but I have a guess.
I sit next to him on our cushions, our knees knocking together under the low table, and let it be good without asking too many questions about why.