11. Chapter Eleven #3
“He opened the account at the bank in Yeonsan,” she continues.
“Every paycheck, before anything else, he put a little aside. Sometimes it was only a few thousand won. When things were tight he put in less, but he always put in something. He told me it was for you. For school. So that when the time came, you could go wherever you wanted.”
My throat closes up. I hold the ledger with both hands, my fingers shaking.
I flip back through the pages, seeing it now for what it is.
Every deposit, a date. Some of them I can match to specific memories.
This one, the month my dad worked double overtime and came home so tired he fell asleep at the dinner table.
This one, the month my mom told him they couldn’t afford fish that week and he shrugged and said rice and soup was fine, rice and soup was plenty.
This one. This one. Years of small sacrifices stretching back eighteen years, never once mentioned to me.
“If you had this,” I start, and I have to stop to swallow and try again. “If you had this, why didn’t you … Mom, after Dad died, we couldn’t pay the bills. You were working sixteen-hour days. We had nothing in the fridge half the time. Why didn’t you use it?”
She smiles tiredly. “Because your father left it for you. Not for me, not for the bills. For you.”
“But—”
“Seyeon.” She reaches across the table and takes my hand.
Her fingers are calloused from years of kitchen work, scarred from hot oil and sharp knives.
“I know it was hard. I know you went hungry some nights. I know you saw me come home exhausted and you worried. But I made a promise to your father that this money would go to you, and I kept it. We survived, didn’t we?
We got through it.” She squeezes. “I always believed you’d get in.
I just needed to make sure that when you did, nothing would stop you. ”
I can’t talk. I press my lips together and stare down at the ledger, at the final balance, at every deposit my dead father made for a future he’d never get to see.
The numbers swim and smear as my eyes fill again and this time I can’t blink it back.
It spills over, dripping onto the table, onto my hand where my mother holds it.
She gets up, comes around the table, and pulls my head against her stomach the way she used to when I was small. Her hand smooths through my hair.
“He’d be so proud of you,” she says quietly. “I wish you could’ve seen his face when you first started reading on your own. He came home that night and told me our son was going to be someone important. That he was going to make sure of it.”
I press my face into her apron and cry.
The next morning Ryowoon finds me sitting in the stands at the athletic field, alone, my bag at my feet, the bank ledger balanced on my knee. I’ve been staring at it since before the sun came up, the pages open to the last entry, my father’s handwriting neat and small in every row.
I hear the scuff of shoes on concrete, a stride I could pick out of a crowd blindfolded.
He climbs the stands and drops beside me without greeting, his knee bumping mine as he settles.
He smells like cigarette smoke and the cold morning air and that cheap bodywash he uses.
He sits and says nothing but tilts his head to look at what’s in my lap.
I hand it to him.
He takes it, flips it open, and I watch his face as he reads. His brow pulls together. He turns a page, another, his eyes moving down the columns. He gets to the last page and goes still.
“My dad started it the month I was born,” I say.
My voice is scratchy from crying last night.
“Every paycheck. Five thousand, ten thousand won, whatever he could put away. My mom kept it going after he died. She went without for years to keep putting money in. She could’ve used it.
There were months we had nothing, and she sat on this and didn’t touch it. ”
Ryowoon stares at the balance. He closes the ledger gently, sets it back on my knee. His jaw works for a second, he’s quieter than usual when he speaks.
“So you’re going.”
I nod. “I have to. I can’t let what they did go to waste.”
“Seoul,” he says.
“Seoul.”
He lets out a long breath through his nose, tipping his head back, looking at the pale sky above the field. Then he leans forward and claps me on the back, his between my shoulder blades.
“You deserve it, Seyeon. You’ve been killing yourself for this. And this town was always too small for you anyway.”
I should just take it, let it be what it is. But the impulse takes over, the one thing I still want.
“Come with me.”
Ryowoon snorts. “How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“Apply for colleges in Seoul. There are tons of them, not just mine. Trade schools, technical programs. We can live together. Split rent, it’ll be cheaper that way.
” I start picking up speed, the idea forming on the spot.
“You can apply late to some of them, the deadlines haven’t all passed. We can figure it out.”
He’s shaking his head before I finish.
“That’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that, actually.”
“How can you say that without trying?” I say sharply, turning toward him on the bench, my knee pressing into his thigh. “If you just looked into it, if we sat down and went through the options—”
“Seyeon.”
“—there are programs that don’t need the same scores, places that take work experience and practical skills, I’ve seen the pamphlets. You’re good with your hands, you’re brilliant with engines, there has to be something—”
“Enough.”
He snaps, not a shout but loud enough to be. His shoulders are bunched up around his ears, his jaw set hard.
“You’re not living in reality. Someone like me can’t dream about shit like that.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it—”
“You don’t get it, Seyeon.”
“What don’t I get?” I’m shouting now, I can hear myself getting louder, more desperate. “Tell me what I’m missing because from where I’m sitting you’re just giving up!”
“I FAILED THE ENTRANCE EXAM.”
His voice bounces off the empty stands. A flock of starlings lifts from the goalpost at the far end, startled into flight. I close my mouth.
Ryowoon stares straight ahead, his elbows on his knees, his hands pushed through his hair. I can see the tendons standing out in his forearms, the white knuckles. He lets out a rough, frustrated sound and drags his fingers down his face.
“No college is going to accept me. I’m not smart the way you are.
My grades are barely passing on a good day.
I skipped as many classes as I showed up for.
Half the things you talk about when you’re studying, I don’t understand a word of it.
I just sit there and nod because what else am I going to do? ”
“You didn’t tell me you failed the exam,” I say quietly.
“Because it’s fucking embarrassing.” He drops his hands and looks at me and the expression on his face makes my chest hurt.
“Do you get it now? It’s not happening for me.
I don’t have a chance. I don’t know all the things you know.
I don’t have a surprise bank account sitting there waiting for me.
All I’ve got is my fucked-up head and a shitfaced useless father and a talent for surviving. ”
He taps his temple with two fingers, hard.
“My head doesn’t work right. It never has.
Numbers slip. Words blur on the page. I read the same sentence six times and can’t tell you what it said.
You think I didn’t try? You think I sat in that exam hall and just didn’t bother?
” He smiles bitterly and shakes his head.
“No amount of studying is going to fix what’s broken in here. ”
I don’t say anything. I’m gripping the ledger in my lap so tightly the soft cover buckles under my fingers.
Ryowoon stands up stiffly, like his whole body hurts. He shoves his hands into his jacket pockets and looks out across the field, at the town hills rising beyond the school walls. His voice sounds flat when he speaks again.
“There’s no future for me out there. No big city life. I’m going to be stuck in this town in the same shitty cycle as my dad and his dad and his dad before him.”
He turns and walks down the stands without looking back at me. His shoes ring against the metal steps, one after another, and then he’s striding across the grass, past the field and then he rounds the corner of the school building and he’s gone.
I sit with the bank ledger on my knee. The morning sun crawling across the field, burning the dew off blade by blade.
The hollow feeling in my chest doesn’t leave.
Graduation is on a bright, clear day where the sun sits high and clean in a blue sky.
Ryowoon acts like our fight on the bleachers never happened.
He bounced back within a day, which is how he’s always been, he absorbs the blow and then he walls it off and keeps moving.
By the afternoon he was leaning against the counter at the store telling Mrs. Nam that Seyeon here is going to be a big city hotshot, watch out, Seoul won’t know what hit them.
Grinning at me over her head when she clucked her tongue and told him to stop being dramatic.
I smiled back. Let him have it. But the thing he said on those bleachers stuck in my head. I can’t stop thinking about the look on his face when he said there’s no future for me. Some nights I lie awake turning it over, trying to find a way to fix it with no success.
But today isn’t for that. Today is loud and stupid and ours.