12
Cleanup
When she saw Shin’s number on the screen, Mary almost didn’t pick up.
She was about to head out to work, but she’d been meaning to speak with her husband about their eldest son’s engagement.
Joey didn’t want his father at the wedding.
As far as he and his younger brothers were concerned, their father might as well be dead.
She held out hope that one day they’d forgive him.
Shin and his estranged wife spoke only a few times a year.
He still sent Mary money each month, which helped with the mortgage and the high property taxes in Bergen County.
She still worked at Sandoval’s Flowers on East Ridgewood Avenue.
At a moment’s notice, Mary could put together a hundred boutonnieres for a prom or gorgeous wedding arrangements for the pickiest bride, or ferry a delivery across town when the driver got sick.
On the hall table, Mary put down her car keys and rested her stainless steel commuter mug filled with milky hot coffee.
She wore a beige raincoat from her college days over a white button-up shirt, a quilted cotton work vest, and an A-line denim skirt.
On her left shoulder, she carried a large canvas tote bag, which held her wallet and change purse, lip balm, a tissue packet, a ham and cheese sandwich she’d packed that morning, a thin cardigan, and the library books she’d return after work.
As usual, she wore thin white socks beneath green garden clogs.
“I was wondering if the boys could help me find a good lawyer.” Shin wasted no time with pleasantries.
“What?” Mary rested the tote bag by the brass umbrella stand.
“I need a lawyer who does white-collar criminal defense.” From church and work, Shin knew several Korean lawyers, but he couldn’t ask them. “I thought Joey and Luke might know which firms specialize in this out here.”
“They don’t do that kind of work,” Mary said out of habit, repeating what her sons had advised their mother to say whenever people asked her for their help with immigration or family law.
No one had ever sought help with criminal law.
Joey was a securitization lawyer at Cleary Gottlieb, and Luke practiced bankruptcy litigation at Weil Gotshal.
“I could go to prison if they think I was involved. I need someone good. I didn’t really understand what she was doing.”
“What? What’s going on? Why would you go to—” She couldn’t say the word “prison.”
“Danbi took money from the insurance account, and her boyfriend, George, took money from the church for her investment property. They said they were going to return it. I didn’t know anything.” Shin told her what he had just learned himself.
Still holding her phone, Mary sat down on the cold tile floor. There were no chairs in the foyer.
“Hello?” Shin said. “Hello?”
She felt like someone had shoved her to the ground and was holding her in place. At eye level with the shoe shelf, Mary stared at the neat row of Patrick’s white sneakers and hospital clogs.
“Hello?” Shin repeated.
Suddenly it occurred to Mary that her husband’s name might appear in the newspapers and that Joey’s fiancée’s parents might see it.
“Is this in the newspapers?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ll call you back.”
In the evening, the boys came over and told her that she needed to divorce him immediately.
In the morning, they made calls for their father and engaged Andy Kuo, a former prosecutor, who knew financial fraud well and specialized in white-collar work.
Since George had implicated Danbi in his confession, they would be tried separately, Kuo said.
Danbi, who had pleaded not guilty, was being detained without bail because she was a flight risk and had assaulted a deputy.
Kuo would not represent Danbi, solely Shin.
So far, Shin had not been charged with anything, but now, thanks to his sons, Shin had a lawyer.
The boys were thorough. Mary gave them the divorce agreement Shin had sent her before, and Joey asked a colleague who did family law to update the agreement. Luke booked Mary a flight and made reservations for a hotel in Irvine.
Mary had never been anywhere in the United States except for New Jersey and New York.
After Seoul, her entire world had been confined to these two states.
Her boys had gone to college and law school in New York and New Jersey—the older two at NYU and Columbia, and her youngest at Rutgers.
Their father had not been invited to any of the graduations.
Shin had paid the college tuitions for all three of their sons and the mortgage for the house; for graduate schools, the boys took out loans.
When she reached his house, Mary parked her rented white Toyota in the circular driveway.
The doors of the three-car garage were open, revealing a white Mercedes and a silver Porsche.
She had not known that her husband was wealthy.
He had sent her money regularly, never complaining about the amount.
Had she known how he lived, she would have asked him for their sons’ graduate school tuitions. The boys would have resisted, though.
The modern house was two stories high, and from the driveway, Mary could make out Italian sofas and large paintings on white walls behind the glass-fronted great room. Through the window, she saw a milky white chandelier set in the foyer ceiling above the pair of large oak doors.
Her husband opened the door.
His feet bare, Shin wore a white golf shirt and faded blue jeans. He hadn’t shaved for days.
“Your hair,” he said. Somehow, her long gray hair surprised him. He was trying to remember the last time he’d seen her. She used to dye it.
At sixty years old, Shin’s hair was more salt and pepper than white, and still quite full. Danbi was thirty-nine, and she kept her straight black hair long, well below her shoulder blades.
Mary touched her head and looked down.
Seeing the hurt in her eyes, he felt stupid.
“I mean—”
“I stopped coloring it,” she said.
“I appreciate you coming. All this way. I’m embarrassed. I didn’t think this would be the first time seeing each other here. It’s been so long. I am sorry. To you and the boys—”
Again, Mary touched her shoulder-length hair, which she wore in a low ponytail.
She was fifty-nine years old. Her face was freckled, and faint lines crossed her pale brow and radiated around her brown eyes.
She was still a beautiful woman and had never been vain.
Over the years, she had lost interest in makeup and treatments.
Recently, Joey’s sweet fiancée, Gracie, had asked if she wanted an appointment at the salon with the bridal party, and Mary had remembered that there would be photographs. She still hadn’t bought a dress.
Every cent had gone to her boys’ education, their housing, and their food.
Joey and Luke shared an apartment with two friends in the city to save money while repaying their law school loans.
Patrick was in the nursing program at Rutgers.
Joey and Luke wanted him to be a doctor, but Patrick preferred to make money sooner and avoid debt; he’d opted for Rutgers over the University of Pennsylvania and lived at home.
When he was done with school, Mary planned to sell the house and buy a one-bedroom condo in Palisades Park.
The property taxes were killing her budget.
Shin leaned his back against the open door and closed his eyes. Mary stared at the wide marble door saddle and tried to keep from crying. Her father and mother had advised her not to marry him. They’d died without forgiving her.
“I don’t know what else to say,” Shin said.
“Can I come in?”
Shin shook his head, disgusted with himself for not having any sense. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and brought her a pair of slippers.
In the living room, Mary didn’t sit down. She pulled a manila envelope from her tote bag and took a deep breath.
“The boys told me that I have to divorce you. Right away. I need you to sign these papers. The lawyers just updated the forms you sent me that time. The house. You said I could have it.”
Shin took the envelope but didn’t open it.
Mary was a kind person and careful in the way she spoke.
On the plane, she had prepared a script for their conversation, which included some news about the boys.
She wasn’t the sort of person who would abandon someone in crisis; she felt disloyal.
Standing on the deep white pile carpet, she took in the elegance of the room, which looked like part of a millionaire’s mansion on television.
“I have to get back to work. I am inconveniencing my employers,” she said. “Mr. Sandoval is filling in for me, and he’s older and gets tired. If you could just sign the agreement and the affidavit. Joey said we need to get them notarized. I’ll take them back, and Joey said the lawyers will file—”
“Can you sit down?” he asked.
Mary sat on the ivory mohair-wool upholstered sectional in the exquisite living room, as nice as any she’d seen in the glossy magazines at her dentist’s.
Sand-colored rugs, an enormous gas-burning marble fireplace, a red-and-blue abstract wall-size painting hanging somehow on a thick wall of glass by the floating staircase.
A thin carved wooden handrail led to the second floor.
Huge panes of thick clear glass seemingly in every direction she looked.
Outside, through the living room window, she could make out the calm blue water of the Olympic-size communal swimming pool and rows of tennis courts for the residents of the development. Tall cypress trees lined the streets.
“Let me get you coffee. Do you still drink your coffee with half a cup of hot milk?”
“I do. But I don’t want coffee.” Mary looked around the room. There were many framed photographs of his daughter, Anna, with Danbi. None of his sons, or her, not that she’d expected to see any.
“Is she here? Your daughter.”
“She’s at school.”
“And your—”