by Steph Cha
Shawn knew Ray loved him, but he also knew that his cousin would never forgive him for being there when he was gone. While Ray was in prison, Shawn fell back on Ray’s mom, Ray’s wife, hung out with Ray’s kids. Didn’t matter that they were Shawn’s aunt, Shawn’s friend, Shawn’s niece and nephew; Ray had the stronger claim, and he let Shawn know it. It wasn’t fair, he told Shawn once, in his fury. It was the same whining complaint he’d lobbed at Shawn all through their childhood, whenever Aunt Sheila took Shawn’s side against him. She was Ray’s mom—why should he have to vie for her attention?
The arrangement was supposed to be temporary, but after a few months, Nisha asked him to stay. The kids loved their uncle. Ray hated this. It put his whole identity through the wringer—as a husband, a father, a man. He accused Nisha of trying to replace him, Shawn of moving in on his wife. But Ray was in prison—he could give them nothing—and in the end, he gave in, settling for passive aggression, the occasional muttered gripe. It was better to let Shawn help her than risk her remembering she could always leave. So Ray shut up and Shawn stayed. He stayed for six years.
Darryl came in from the kitchen and helped himself to a cookie. He looked at his father and smiled awkwardly, wanting to be near him, chewing to hide that he didn’t know what to say. Ray patted his shoulder, and the boy flushed with happiness. There were times these days when Darryl seemed so grown up it nearly broke Shawn’s heart. But he saw it now, the unspoiled tenderness of this child.
“How’s school?” asked Ray.
Darryl shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“Classes and all that—good?”
“Yeah, it’s good.”
“Good, good.”
It struck Shawn all over how out of the loop Ray was after ten years away from his kids. He had teenagers now, not small children who would babble about anything if you gave them a second of silence to fill. Ray didn’t know much about their day-to-day lives, so he couldn’t ask them anything but the most generic questions. He’d have to get to know them now, and Shawn saw that it would take work, a kind of work Ray had never had to do before.
“You study hard? Get good grades?” Ray asked.
“I do alright.”
“As long as you don’t cut class,” said Ray, satisfied.
Darryl sneaked a glance at Shawn and looked away when they made eye contact. Back in May, Nisha had gotten a call from Palmdale High. Darryl had missed three days since spring break, and each time, he’d shown up the next day with a note signed “Laneisha Holloway,” indicating that her son had been sick and had to go see a doctor. The administrator didn’t point out what Nisha already knew—that Darryl was the picture of health—and she didn’t come out and accuse him of forging his mother’s signature. Instead, she asked Nisha if Darryl was okay and whether he’d be needing more time off to see his doctor.
Later, when she recounted the conversation for Shawn, she marveled at how quickly and calmly she absorbed what she was hearing. She did what she thought any parent would have done: she covered for him—a bold, automatic lie about a newfound corn allergy—and vowed to let him have it at home.
She’d enlisted Shawn’s help, and he’d taken the boy aside, given him a heart-to-heart. Told him to stay in school and listen to his mother, that if he did those two things, he could stay out of prison, and wouldn’t that be nice. Ray had heard none of this, which meant Nisha hadn’t brought him up to speed. Shawn had suspected as much.
“Not that I’m one to give advice. I was the worst student,” said Ray. “I used to knock off school to do the stupidest shit.”
“Like what?” Darryl asked, with a spark of real curiosity.
“Oh, you don’t want to know.” Ray smiled coyly, enjoying some private memory.
“Nothing good,” said Shawn. It worried him, how Ray went sentimental when he talked about the past. Shawn had never enjoyed the good times, the goofing and partying that came before and between the bad. Ray’s youth was different, his childhood longer. When he was Darryl’s age, being in a gang was mostly posturing and hanging with his friends. Ray talked about those days like a washed-up athlete reminiscing about high school, his memories rounded out and partial, sepia toned.
“Your uncle, always so serious.” Ray was smiling, but that didn’t do much to hide his annoyance. Shawn had crossed him, cutting in on his sad attempt to impress his teenage son with his bad-boy past—the same past that had led him to a decade in federal prison.
Dasha shouted from the kitchen. “Mom! Uncle Shawn! Tell Darryl to get his butt back here.”
Ray shouted back. “Darryl’s fine right here. You come here, too, Little D. The dishes can wait.”
The sink shut off, and Dasha came to the table.
“Give your daddy a hug,” said Ray.
Ray was a jealous man, and he’d spent a stupid amount of energy worrying about Shawn and Nisha, as if either of them was capable of that kind of betrayal. But Shawn had to admit, there was a part of him—the deepest, meanest part of him—that saw his cousin with the smoldering resentment of a rival. For as long as he could remember, Shawn had battled a seasick feeling—one that came and went, but stayed for years at a time—that he was loosely held by the world, that he was one snap away from a total unmooring. If it weren’t for his aunt and uncle, he would have grown up without parents; if it weren’t for his cousin, he would have grown up without a brother. These tightenings and reinforcements had helped him survive. So it seemed fitting that Shawn would be a father to his cousin’s children. These kids, Darryl and Dasha—they were his kids. But there was no avoiding that Ray was their dad.
Shawn left them and found Jazz and Nisha on his old sofa bed, sipping champagne while Aunt Sheila sat in an armchair, reading to Monique. Jazz smiled at him, and he looked at the mouth that he loved, the kind, clear eyes.
Nisha was looking at him, too, gesturing toward the dining table with a meaningful nod. He gave her a thumbs-up, and she put a hand over her heart. No, his feelings for Nisha were nothing like his feelings for Jazz. He loved her, but what was she to him? Not a wife, not a girlfriend. Not a mother, not quite. A sister, maybe.
Three
Thursday, August 8, 2019
Woori Pharmacy was finally closed for the day. Grace’s back hurt, and the bright lights were giving her a headache. There were about a hundred treatments for both those problems, most of them right in the pharmacy, but no way to prevent fatigue after ten hours on her feet. She hadn’t had a minute to herself since leaving the house with Paul in the morning. It was Miriam’s birthday and she hadn’t even gotten a chance to call her.
Javi went home when his shift was up, but there was still work to do for Grace and Paul. Grace had to check the tech’s work and fill the remaining scripts, or she’d start the day behind tomorrow morning. Paul sat on the stool by the register, plugging numbers into the huge calculator—the same one they’d had in the store when Grace was a teenager, doing tech work and shadowing Uncle Joseph. Grace left the accounting to Paul and Yvonne, but she was pretty sure most other pharmacies didn’t stick to longhand. Her parents were good with numbers, and they refused to pay for accounting software after getting by without it for so many years.
Paul was almost sixty-five now, but he looked like he could man the register another twenty years if he felt like it. He had amazing posture, despite the thick varicose veins that made it painful for him to stand, and he projected an air of competence and pride that Grace had failed to inherit. Immigrant grit, maybe that’s what it was. Miriam didn’t get it either.
Grace had always known, on some level, that her parents were hard workers. They’d worked together before they had children—those years mostly vague and unimaginable to Grace—and then Paul had put in every hour he could to make money while Yvonne raised their daughters. She’d been a tireless mother while they grew up, approaching parenthood with the sort of dedication and zeal that won prizes in other fields. Now that Grace helped run the store, she saw that unflappable first-gene
ration work ethic up close, in a way that she understood better. Her parents showed her up every day.
Lucky for Grace, she had the education. Woori was the Park family business, but Grace was the only licensed pharmacist among them. Uncle Joseph was a pharmacist, but he wasn’t her real uncle, though she’d known him since she was a baby. He was Paul’s best friend and business partner—they’d bought Woori together when Grace was in high school, after Paul had spent fifteen years managing Uncle Joseph’s old store. Both men hoped their kids would take up the business, but only Grace had obliged. Uncle Joseph’s kids didn’t talk to him, and Miriam had never shown interest, even when she was still a participating member of the family. Only Grace had been a good girl, doing her studies and coming back home. Uncle Joseph was in semiretirement now, making Grace the primary pharmacist at Woori. Her parents needed her.
It wasn’t especially fair, though they never thought to complain about it. They’d made enormous sacrifices so their children could grow up in the States. Korea was still poor when they emigrated in the ’80s, but they would’ve had easier lives there. Paul was a college graduate with a good job at Hyundai. They could’ve ridden that out, set up in white-collar comfort, their friends and family nearby. Instead, they’d come to Los Angeles, where they knew no one and didn’t speak the language. Paul’s degree and experience meant nothing here. He’d had to start over, learn to count and read and write. It must have been even worse for Yvonne. She was only nineteen when she married Paul, an upwardly mobile man ten years her senior. She was twenty-one when he dragged her across an ocean, and Grace suspected she hadn’t had much say in the matter.
Day by day, dollar by dollar, they built new lives in this foreign place, all so she and Miriam could grow up free and clear, American. She wondered sometimes if they regretted it all. Miriam was so American she renounced her own mother—a capital crime, pretty much, in a Confucian culture. Grace was the filial daughter, and here she was at twenty-seven, still just taking and taking and taking. In Korea, she’d be married by now, hassling her husband to let her parents retire and move in with them. Here, they let her live at home rent-free and wanted nothing more than to have her take over the pharmacy, the culmination of their decades of labor.
What sharpened her guilt was that she saw their pride in the store without quite sharing it. She was grateful, and she had a lot of affection for the place, but she saw it for what it was: a two-hundred-square-foot glass box adjoining a Korean food court and supermarket in an ugly deep Valley strip mall. The walls were glass, see-through where they weren’t covered with vitamins and ointments and printout ads for shampoos and Powerball tickets, but none of them faced the outside world. They got no sun, only the artificial light of the Hanin Market, a complex they shared with a Korean bank, a Korean bakery, a Korean cosmetics shop, even a fully Koreanized branch of the U.S. Post Office. All so Valley Koreans didn’t have to drive to Koreatown to run errands in their own language. It was a nice setup, but it wasn’t exactly the American dream.
For one thing, the work was exhausting. She just couldn’t imagine doing it for the next thirty years. The physical demands alone were almost unbelievable, something years of higher education had never prepared her to face. She wore compression socks and massive, hideous sneakers, but still went home aching almost every day.
On the other hand, she didn’t know what else she was supposed to do. She’d been raised for this, and the work was so tiring that she hardly had time to think about other options. She wasn’t like Miriam, who majored in English and left Grace with their parents’ hopes on her back. She couldn’t be like Miriam—one of them had to think of the family.
She finished the last of the scripts and stretched her arms out. One more day’s work done.
Paul called over to her from the register, in Korean. “All finished?” He stood up from the stool, ready to go home.
Grace had to call Miriam before they left. Home was only ten minutes away, and once she was there, Grace had no intention of reminding her mother that it was Miriam’s birthday—not that there was any chance Yvonne had forgotten.
“I have to call Unni,” said Grace.
He nodded, understanding. He’d remembered then, though he hadn’t mentioned it all day. “You’d better call now,” he said. “I’ll wait in the car.”
“Should I tell her you say happy birthday?”
“If you want.”
“Do you want to talk to her?”
“She can call home,” he said, and left.
Technically, Miriam had no fight with Paul, but as far as Grace knew, they hadn’t been in contact either. It might’ve been solidarity on Paul’s part—he’d been furious that Miriam could be so callous to Yvonne—but there was at least an equal chance that he just couldn’t maintain a functional relationship with his daughter without his wife as a bridge. When Grace was in college, she never spoke to Paul unless she was talking to Yvonne and she put him on the phone, and there was no reason to believe he was any better with Miriam. Their dad was just weird like that. There was no way he’d call Miriam on his own, let alone make plans to see her.
The phone rang, and Grace found herself hoping it would go to voice mail. She hadn’t seen Miriam since that awful night downtown. Apparently something like thirty people had shown up after Grace left, and there was shouting and shoving and eventually someone called the cops, which of course pissed everyone off. Two people got arrested: one of the protesters, for punching a Western Boy, and one of the Western Boys, for punching a protester. The Western Boy had a bowie knife strapped to his ankle. It was probably something he saw in a movie, but it was still terrifying—in the movies, a knife like that cut throats.
Miriam acted like it was no big deal, like Grace had freaked out for no good reason. But over the last month and a half, there had been more blowups, street confrontations and internet wars, protests and counterprotests that built to a righteous fever. Then, yesterday, a Bakersfield grand jury declined to indict Officer Trevor Warren for the shooting of Alfonso Curiel.
Grace had been following the story since the rally, though if she was being honest, her feelings of personal outrage and sorrow had died down. She felt guilty about it, but she couldn’t force herself to keep caring about this boy she’d never met, not with any passion, not when it seemed like the rest of the world was moving on.
It also turned out the Curiel kid wasn’t exactly a college-bound Boy Scout. This wasn’t his first encounter with the police—he was actually running from them when they tracked him to his parents’ backyard. It wasn’t a racist neighbor calling him in for no reason. Someone had seen him walking around after midnight, going up to people’s doorsteps and stealing packages. A lot of gangs were into package theft these days, and there was speculation that Curiel was part of an organized ring.
That didn’t make it right to kill him, of course, but coincidentally or not, the news coverage had gone quiet since that revelation, and Grace had found herself less distressed by the tragedy. Still, the grand jury decision felt like a punch in the stomach. There’d be no trial, no chance for even the bare minimum of justice for this poor teenage boy.
There was an immediate response. Crowds gathered in protest up and down California. The largest one was in downtown L.A., and the police had been waiting in riot gear, ready to nip any trouble in the bud. Miriam was there when the cops let loose with pepper spray, when they started making arrests.
She posted pictures from the scene on social media. Grace knew she had to be on her phone, counting retweets, liking comments. But when Grace called, Miriam didn’t answer.
She wasn’t answering now either. It was after 7:30—she was probably out to dinner, having a wonderful time. She would see that Grace had called, and that would be enough.
The house smelled like miyeok—it hit her as soon as she walked in, the briny scent clogging the air. Yvonne was in the kitchen, taking things off the stove. Grace stood and watched her, the scene straining her heart. Her mother
looked so small and tired, her shoulders hunched, her eyes losing their light.
“I’m home,” said Grace.
“Eung,” Yvonne acknowledged weakly. She bobbed her head in Grace’s direction without looking up. “Dinner’s ready. Can you set the table?”
Grace grabbed plates, spoons, and chopsticks and set them down while Yvonne transferred the miyeok-guk, eundaegu-jolim, banchan, and rice to the table. Paul had gone to his room to change or watch TV or whatever he did every night while the women of the house set up for dinner. He came out with unerring instinct the minute everything was ready. Grace closed her eyes while he said the prayer. She remembered what Miriam used to say: Umma cooks the food, we set the table, and Appa sits down just in time to thank God.
He made no allusion to Miriam or her birthday, not that he ever did in Yvonne’s presence. It didn’t matter. The house was heavy with her absence.
Grace sat in her chair—the one next to her mother, across from her father, who sat next to the one that was always empty—and surveyed the bounty on the table. So this was what Yvonne had done all day. It was a massive amount of food, a meal with a sense of occasion, built around a platter of black cod and radish braised in a sauce hot with gochujang. Grace loved eundaegu-jolim—it was one of her favorite things her mother made. It was also Miriam’s pronounced favorite, the dish Yvonne used to cook whenever her elder daughter came home.
But the miyeok-guk was the real clincher, the seaweed soup Yvonne made on every family birthday but her own. She’d told Grace once that it was the soup eaten by a new mother right after a birth, the nutrients targeted for postnatal recovery; that when she had Miriam and Grace, her own mother had brought it to the hospital by the bucket. It was like a traditional Korean culinary umbilical cord, eaten every year to celebrate the connection with mother and birth and body. And there it was, right in the middle of the table, challenging them not to turn it into a conversation piece.
