She smiled at this morsel of joy, despite the heaviness of their task. Swaying a little to the music, she stared out the window as they drove south through unfamiliar neighborhoods. She tried not to look at him. It made her nervous to sit so close to him. She could reach out and touch him, and no one would see. No one would know.
In front of a two-story apartment building, windows barred and cracks crawling up the stucco like vines, Mr. Kim unloaded the bags of donated food from the van and carried them to the top of the steps. He pressed one of the unit numbers on the intercom, and when a woman answered, he introduced himself. For a second, Mina wasn’t sure if she would open the door until a loud obnoxious buzz let them inside.
Mario’s mother stood in front of her apartment door like a woman accustomed to bad news. Her orangish blond hair, dark at the roots, had been pulled into a loose, high bun above a heavy face with vertical lines carved between her brows. Her black T-shirt was stretched at the neck, revealing fragile collarbones.
“Hola, Lupe,” Mr. Kim said. “Uh, tenemos comida, uh...fideos, leche, jugos...para ustedes.”
Lupe clapped her palms in response. She reached to help Mina with the bags, but Mina refused as Lupe guided them inside of her apartment. On the sunken couch sat three ebullient children of different ages glued to a Spanish-language game show on TV, erupting into squeals of laughter at every joke or wacky stunt. The oldest, a girl of about ten or eleven, held a baby with the downiest brown hair on her lap. The baby sputtered, and she wiped the baby’s mouth with a cloth.
Mina smiled thinking of her own daughter at that baby’s age—her pink face, the little closed eyes, the nose, the tiniest fingers and toes, the creamiest folds of skin, and that smell, that sweetest of smells, soft and powdery.
“¿Quieren algo de beber?” Lupe asked, gesturing for them to sit.
Mr. Kim rested the bags on a round dining table and slid two chairs out for themselves while Lupe poured glasses of orange juice. Thirstier than she had thought, Mina sipped gratefully as Lupe sat down with them, observing the children watching television, laughing. The eldest daughter lowered the volume.
“No saben lo que le pasó a Mario,” Lupe whispered. “No sé cómo decirles.”
Mina recognized enough words to piece together that Lupe hadn’t told the children about what had happened to Mario.
“¿Cuándo fue la última vez que...escuchaste de él?” Mr. Kim asked.
Tears spilled out of Lupe’s eyes. Mr. Kim pulled a handkerchief out of his shirt pocket. The second girl, without the baby, and the boy rushed to her, putting their faces on her back, their arms around her shoulders.
Unsure of what to do next, Mr. Kim and Mina stared at the dining room table. When Mina glanced up to see the mother and children holding and comforting each other, she could feel her heart, which she had worked so hard to ignore, tear in two.
“Lo siento,” Mina said. “Lo siento.” One of the expressions she had learned from Hector and Consuela.
When Lupe finished blotting the tears from her face, she inhaled deeply through her mouth. Her daughter wiped away the hair sticking to her face and kissed her mother on the forehead with such tenderness that Mina felt a heat rise from her chest and she couldn’t help but cry. Mr. Kim’s eyes rested on Mina—a shade too long.
He now knew. This was her sadness, too. She was mourning someone, a family.
* * *
The following week, Mina and Mr. Kim sat side by side on the couch as Lupe served leftover chocolate cake on paper plates printed with rainbow confetti. Yesterday had been her eldest daughter’s birthday. The two girls ran in circles around the small living room, bopping each other with helium-filled balloons, while the little boy, five or six years old, held the baby.
Lupe had received a phone call from Mario at a detention center in the morning. Describing the conversation, she clapped her hands, eyes upward, thankful to God. Tears leaked out of her eyes. Having heard stories of briberies and beatings, even murders, she only needed to know that he was still alive.
Mina could sense Lupe’s guilt, the guilt that perhaps all parents feel when somehow they lose their child, no matter the age or the circumstance. That guilt was a vertical and endless wall made smooth from hands and feet attempting to climb it. Occasionally a memory together—the laughter, the squeaky voice, a kiss on the cheek—would serve as a kind of ridge on which to hoist yourself, but still you’d fall somehow. There was no way to rest.
As they left the party, Mina pulled herself into the van beside Mr. Kim. “Does she know yet how long he’ll be there, in the detention center?” Mina asked him.
“No. But could be weeks, months.” He turned the ignition a few times. The engine choked. “I spoke to Mr. Park about getting her a job at the market.”
“Oh, that’s good,” she said.
“She has a neighbor, a nephew who’ll help her with the kids while she works.” He tried again. This time, the engine groaned to life. “It’ll be hard, but it’s not hopeless.”
“What about her? Is she or the kids at any risk? Of being deported?”
“Yes, of course.”
Outside the car windows, men cruised on low bikes. Tires glinted like the steady throb of lighthouses in the dark. Mina couldn’t help but wonder what each person living in this city did to get by. How many of them lived like her, underground, and how many had stories like hers? How many risks did people take, on and off paper, to survive the brutalities of what they could not change about their lives? America, to many abroad, represented the only way out—not a solution but a chance to keep hope alive and burning.
But some days she felt like she was living inside of a lie.
“Do you want me to take you home?” Mr. Kim asked, breaking through her thoughts. “Or back to the store?”
“Oh. Are you going back to the store?”
“I don’t have to, I can also just go home. I can drop you off.”
“Okay, well...”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“If...if you could take me home, that would be nice.” She was hesitant to tell him where she lived. She didn’t know why. “I live near Wilton and Olympic. Is that out of your way?”
“No, not at all.”
“I can take the bus.”
“No. It’s fine.”
She asked him to turn right onto the dark, tree-lined street on which she lived. She became self-conscious of being in this car alone with him, a man—concerned that either the landlady or Mrs. Baek might see her and get the wrong idea.
But what was the wrong idea? What would be so shameful about her and Mr. Kim or any man for that matter? She was an adult. She could take care of herself, make choices about her body. But still her heart raced. Perhaps she was simply terrified of wanting more from this life—more feeling, more joy, more pleasure—knowing that it could all be taken away at any moment and that still she’d have to survive. Was she strong enough?
“A couple blocks on the left,” she said, pointing. “Right there.”
He pulled up in front of the house, which had all the lights off inside. The landlady must have already gone to bed.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No problem.” His hands remained on the steering wheel as he stared through the windshield. He gulped. Was he sweating?
As she opened her door, Mr. Kim said, “Do you...do you want to get dinner sometime?”
“Oh. No. No, thank you.” She smiled, hopping out of the van.
“You’re not married, are you?”
“No. I just—”
“Just thought I’d ask.” He nodded, lips pursed. “Have a good night.”
She shut the van door and waved goodbye through the window. She walked up the broken driveway to the house, afraid to look behind her because she knew he was still in his car, making sure she got inside safely. She opened the fro
nt door and rushed toward her bedroom.
She switched on her lamp and lay down, face pressed against the pillow.
She liked Mr. Kim. His polite, big-hearted demeanor. His warm smile.
The smooth skin of his arms. The thick black hair on his head.
But why would anyone want to be with her, a widow who had lost her child? She was damaged goods, as far as she could tell. It would be too much work to get involved with anyone now. Besides, she could never afford to lose anyone again.
She couldn’t sleep at all that night, thinking about him, about Lupe, her children, Mario, and then about Mr. Kim again. Her mind, like the streetlights, let off a steady beam until the morning, when she could hear the birds singing, and the sky turned purple and yellow, like a fresh bruise outside. That was when she finally closed her eyes.
* * *
Mina caught glimpses of Lupe in the store, stocking items as Mina had done when she began working at the supermarket. They’d wave at each other or smile and say hello with a silent understanding that they shared something, something that might be too significant, even dangerous to speak of. Mina yearned to ask her about Mario but didn’t quite know how.
She had wanted to learn Spanish for many reasons and now for this one in particular. How would the shape of her feelings, thoughts change if she could say them out loud? If she could hear them? If someone else, who might understand, could hear them, too? By only speaking Korean, her world, and the world of what was inside her, felt limited to the few people she spoke to each day, or the people whom she couldn’t quite trust at church. How could the shape of her life change if she had more people that she could reach with words?
She’d have to learn on her own. She could get a book. But, no, she should learn English first.
But why should she learn English when no one around her used it? Every single person at the supermarket spoke Spanish or Korean or both. Perhaps Mr. Kim and Mr. Park, the owner, spoke English, but that was it. In Koreatown, she managed to do almost everything in Korean. And since she rented her room under the table, completed all her transactions in cash, she didn’t even need a bank account yet. Even if she did open one eventually, there would be a Korean bank to help her, a Korean accountant.
At the end of her shift, she walked to a bookstore a few blocks from the supermarket, where she picked up a Spanish language book. Standing at the bus stop, she flipped through the text, trying to decipher the diagrams.
Dorothy swims in the lake. / Dorothy nada en el lago.
Dorothy drinks orange juice. / Dorothy bebe zumo de naranja.
A sudden gust of wind, speckled with dust and dirt, devoured her as the bus approached. Mina showed her pass to the woman with the round face and perfect bob.
“Aren’t you cold?” the driver asked.
“No, no. It’s okay.”
“It’s freezing out there.” She mimed shivering, crossing her arms to keep herself warm.
Mina smiled, making her way to the back where she could study her book.
“It’s freezing out there,” she repeated to herself.
Once she got home, she reheated a pot of doenjang jjigae while skimming the text and flipping through the lesson plans. It seemed that with about thirty minutes per day, she could get through at least half of the book over the next month, completing all the exercises and assignments along the way.
In the dining nook, she closed the book and blew on a spoonful of soup before taking a bite and realizing then how cold she actually was in that house. She needed to put on a sweater but felt too lazy and hungry to move.
Mrs. Baek emerged from her bedroom in a drab gray T-shirt and loose matching pajama pants, yawning as if she had just woken up. The night before, she had probably worked the graveyard shift at the restaurant where she cooked for late-night diners and partiers who had been out drinking and craved a comforting bowl of soondubu jjigae or a cast-iron platter of bulgogi.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” Mina said. “I made dinner already, some doenjang jjigae. Do you want to join me?”
“Sure, let me take out some more banchan.”
Mina ladled her some soup and scooped rice while Mrs. Baek laid out a stack of little bowls—gosari namul, kkakdugi, panfried dried anchovies—covered in Saran wrap from the fridge.
“I make these every day at work,” Mrs. Baek said, unwrapping the banchan and releasing the rich, comforting scents of sesame, onion, and garlic. She sat across from Mina as if she were on the floor, lifting one of her legs and placing the bottom of her foot on the bench. Unlike so many women, Mrs. Baek didn’t seem to mind taking up time and space, spreading herself out, which both irked and fascinated Mina.
“I’m so thirsty,” Mrs. Baek said, chewing. “I don’t know why.”
“Let me get you some water.” Mina ran the faucet, trying to remember how many years Mrs. Baek had lived in America. Five, ten, twenty?
Mrs. Baek flipped through the Spanish textbook absentmindedly, as if strolling through the glossy pages of a women’s magazine. “You’re learning Spanish?”
“Trying. I figure it’d be easier to, you know, talk to people.” Mina laughed. “I guess I should learn English one of these days, too. I can’t always depend on you.”
“Oh, you’ll learn eventually.” Mrs. Baek smiled. “It takes time.”
“How long have you been here, in America?”
“Many years. Almost twenty.”
“No wonder your English is so great.” Mina mixed rice into her jjigae.
“Yes, yes. I read a lot, too. I was also an English literature major. Do you like to read?”
“To be honest, I hate reading.” Mina smiled. “I was never a good student.”
“You can watch television or movies then. I think if you take in the culture, it’s easier, you know?”
Mrs. Baek impressed Mina with her college degree, her English skills, and her cooking, yet something about her was also deeply unsettling. Mina couldn’t quite understand how this woman would’ve ended up in the same house as her, at a restaurant cooking food, when she could get a higher paying job in an office somewhere. Was she running from something or someone?
She couldn’t ask that. Still, she had a sneaking suspicion that Mrs. Baek, like her, was hiding from the world. But from whom?
IN THE BACK of the store at a long folding table, Mina nibbled on her packed lunch, a bento of leftovers—rice, seasoned spinach, kimchi, a few bites of bulgogi. She thought about the Spanish words she had learned from Daniel, words about the weather—nublado, viento, soleado—which sounded beautiful out of his mouth but funny and garbled out of hers. She still couldn’t quite get the sound of the letter L.
As she formed her tongue and lips, trying to find the shape of that sound—L... L... L—Mr. Kim entered the break area, stopping to bow his head toward Mina before heading to the restroom. Now that Lupe worked at the supermarket, Mina and Mr. Kim no longer had a reason to visit her and her children. He still left food items for Mina in her storage bin, but as the days passed, she saw him less and less. Perhaps he now felt embarrassed after asking her out to dinner a couple weeks ago. Who could blame him?
He exited the restroom, turning away.
“Mr. Kim,” she said, not knowing why or what she would say.
He stopped in his tracks. “Yes?” His voice was tired and gravelly.
“I’ve never thanked you...” She cleared her throat. “For the things you put in my basket.”
“Oh.” He turned around, staring at the floor a few feet ahead of him, waving dismissively. “No big deal. Sometimes, we have these leftovers, can’t sell them or anything, so...no big deal.” He lifted his hand to acknowledge her words before turning again.
“Mr. Kim.”
“Yes?”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing. Everything is fine.” He g
lanced at his watch. “I have to run now. But thank you.”
For the rest of the day, she thought about his downturned face. The tenuous bridge between them was eroding. She imagined herself shouting for him as he walked away, but she didn’t know what she would say. She couldn’t explain how frightened she had become of life, knowing that at any moment it could be taken away and that there were no lessons, no meaning that she had found in loss, only pain. How could she explain this to him?
At her register, she scanned and punched the numbers, barely acknowledging the customers, anyone around her.
“¿Qué pasó?” Daniel asked.
She feigned a smile. “Nada.”
But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She wished there was something she could do for him, leave something in his office. But what? What would he need? How would she know? Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe any gesture would count.
At the end of her shift, she grabbed an Asian pear from the produce section, paid for it, and rushed toward the back of the store. She placed the fruit on his desk in his tiny office, which she had never entered before and smelled musty and slightly sweet from paper and ink. She heard a noise behind her and turned around. He stood at the door.
“Is that for me?” His brown eyes softened.
“Yes.” She caught her breath. “I just thought—sorry, I probably shouldn’t be in here.”
“That’s nice of you. You don’t have to do anything for me.”
“You just looked...tired.”
His gaze dropped toward the ground as his mind seemed to calculate what and how much to say. “A lot going on around here.”
A pair of feet shuffled behind him as the store owner walked over. Facing them both, Mr. Park said, “Hello, hello. Am I interrupting something?” He lifted his eyebrows.
Mina cringed inside. The office seemed to shrink in size.
The Last Story of Mina Lee Page 11