by Jung Yun
“It’s for the boy,” Jin says. “For helping me.”
Ethan doesn’t need another toy. He doesn’t even like blocks. Kyung wonders if he asked for it, although it hardly matters how the thing ended up in the basket. He can’t refuse now. He nods and the cashier scans the caterpillar and swipes his card through the machine. His chest tightens at the thought of being declined while his father looks on—he’ll never recover from the shame. He keeps his eyes glued to the box, the little white one next to the register that reads PROCESSING in red letters. Processing, processing, processing. It’s taking longer than usual, which means something bad is about to happen. Kyung fans through his cards again, not certain which one to use when the first is declined. He doesn’t think he has room left on any of them.
“Sign here,” she says, tearing off the receipt and putting a copy in front of him.
Kyung stares at the slip of paper as if he doesn’t believe her. Then he scribbles his name so no one will notice how badly his hand is shaking. His signature—a zigzagged line that looks like he was testing the pen for ink—doesn’t even resemble the one on the back of his card.
“Thank you,” he says. He knows the cashier had nothing to do with the purchase getting approved, but he thanks her as if she did.
As they walk back to the car, he and Gillian exchange a look, one that’s becoming all too familiar lately. A ninety-dollar purchase at Walmart shouldn’t terrorize them like this. Kyung makes a decent salary at the university. He has a goddamn Ph.D. But their mistakes are finally catching up with them. Their house payment is a nightmare. His student loans too. They’ve refinanced their mortgage, borrowed from their credit cards, and transferred their balances over and over again—all in the name of staying current on their bills, but they can’t keep up with this shell game much longer.
“Can I have my bug now, please?” Ethan asks.
Kyung digs into one of the plastic bags and hands it to him.
“Thank you.”
Gillian smiles as she watches Ethan examine his new toy, confirming what he’s always known about her. She’s quicker to recover than he is; she’s always been the more resilient of the two. Kyung’s moist hand is still wrapped around his wallet like it’s a brick he’s about to throw. In a few years’ time, Ethan will be old enough to understand their situation, to feel the same shame and worry and weight that he does. Kyung stops short in the middle of the parking lot and swoops the boy up in his arms, hugging him much harder than he should.
“Daaaaaaaad,” Ethan protests.
Four is a kind age, he thinks. Four is wonderful and clueless.
When they return home, Kyung leads his father upstairs to the guest room. The back of the house is in the shade now, and the space almost seems barren in the dim light. He’s embarrassed by the stained blue carpet, the absence of anything resembling comfort or style. The only personal items on display are the alarm clock and two remote controls on the end table. It’s a far cry from the antique-filled rooms in his parents’ house, but it’s clean. At the very least, it looks like they made an effort to receive him.
“Will you be comfortable here?”
Jin sits down on the edge of the bed, testing the springs. “I’d like to lie down now,” he says, not answering the question.
“So do you want—do you want me to help you change clothes?”
They regard each other carefully, both seemingly aware of the problem. In order to help, Kyung would have to touch him, and Jin would have to let him, something they no longer do by choice.
“I’m fine in what I’m wearing. I just want to lie down.”
“Well, let me help you unpack first.” He puts Jin’s new clothes in an empty drawer and places the toiletries on a shelf in the adjoining bathroom. The unpacking takes all of thirty seconds, hardly enough time to prepare for the apology he knows he should give.
Ethan runs into the room, picking up a remote control as he climbs into bed.
“Your grandfather needs to rest now,” Kyung says. “Why don’t you go play somewhere else?”
“It’s fine. It’s fine. Leave the boy here.”
Ethan turns on the TV and leans against the headboard, stretching out his legs. Jin slowly does the same.
“Is there anything special you want for dinner?”
Jin shakes his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“How about some juice or milk? Or maybe coffee?”
“Not now.”
“A glass of water?”
“No, I just want to rest.”
Kyung leans against the doorframe. It’s obvious that his father wants him to leave, but there’s still too much that he needs to say. If he doesn’t say it now, he worries he never will. He glances at Ethan, wishing he’d go downstairs. It’s hard enough to know where to begin.
“We have cable here. No premium channels, but…”
He pauses as Ethan curls up in the crook of Jin’s good arm. The two of them look comfortable together, lost in their noisy cartoon while the television glows blue against their faces. This wasn’t what Kyung’s childhood was like at all. His father didn’t have time for television. He didn’t have the patience either, but it was better that way. He was always someone to be avoided. The sight of Jin and Ethan sitting together makes him both bitter and hopeful. It’s too late for Kyung to have this kind of relationship with his father, but maybe his son will.
“That other remote control over there is for the air conditioner. Are you warm? Should I turn it on for you?”
“No,” Jin barks. “How many times do I have to say it? No. Just leave me alone.”
Ethan sits up, startled by the change in volume. He looks like he’s about to cry. Kyung wants to get him out of the room, but he can’t. His arms and legs are locked, paralyzed by the sound of his father’s raised voice. Whatever words of apology he intended to say recede inside him, canceled out by a swell of anger that he doesn’t want his child to see. Jin pulls Ethan back by the shoulder and slowly, cautiously, the boy settles into his former position, his eyes darting from the screen to the door. Kyung and Jin exchange a look, the kind that men give each other when they expect the other to stand down, and there, right there—Kyung sees it. Something black and familiar that reminds him who his father really is.
* * *
The twenty-dollar bill is for emergencies. He keeps it in his wallet, folded tightly into a square, hidden behind a stack of old photographs and receipts. He can’t remember how long it’s been there, but he knows what it’s for. Things of an urgent, unexpected nature—a category to which alcohol doesn’t belong. Tonight, however, is an exception. Tonight, he considers it necessary. Urgent, even, in its own way. The question is: Where? Twenty dollars hardly buys anything these days. He needs to find a dive, a real one, the kind of place where a twenty can still get him good and drunk. Kyung makes one left turn after another, tracing the town’s grid to its outermost edges. The cell phone on his dashboard keeps blinking, the red light angry and insistent. He’s only been gone for an hour, but Gillian has already left five messages. When it rings again, he turns it off and decides to tell her he misplaced it. Kyung has a habit of forgetting where he left his phone, something they’ve argued about in the past. She says he should be more careful with it in case she needs to reach him, but he’s willing to risk an argument later rather than explain why he had to leave now.
Just past the veterans’ hospital, Kyung pulls over at an intersection where there’s a bar on each corner. One is closed, the metal window gates shuttered for the night. Two others appear to be topless bars. The fourth, MacLarens, has a long green sign above the entrance with faded shamrocks that anchor each end like quotation marks. FINE IRISH PUB, the sign says, although the cracked front window appears to be held together by nothing more than duct tape and hope. When he opens the door, he’s relieved to find it nearly deserted. The only other customers are two old men playing keno beside the jukebox, staring at numbers as they tumble across a screen. Their table is ful
l of empty beer glasses and scraps of crumpled paper—litter from their previous games. Kyung sits down at the far end of the bar, keeping his head down as he orders a whiskey on the rocks.
“Kind?” a woman asks.
“Kind, what?”
“What kind of whiskey?”
Her tone is impatient; her accent, crude and South Boston. Kyung looks up, momentarily stunned silent by the woman’s wrinkled appearance, badly camouflaged under layers of girlish frost. Frosted hair, frosted eyes, frosted lips.
“Cheapest you have.” He tries to unfold the embarrassing origami of his money before she has a chance to see. “How much is that, by the way?”
“Four-fifty.” She pours him the equivalent of a double from a plastic bottle of Black Velvet, forgetting the ice—a mistake he doesn’t bother to correct.
“You all right?”
Kyung drinks slowly, not certain why a stranger would ask. What about him makes her think he’s not?
“I’m just tired.” He rubs his eyes as proof.
“That oughta help,” she says, motioning toward the whiskey.
She looks at him as if she expects their conversation to continue, but Kyung can’t think of anything else to say. The standard questions—How’s business? How are you doing?—seem useless. The bar is nearly empty and she works there for a living, so he already knows the answers. Besides, he doesn’t have the energy for a stranger right now. He spent his entire day preparing for Jin’s arrival, hoping that his efforts might be appreciated, or even just acknowledged. Instead, his father talked down to him in his own house, in front of his own child, when all he was trying to do was be kind. Kyung knows he was pushing too hard, asking one question after the next when Jin clearly wanted to be left alone. But the role of doting Korean son doesn’t come naturally to him. He’s still figuring out how to try. They’ll never get through this if Jin doesn’t try too.
The woman walks away, scattering coasters across the length of the scratched wood bar, occasionally shuffling them like a deck of cards. When she reaches the opposite side of the room, she stops in front of the television set. The Red Sox are on again. The Red Sox are always on in this town.
“Jesus. He’s put on weight,” she says, staring at the dreadlocked Puerto Rican at bat. “For nine million a year, you’d think he’d go on a diet.” She turns around, seemingly eager for someone, anyone, to agree with her. Kyung looks down at his drink.
According to the coasters she left, MacLarens is Marlboro’s favorite bar, an unlikely claim trapped in the speech balloon of a grinning leprechaun. It seems more like Marlboro’s oldest bar. The place shows all the telltale signs of age: A wood floor that pitches and slopes as if the ground beneath it is sinking. A pair of rickety pool tables lined with threadbare green felt. On the wall nearest him, a dozen autographed photos of celebrities hang from a rail, but when Kyung scans their faces, he doesn’t know who they are, or who they were supposed to be when their pictures were snapped. He takes another drink, a longer one this time, closing his eyes as the whiskey warms his throat.
It’s been years since he went out to a bar like this. Although he likes alcohol, he’s never really enjoyed bars, not even in grad school when his roommates made the rounds every weekend. Occasionally, they dragged him along, but Kyung hated all the noise and shouting, the absence of anything resembling personal space. It’s strange that he and Gillian met at a bar, a detail about their past that still embarrasses him. She was working at a sports lounge back then, where her uniform was a tank top, jean shorts, and a push-up bra that squeezed everything north. Tits up to her neck, his roommates said, daring him to ask her out.
Gillian was supposed to be a fling, a pretty girl to help him get over a breakup, but Kyung didn’t like playing the field that way. He preferred something steadier, something that required less work, and Gillian actually suited him better than anyone he’d ever dated before. She was twenty-nine and working two jobs to finish her bachelor’s degree, so she wasn’t always around. She accepted the fact that he didn’t want to talk every hour of the day, and she never pressed him about the things he didn’t want to talk about. “Needy” wasn’t a word he’d ever use to describe her, which was exactly what he needed, someone who just let him be. He’d lost two girlfriends in a row because he refused to get married, as if he’d missed a deadline that no one ever bothered to tell him about. When Gillian started dropping hints after their first year together, he didn’t refuse again.
“I got seven on this card,” one of the old men shouts, holding up a slip of paper. He jumps out of his chair and brings his keno ticket to the bar. “What does seven pay out, Dee? That’s like, what, fifty bucks?”
The woman slides the ticket through a machine, and the cash register beneath it opens with a ping. She counts out a thin stack of wrinkled bills onto the old man’s eager palm. Kyung makes the mistake of watching this transaction, looking the man in the eye as he pockets his winnings.
“Hey, I know you,” the man says.
“Me? No, we’ve never met.”
“Sure we have. You came in here not even a week ago with your girlfriend.”
Up close, Kyung notices that the man’s eyes are bloodshot, his skin a bright, unhealthy shade of red. “You’re thinking of someone else.”
“No, don’t you remember? Your girl and me, we’re both from Rockport. You bought me a beer last time.” The man tries to lean on the bar, but his elbow skids across the surface and he stumbles toward Kyung’s chest.
“I told you”—he pushes him away, a little too roughly—“that wasn’t me.”
The man makes a whistling sound. “Sor-ry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. He shuffles back to his table, raising his voice as he tells his friend to avoid the asshole at the end of the bar.
Dee walks over and refills Kyung’s glass. “Just ignore Arnie. He’s a regular idiot. I’ll have that fifty bucks back in the till in a couple of hours.”
Kyung didn’t ask for a second drink; he’s not sure if he should have one. The first went down too quickly. He glances at his change on the bar, wondering if she’ll charge him for it.
“Don’t worry about that. This one’s on the house.”
“It is?” He doesn’t understand why she’s being nice to him; he’s certain he’s done nothing to deserve it. “Why?”
“Why? Hell, nobody ever asks that.” She laughs. “I guess you just looked like you could use it.”
“Yes, but why?”
Dee shrugs and starts wiping down the bar with a dirty rag. “You don’t really seem like the type to drink on a Tuesday night without a reason.” She pauses, then adds: “That’s a compliment, by the way.”
He looks himself over, realizing that he’s still wearing his dress pants and button-down shirt, clothes that stand out in this part of town.
“So what do you do for a living?”
Kyung slowly turns his glass like a knob. It’s another double; the whiskey is almost flush with the rim. “I’m a professor.”
“That must be nice, getting your summers off and everything. What do you teach?”
“Biology.”
“You mean like cutting up frogs?”
“Anatomy, yes.”
Dee shudders. “So the kids who study that, they end up being doctors or something? Is that what you are?”
Kyung shifts in his seat, not certain how to explain that he’s the wrong kind of doctor, that he dropped out of med school after his second year. His advisors said he was book smart, but too slow to think on his feet when real patients were involved. The chances of matching into his desired residency—into any residency, they said—weren’t good. Kyung ended up transferring to a Ph.D. program in bio because he didn’t know what else to do, where else to land. He suspects his colleagues don’t think he belongs in academia, that he was only hired at the university because of his father’s influence there, a possibility that feels true even if it isn’t.
“Some of them become doctors, yes.”
Dee pours herself a shot of Black Velvet and raises it to him, lifting her pinky up to the ceiling. “Come on, shoot one with me. You’re killing me over there with your sad mug.”
He wonders if this is Dee’s idea of flirting with him. He raises his glass and downs the contents because drinking is easier than talking to her.
“You don’t spend a lot of time in bars, do you?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, here’s how it works.” She smiles, as if she’s recited her next line a thousand times and still thinks it’s clever. “I just stand here while you drink and tell me what’s on your mind. You don’t have to be shy either. I’ve heard it all before. Besides, the Sox are in the shitter, so you’d probably be doing me a favor.”
Kyung studies the gouges in the bar, thick ones where people probably scratched off their lotto tickets with fingernails and coins. He’s certain that Dee has never heard a story like his. Even if he wanted to tell her, he wouldn’t know where to start, how far to go back, when it would ever end. He slides off his stool, surprised by the distance between the floor and his feet.
“Thanks,” he says, taking his change from the bar. “I have to go now.”
“Fifty cents?” Dee looks at the quarters still stacked on his coaster. “I buy you a drink and that’s all the tip you’re leaving? Fifty cents?”
“Oh, sorry.”
From his original twenty, he now has a five- and ten-dollar bill—neither of which he wants to part with. He pats down his pockets, hoping he has more change.
“Forget it,” she says, waving her dishrag at him like a fly. “You have a good night.”
The street is empty when he opens the door to a rush of cool air. The only sound he can hear is the vague thump of music leaking from one of the bars nearby. He takes his keys out of his pocket, dropping them on the sidewalk, and then dropping them again not five seconds later. As he starts his car, the whiskey hits him all at once, two doubles drilling straight into his stomach. He can’t remember what, if anything, he ate that day to absorb the blow. Kyung leans back on his headrest, trying not to think about his heart, the way it keeps pounding louder and faster than it should. It sounds like something out of a horror movie, ready to burst through his ribs. His chin bobs toward his chest, and his lids begin to blink, weighed down with lead. He can barely see, so he closes his eyes and tells himself to relax, don’t panic, and don’t throw up. When he opens them again—a minute, an hour later?—someone is shining a light into his car. Kyung swats at the armrest, locking the doors while the man outside raps on his window.