by Jung Yun
“Pay attention,” Gillian whispers.
Kyung looks at her, not certain if she’s speaking to him or to Ethan. Then he feels the sharp point of her elbow in his ribs.
Ethan leans forward in his seat as an elderly woman climbs the steps to the altar. She’s dressed in a traditional Korean gown, floor length and white, with a long-sleeved jacket that ties in the front with a bow.
“Is she a bride?” he asks Gillian, who responds with a gentle “shhh.”
Kyung studies Ethan’s profile, quiet and focused as he tries to make sense of what the woman is wearing. It’s embarrassing to see his four-year-old behaving better than he is, so he defaults to an old trick, counting everything in his line of sight. There are 73 gardenias in the planter in front of him, 214 words in the program, 48 fake bulbs in the candelabra on the altar. As a child, he often counted to pass the time, distracting himself until the beatings ended and the house was quiet again. Whatever comfort he took from this activity—it fails to soothe him anymore.
By the time the service concludes, the heat outside is brutal. Kyung and his family form a receiving line on the front steps of the church. The reverend is noticeably absent. Embarrassed, probably, by his strange showing inside. An hour-long service and he barely managed to utter five complete sentences in a row. As the guests file out of the church, Kyung feels moist, rough hands press against his, one after another. Women he doesn’t know embrace him, pushing their warm breasts against his body. Several have helped themselves to the floral arrangements, toting them out like gift bags, which strikes him as rude.
Before he has a chance to fully form this thought, Lentz appears with his hand outstretched. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mr. Cho.”
Beside him is another man dressed in a cheap brown suit with the disposition of an old marine.
“This is Detective—”
Kyung cuts him off. If this is the detective he never heard from, he doesn’t want to meet him now. “Thank you both for joining us,” he says.
He turns to face the onslaught of mourners coming at him, squeezing through the doors of the church. Lentz and the detective take their cue and move on, replaced by more people, more handshakes, more sweaty hugs and stolen flowers. Kyung hears himself saying what he knows he should—“Hello.” “Thank you.” “I appreciate that you came.”—and the irony of this isn’t lost on him. He told everyone at the Cape that he didn’t want to pretend anymore, and now here he is, just getting through the script, waiting for the line to thin. When it finally does and the last of the elderly stragglers have left the building, he walks to a small patch of shade near the side of the church. His father is still standing by the door, trying to remove the boutonniere from his lapel. Jin frees the gardenia and spins it by the stem, clockwise and counterclockwise, over and over again. He seems hypnotized by it, staring at the pinwheel of white until he’s the last person left on the steps. Suddenly, he rears his arm back and hurls the flower into the bushes, startling a pair of birds that flap and flutter their way to the roof. It happens so quickly, no one notices except for Kyung.
* * *
The reception is at the parsonage, a detail he didn’t overhear until it was too late. He assumed everyone would come to his house to pay their respects, but the actual location is much worse. He has no desire to enter the reverend’s home, to be anywhere near Molly again. During the two-block walk from the church to the parsonage, Kyung brings up the rear, cycling through every possible reason to leave. Illness, anxiety, fatigue. Nothing seems important enough to excuse himself from his parents’ friends, a fact that Gillian confirms as they near the front door.
“Don’t go disappearing on us,” she whispers. “Everyone will want to see you.”
Kyung reaches for her hand, a nervous instinct that she mistakes for affection. She pulls away before he can touch her.
“When is this going to end?” he asks.
The question could refer to so many things. Even he’s not entirely sure what he meant.
“You’re incredible,” she says.
This is the longest she’s ever been angry with him, the longest she’s ever gone without wanting to talk things through. Whenever he tries to start a conversation, she’s quick to interrupt, filtering everything he says through the worst possible lens. It’s not like her to be so closed off to him, but there’s nothing he can do to fix this right now. His only goal is to get through the day.
Despite the church’s carefully maintained appearance, the parsonage hasn’t received the same kind of attention over the years. The crooked little house looks the same as it did when the elder Reverend Sung lived there. Although everything is immaculate, scrubbed clean and pine fresh, there’s no hiding the peeling linoleum in the entryway or the trampled shag carpet in the living room—carpet that Kyung still remembers staring at whenever his parents dragged him to Bible study. Even the furniture looks the same, just older and more abused. The sofa cushions sag. The tables and bookcases are all marred and mismatched. Kyung can’t imagine living in the house he grew up in, much less leaving everything as it was before. The thought of this is so strange to him, but he reminds himself that not everyone had a childhood like his. Maybe the memories here are happier; the sameness, a source of comfort.
Without any prior discussion, Kyung and his family branch off into different areas of the house. Gillian and Ethan gather with the women and children in the kitchen. Jin deposits himself on the living room sofa while Connie and Vivi head toward the buffet line in the dining room. Kyung continues down the hall, looking for a place where they’re not. He shakes hands and says hello to people as he passes by, but never stops long enough to exchange more than a polite sentence or two. At the end of the hall, he finds a bathroom behind one door and a study directly across from it behind another. He doesn’t think Gillian can accuse him of disappearing if he leaves the door open, so he slips into the cramped study, surprised by the volume of furniture and clutter inside. The reverend’s desk is the length of a dining table, with loose sheets of paper covering every square inch. Stacked on top is an oversized hutch lined with boxes of ancient software and seemingly broken printers. Kyung sits down in the chair, studying the books on the shelves. About half of them are religious, with titles that seem like self-help: Your Relationship with God. Spirituality in Troubled Times. Lifting Your Soul with Prayer. Curiously, the other half is science fiction, the cheap paperback kind with aliens and spaceships landing on their covers. Kyung picks one up at random and flips through the yellowed pages. The writing is neither terrible nor inspired—just pulp that he wouldn’t think to associate with the reverend.
Across the hall, someone closes the bathroom door, scraping a metal chain to lock it from inside. Kyung puts the book back on the shelf and turns to the desk, scanning the papers in front of him. He notices his mother’s name on one page, and then another. The closer he looks, the more he sees Mae’s name scattered everywhere. The reverend must have been working on his eulogy here, printing and reprinting the text at least a dozen times. He reads a random paragraph about Mae’s devotion to God, and then another about her generosity toward the less fortunate. Like the sci-fi book, the writing isn’t terrible. But it’s not special either. The eulogy reminds him of a horoscope, something so general that it could apply to almost anyone, which he doesn’t necessarily fault the reverend for. What else is a minister supposed to do at a funeral besides say comforting things about the dead? What he doesn’t understand is why the reverend never said any of it at all.
When the bathroom door opens, an elderly man appears, catching himself midstride as he notices Kyung in the study. He walks in and bows, taking Kyung’s hands as he attempts to offer his condolences in Korean. When Kyung explains that he doesn’t speak Korean, the man starts over again in quiet, stilted English. After he leaves, he’s replaced by another old man, then a pair of young women, then a couple with a baby in a sling and a boy about Ethan’s age. The study turns out to be the worst possible place to h
ide. People stop to pay their respects on their way to or from the bathroom. They form a line down the hall, waiting until their turn finally arrives. Kyung remains standing the entire time, nodding through one conversation after the next with no break in between. Everyone seems genuinely sad and sympathetic, but it’s hard not to notice how they all say a variation of the same thing. They tell him his mother was wonderful and generous. They tell him she was helpful and special and kind. He tries to listen attentively to everyone who walks through the door, but it’s painful. He and Mae were nicer to strangers than they were to each other.
After an awkward attempt at conversation with a woman who doesn’t speak English, he notices Elinor poking her head inside the door. She enters the room and introduces herself, crossing her hands limply over her chest. Up close, Elinor is one severe swipe of color after another. Her hair is an unnatural shade of red that reminds him of an old penny. And her lips are red too—a bright, thickly applied shade of fire engine.
“Thank you for coming,” he says. “And for reading at the service.”
He shakes her warm, perfumed hand, trying not to stare at her unusual outfit—a shapeless blue jacket that hangs from her shoulders like a cape, and white pants so billowy, they look like a skirt.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Kyung. How are you holding up?”
“I’m all right, thanks.”
She looks at him skeptically, but doesn’t try to press the matter. “I was devastated when I heard about what happened. I mean, no one can be more devastated than you and your father, but—”
“It’s not really something we have to compare like that.”
“Yes, of course. I just meant … it was such an exciting time in her life. Before I went on vacation, we were on the phone almost every day making plans.”
“Well, she loved to redecorate.”
“Oh, we weren’t redecorating anything. She was going to come work for me.”
“Work? You mean like volunteer?”
“No. It was a full-time position, with benefits and everything.”
Kyung shakes his head. The idea of Mae having a job, a real job, doesn’t compute. “You mean you were going to hire her in exchange for an investment? My father was going to give you a loan or something?”
Elinor stiffens. Suddenly, the nervous, tongue-tied woman is gone, replaced by a visibly piqued businesswoman. “I’ve never needed a loan from anyone, not even when I first started out. I have three employees and more work than I know what to do with.” She pauses, softening a bit. “I wanted Mae to join us because she had an exceptionally good eye. You knew that about her, didn’t you? How she could track down almost anything she put her mind to? I mean, really obscure pieces that other decorators would usually give up on.”
He didn’t mean to insult Elinor, to insinuate that her intentions weren’t good when she offered Mae a job, but this is the only way he knows how to make sense of it. His mother had never worked before. She’d never expressed any interest in it either.
“I’m not sure why she didn’t tell you about this. She beat out two other women who had much more formal training. One of them even had a master’s degree in design. Every time I talked to her, it seemed like she was so excited to get started.”
“Wait…” Kyung still can’t imagine his mother going into an office every day or bringing home a check at the end of the week. He also can’t imagine his father being amenable to it. “When was this supposed to happen?”
“She was planning to start after I got back from vacation, but the day came and went, and she didn’t show up, so I kept calling and calling. It wasn’t like her to not call me back, so I drove up to the house and there were all these news crews there. Of course, it made sense after that. It was so awful, what they did to her.… I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I shouldn’t be talking about this now.” She rummages through her bag and removes a key attached to a small plastic disk. “I’m guessing you’ll probably want to get her things at some point? I wrote the address on the key chain for you.”
“What things?”
“In the apartment…” She frowns, studying his face as if she might be speaking to the wrong person. “The apartment above my studio? She asked if she could rent it. She’d been having some things moved up there.” She looks flustered again. “Is there someone else I should be talking to about this? Your father, maybe?”
“No, no.” He takes the key from her. “I just don’t understand why she needed an apartment.”
“The drive, I suppose. I got the sense she wasn’t comfortable asking you or your father for a ride every day.”
It feels like Elinor just shoved him into a wall. His reaction must register on his face because she quickly tries to smooth things over.
“I mean, she never said that directly. But it’s a long drive from here to Connecticut. Two hours, round-trip. Four, if you had to drop her off in the morning and come back for her at the end of the day. It would have been completely impractical.”
Kyung stares at the key, trying to understand why Mae never mentioned any of this before. He remembers her talking about Elinor—endlessly, in fact. Whenever he had to drive her somewhere or drop by the house because she’d complained so bitterly that he hadn’t, Mae would go on and on about a project they were working on together. Rather than fight to change the subject, he’d simply tune her out. He wonders if Mae told him about the job while he wasn’t listening. Or maybe she didn’t bother to tell him because she knew he wouldn’t listen at all.
“It’s not like it’s a big apartment or anything,” Elinor continues. “It was just a place to stay during the workweek.” She turns at the sound of someone clearing his throat and sees the reverend standing outside the door. She seems relieved to have a reason to end their conversation. “She paid the rent through the end of the year, so there’s absolutely no hurry. You should feel free to come and go as you please. I just thought you’d want to have the key for whenever you’re ready.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.… I appreciate you being so nice to her all these years.”
“It was mutual.” Elinor’s eyes begin to well up. She searches through her bag and removes a small package of tissues. “I never expected we’d become such good friends when we first met, but she was such an amazing woman.” She dabs at her eyes as they begin to spill over, leaving watery brown smudges on the tissue. “Look at me. I’m a mess. I should really get going now. Please, take all the time you need with the apartment.”
He has more questions he wants to ask, more things he wants to know, but Elinor leaves before he has a chance to tell her not to. The reverend is quick to enter as she exits, stopping when he notices the papers on his desk.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I left such a mess in here.” He collects his eulogy and deposits the sheets of paper into the trash. “Gillian asked me to check on you. You know there’s plenty of space in the living room, right? You don’t have to sit here by yourself.”
“I’d prefer it, if you don’t mind.”
“I understand. You’ve always been a little shy.”
“Shy” is a generous assessment of his personality, and a completely incorrect one, but Kyung lets the comment pass.
The reverend gently kicks the trash can. “So, did you read any of this?”
“I didn’t mean to, but yes, I got a sense of what it was.”
“And you’re upset with me, I assume.”
Kyung shrugs. It’s not the right word, “upset.” He can’t bring himself to feel that much about an event he didn’t plan, a rite of passage he doesn’t fully believe in. The service wasn’t perfect, but his mother wasn’t there to see it. And the longer he drifts through the day, the more he realizes that everyone is pretending in some way. They have to. The truth has no place in the etiquette of mourning.
“I don’t have anything to be upset about.” He turns around and scans one of the bookshelves. “Have you always read so much science fiction?”
>
“I used to, but not anymore. This was actually my bedroom when I was little. I just have a hard time throwing out books.”
“It’s not strange, living in your father’s house?”
“It’s a parsonage. It was no more my father’s house than it is mine.”
Something about Reverend Sung strikes him as more human today, more benign. From a distance, he always seemed several ranks above everyone else, beyond reproach in a way that made Kyung feel distrustful and judged. But the reverend looks so stricken now, almost childlike in his remorse.
“It was fine, you know. The service. I’m sure it’s a lot of pressure to deliver a eulogy.”
There’s a couple standing in the hallway, but the reverend politely waves them off and closes the door, trapping Kyung in the study with him.
“My father was planning to come—did you know that? He was looking for a plane ticket from Seoul up until the very last minute, but I’m glad he couldn’t find one now. He would have been so embarrassed.”
“It was nice of him to try. That’s a long trip for a funeral.”
“He was very fond of you and your parents.”
Kyung pauses. “I always liked him. He did a good thing for me once.”
“I know,” he says, looking over his shoulder, confirming Kyung’s suspicion that his family’s history had been passed down from one reverend to the next. “And I like your father too, despite some of his past behavior.”
The fear of being known like this, it was always the thing that governed him. He didn’t want to be the subject of other people’s pity, but the reverend’s tone is so matter-of-fact, with no judgment or condescension at all. He looks at Kyung calmly, waiting for him to continue, as if nothing between them has changed.
“I was terrible to my mother the night before she died. I said things to her, things I can’t take back.”