Sang-woo shook his head. He was moved, he couldn’t help it, even if he knew Anthony meant exactly what he said. Anthony was a gambler, like Sang-woo — the most superstitious kind of man. They weren’t friends — Sang-woo wasn’t friends with his customers, it wasn’t like that and he didn’t pretend — but they did scratchers together every time Anthony came in, sometimes four, five times a week, ever since Anthony hit it big last July. He’d won five thousand dollars, the biggest score in the history of South Park Liquor, and neither man could believe there wasn’t more coming.
It was the same mistake, he realized now, the same one that defined Sang-woo’s entire American existence. The notion that this — South Park Shibal-Sekki Liquor — was some kind of golden goose, a place of good fortune, and not a shithole money pit where all his dreams came to die.
He looked at it now: his store, his life’s work, its shabby pink walls inappropriately cheerful, surrounded by so much destruction. He thought of a pretty Vietnamese blackjack dealer at Commerce, her nails long and shell-pink as she tapped the felt, shaking her head, then raked in another stack of Sang-woo’s chips.
He hated this place. He hated that it was supposed to make him proud, all his toil and sacrifice so his kids could have good lives, so they could go to school in America and tell him to stop smoking. If he worked hard, and they worked hard, he could pay for them to go to college. It was a good bet, American college. Positive expected value. But the return wouldn’t come to Sang-woo. That was for Hana, for Eric. He and Eun-ji would take care of themselves with what they had left. But the work was hard, and after eight years running the store, he had worse than nothing to show for it.
Somewhere nearby, he heard sirens. He wondered if they were going to Happy Hamburger or another fire — Sang-woo saw one raging on his way here, and at least a dozen buildings that had burned overnight. He asked: “You think you’re lucky, Anthony?”
The big man shrugged. “Don’t know about that. But this is my lucky spot.”
“What happened to the money? The five thousand?”
“That exact money? I don’t know. Gone, I guess.”
Sang-woo had done the math. In the last year, Anthony had bled over three thousand dollars on scratchers, and Sang-woo had bled right with him. But every time they hit — fifty dollars on a ten-dollar ticket, twenty dollars on a five-dollar one — they felt the euphoria of possibility, the big score waiting, hidden in the next card. Sang-woo understood — had probably always understood, somewhere in his broken, idiot brain — that the chase wasn’t worth it. Between the scratchers, the cards, the horses, the sports — all the bets he made to sprinkle his long, dreary days and nights with brilliant little crystals of chance — he was in the hole for almost $100,000. For weeks now, he had been gathering the courage to tell Eun-ji. She’d put some money away in a savings account that wouldn’t mature for a few years. She said it was for Hana and Eric, but he knew what it was really for: an emergency fund she could shield from him.
He would tell her, he’d decided, on Hana’s twelfth birthday, the first week of May, when Eun-ji would have to keep her composure. Then, with less than a week to D-Day, everything changed.
“How long you stand here?” he asked Anthony. “You here yesterday?”
“Yeah, came last night with Wallace.”
“Wallace?” Wallace was another customer, but he had no special reason to care about Sang-woo or the store. “Why?”
“He borrowed a hundred dollars from me when I hit that jackpot. I know I ain’t never seeing it again, so I figure he owes me. It’s a good thing too. We chased some kids away.”
Sang-woo crushed his cigarette with his shoe and gave a hard kick to the metal frame of the doorway. The glass rattled.
Anthony stared at him, his eyes wide and alert, like he was ready now to face down a looter who’d come for his store. “What’d you do that for, Sang?”
“It’s no good, Anthony,” said Sang-woo, kicking again. “You say it’s good luck? No. It’s bad luck — for me, for you. You know what my wife say?”
“What?”
“She say when you gamble, all luck bad luck, even good luck.” He’d shouted at her to mind her own business, even broke a plate — but it stuck with him, the way things did when they came spitting out of her mouth. “Forget luck. Fuck luck. I got something better.”
Anthony laughed. “Yeah, what’s that?”
Sang-woo lit another cigarette and watched the flames rising from Happy Hamburger, not a fire engine in sight. “A sure winner,” he said.
$280,000. It was more money than he’d ever had in his life. With $280,000, he could pay back his creditors, open another business — in the Valley this time, somewhere safe — and who knows, maybe even have some left over. Enough to put aside for the kids or play the stock market — no use letting it sit in a low-yield bank account when it could grow with some careful investing, maybe double or triple by the time Hana went to college.
Sang-woo never felt better than he did after the fire, South Park Liquor turned to a crumpled skeleton of metal and rubble and ash. It was all he could do to hide his glee, his winning ticket stashed away in his home desk drawer.
Eun-ji was livid, of course she was, but what could Sang-woo have done? She’d warned him against going to the store at all — now did she think he should’ve been there, armed and standing guard, night after night after night? She cried and wailed, lamenting the loss of their livelihood, and Sang-woo let her. Then he mentioned, as if he’d just remembered, the insurance policy he’d bought from Mike Koh. She’d stared at him, agape: “Mike Koh? That useless bastard?”
But even Eun-ji came around when he showed her the policy from Pacific Marine and Fire. Signed, dated, everything in English, and the bottom line: in case of total loss caused by fire, $280,000 of coverage. It didn’t stop her from pouting, or worrying ceaselessly about the future, but she went back to washing his clothes and cooking and serving his meals without complaint. He knew that for once he had done something right.
Except a month had passed with no word from Mike Koh, a man Sang-woo usually saw two or three times a week. He wasn’t at church, he wasn’t at his usual tables — Sang-woo looked every time he dipped into Commerce, hoping to double some of his future payout money. Sang-woo called and called, left multiple voice mails on Mike’s phone. He started getting that roil in his gut, the gambler’s vertigo, the hope and nausea he felt watching the torturous turn of a make-or-break card. It pissed him off: this was not a gamble; Sang-woo had signed the papers, he’d even made the payments on time, he had the policy in his pocket; he’d already won.
So why was he standing on the corner in front of his burned-out liquor store, watching the street with Anthony and Wallace like a trio of low-level drug dealers?
Wallace looked at his watch. “You think he’ll show?”
Sang-woo put out his cigarette, lit another, and wondered idly if Mike would be scared of Wallace. Anthony, he didn’t bother wondering about; he would never count on anyone being scared of Anthony, only figured that both of these jokers would be better than just the one. But Wallace? He looked young, not like a kid but like he could be twenty, twenty-five, prime gangbanger age. He was thin, maybe even skinny, but Mike was no Schwarzenegger. Mike was an insurance salesman. He sold policies to Korean merchants in South Central, but he found them at church, at birthday parties, not in the actual neighborhood. When Sang-woo named South Park Liquor as their meeting place, Mike asked if there were still National Guardsmen around, then said he’d only drive down in the middle of the day. Sang-woo guessed that Mike rarely saw Black people. Yeah, he’d be scared of Wallace. Maybe even of Anthony, if he thought the big man might have a gun.