At the start of the new year, she ran into Mr. Sorenson. He was leaning on a footed cane.
Just a fall, he told her. But his son (he had a son!) was convinced that he was too old to be living alone. Party time over. He was getting shipped out to a retirement community near Orlando. “You know Disney World? Mickey Mouse?”
He asked her, with new formality, whether she had a moment to step inside his house. He had something for her there.
Of course she did. Her life was once again full of such empty stretches, affordable moments.
The apartment was clean but smelled faintly of cooked cabbage and bleach. Over the recliner was a crocheted blanket in a classic granny-square, telling of some bygone female presence in his life. A few open boxes where he had started packing.
“Twenty medium-sized boxes,” he said in a false, hearty tone. “That’s what I get to take with me.”
She noticed a handsome burnished instrument. It looked very much like an upright except it had two sets of keyboards and a variety of pedals. He caught her looking. “What you have there is a mint 1960s Hammond B3.”
So it was true about the organ. She had only ever seen one in church, which had supplied her with an idea about pipe organs.
“I ask you,” he said. “Can something like this be made to fit into twenty medium-sized boxes?”
She heard the bitter note enter his tone. She sympathized with it. But she also gently refused it. There was nothing she could do for him, that they could do for each other. They belonged to whom they belonged.
He seemed to understand this.
“There she is,” he said, abruptly, drawing her attention to a large plant on a stand beside the organ. “Christmas cactus.”
She dimly remembered he had given her a cutting of the same name. But it had never produced anything like this riotous display of flowers.
“All yours,” he said. He wouldn’t be able to take living things with him on the move either.
As he watched, she struggled to wrap her arms around the pot, the leaves coming right up to her face, into her nose, obscuring her vision. All the spiky, hot-pink, white-tongued flowers.
Afterward, she would sometimes meet him coming and going from the garbage disposal down the hall. Divesting, he said. He offered her useless things. Baseball cards, cassettes, souvenir spoons. He gave her some more full-grown plants but never anything that had yet to put down roots. He didn’t give her a phone number or an address to reach him once he was gone, and she didn’t think to ask.
One Sunday, shortly after the Christmas incident, her children had come to her. Something had to be done about Dad, they said, sternly, with loving intent.
Yes, said Young-Ja with gentle amusement. Who was disagreeing? Something had to be done. But what?
They had no solutions. They were all so smart and competent, so young in their conviction that they would not grow old. But who among them was prepared to take their father in? Or who would stand to see him in a home? Even so, who would pay?
She gazed at them, loving them with a freedom she had not felt since they were small. She was glad, so glad, that they did not know about her own ailing health. She knew that she would get up every morning and muscle through, as she always had. She had in her body the proof. The cancer in her kidney when the children were young, impossibly young. The alarming growth on her left eye, spreading toward her pupil. The aches in her joints, the stiffness in her back, the headaches from the Perc fumes. Each time, she had rallied, had made a habit of exceeding doctors’ expectations.
Even now, she felt in herself a steadying of purpose, a long view opening up. Of course, she would be the one to provide a solution to the problem of Mo-Sae. That was why her children had come to her. To ask her to relieve them of this burden. And hadn’t she known that this time would come? Hadn’t she known from the moment she had taken his torn sock in hand with an offer to mend it?
She had offered other things as welclass="underline" a way out from his hated degree program, a way to make a living. It had been her idea to purchase the dry cleaners from her old employer—the business through which they had bought their home, put their kids through college. They had bought it through her savings. Even so, she had known that at certain rocky junctures of their marriage, Mo-Sae would find in this a convenient source of blame. Indeed, she had seen this plainly on his face that night when he had taken the stage: the still vibrant longing for attention and applause.
Be that as it may.
She had borne him his children and set his tables. She had served him red ginseng in autumn, deer antlers in spring, marrow soup in winter, and medicinal chicken stuffed with licorice root in the summer seasons of his life. As things got worse, she had taken in his smell, coaxed him to bathe, clipped his thick yellow toenails, and boiled stains from his sheets. She had not neglected to bring him the plenteous pills—the regulators, inhibitors, uppers, and downers—that would perhaps prolong his life, with a glass of water set on a saucer.
And after all was said and done, after he had been laid to rest, she knew that she would not rest. She would put up his stern framed photo in the living room. Exhort the children and grandchildren. Make regular visits to the cemetery, where she would upkeep his memory with ammonia, an old toothbrush, and a handful of flowers.
Watch the boy, Young-Ja had said.
Now she is gone, swept out of the house on one of her errands. Well, good. When she is around, she is always watching him, testing him, bringing as evidence the dry toothbrush or the empty candy wrapper.
The phone rings.
What! he shouts in Korean, then remembers to pick up the receiver. “Hello!” he shouts in English.
It is his daughter, his Christina. Young-Ja apparently isn’t answering her cell.
Christina seems surprised, almost irritated, to hear that her mother is not home. She asks him where exactly Jonathan is, what exactly he is doing. She tells him to get a pen and write down precisely what she says: “Mom call Christina as soon as you get home.”
He writes nothing. As soon as he hangs up the phone, he heads to the pantry, where he lords it over the products on the shelves. His good privilege. His bad choices.
He notices the boy watching him. “Come here, little one,” he says, wooing.
They assess their choices. Beans, grains, glass noodles. Dark viscous liquids decanted into unlabeled glass jars. The faint smell of dried anchovies and sesame oil. Ingredients, not food.
Through the open window, they hear a distant mechanical melody. The boy identifies it. Ice cream truck.
“Grandpa has no money,” says Mo-Sae, patting his pockets. “Nothing.”
But the boy has a solution, bringing an old coffee can full of change. Mo-Sae picks up some coins, which have complicated pictures. Then he remembers that these are American coins. He returns them to the can, which is surprisingly heavy. “Aren’t you rich!” he jokes to the boy. But what really stirs in him is sadness. This is his wife. This is the evidence of her life. A handful of small saving actions.
The boy tugs him toward the front door. He wants to go out. But Mo-Sae is deeply reluctant. He thinks that if he crosses this threshold without his wife, if he walks through the hallway with all its identical doors and goes out into the open world, he will lose all orientation. He will never find his way back. Still, when the child puts a hand in his, Mo-Sae is filled with belligerent affection. The belligerence briefly flares against Young-Ja, wherever she is, as though he will prove something to her.
He tells himself not to forget, not to forget, but by the time they reach the ground floor, he has forgotten why they are there. He looks out at the world beyond the lobby, the parked rows of cars and adjacent apartment buildings. What do they want from him? But the belligerent spirit warns him not to disappoint the boy. He notices a pool, gated and empty, and he tells his grandson in a rousing voice that when he is just a little older, Grandpa will teach him how to swim. They walk in that direction. At the gate, he fiddles with the fork latch. Surprisingly, the latch obliges and the gate swings open.