Page 127 of The Way Back Home

Mrs. Nam’s store is quiet when I pull up out front. The roll down doors are up and I can hear the tinny sound of her TV playing a drama through the open doorway. No customers. Mid afternoon lull. The same as it’s been a thousand times before.

I pull off my helmet and sit on the bike for a minute, looking at the storefront. The faded awning. The old freezer by the entrance. The hand painted sign she’s never replaced. I can see the scorch marks on one side where the fire damaged the exterior, faded now.

I swing off the bike and walk in.

She’s behind the counter, perched on her stool, arms folded, watching her drama. The volume is up too loud because she won’t admit her hearing’s gotten worse. She turns her head when my shadow falls across the counter and looks at me in my riding jacket. My bag is strapped to the back of the bike, visible through the open doors. My face must look the way it feels because Mrs. Nam’s expression doesn’t shift into surprise or confusion. She looks resigned.

She comes around the counter slowly, her joints giving her trouble though she’d bite the head off anyone who mentioned it. She stops in front of me and takes my hand in both of hers, her small fingers wrapping around mine, and she looks up at me and nods once.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

My throat clenches. I grip her hands back and make myself look her in the eye. She deserves more than that from me, deserves more than I could give her in a hundred lifetimes.

“Halme,” I say hoarsely. “I wanted to say thank you. For everything you’ve done for me. For all of it.” I swallow. “You didn’t have to take us in. You didn’t have to feed us or protect us or put up with any of our bullshit. And I don’t think I ever said it properly.”

Her eyes are bright. She squeezes my hand, her grip stronger than it has any right to be for a woman her age. “You say it every time you walk through that door, child. You always have.”

I press my lips together hard. Keep it together.

“I figured this might be coming,” she says, her voice steady but her chin trembling just slightly. “Saw the look in that boy’s eyes when he got on the bus.” She searches my face. “He didn’t know, did he? What was really happening between you two this summer. What you were feeling.”

I laugh. “He knew. He always knows. That’s the problem.”

She gives me a long look. Seeing me clearly.

“Do you really have to do it this way, Ryowoon?”

I hold her gaze. Grip her hands tighter. “He’s better off,” I say. “Without me. He’s better off.”

Mrs. Nam presses her lips together. I can see she wants to argue. Wants to grab me by the ear and sit me down in the courtyard and talk sense into me the way she’s done a hundred times. But my face must tell her I’m past reaching because she lets out a breath and pulls me down.

I have to bend nearly in half to let her hug me and she wraps her arms around my neck with surprising force, pressing my head against her shoulder the way she used to when I was small enough to fit properly in her arms. She holds me and I hold her back, my hands fisting in the fabric of her vest, my eyes burning.

“You will always have a home here,” she says against my ear. Firmly. “You hear me? Always. No matter where you go or how long you’re gone. This door is open for you.”

I nod. Can’t speak. She pats the back of my head, smooths my hair down the way my mother never did or at least never did enough. Then she pulls back, cups my face in her palms, and looks at me. Her eyes are wet but she doesn’t let the tears fall. Stubborn woman. Never cried in front of us. Not once.

“Let me get you something for the road,” she says. “You’re too skinny. You’ll blow off that motorcycle.”

I choke out a laugh. She bustles into the kitchen and I hear her moving around, opening containers, wrapping things. She comes back with her arms full. Packages of kimbap, rice balls, a thermos of barley tea, a bag of the honey cookies she keeps in the tin behind the register. She presses all of it into my hands, piling them up until I’m juggling.

“Halme, I can’t carry all of—”

“You’ll manage.” She shoves the last package at me and closes my fingers around it. Then she holds my hands again, the food pinned between us, and looks up at me one final time.

“Go,” she says quietly. “Go find your way. But you come back when you’re ready. You hear me?”

I lean down and kiss her forehead. Feel her hand pat my cheek one more time, calloused and warm.

I walk out of the store into the late golden light. My arms full of more food than one person can eat in three days, my chest so tight I can’t pull in a full breath. I strap the packages to the back of the bike alongside my bag, fitting them into the gaps, making it work. Pull my helmet on. Straddle the seat.

I look back.

She’s standing in the entrance. Small and upright between the roll down doors, her hands folded in front of her, the TV still playing behind her. The light on her silver hair, on the worn fabric of her apron. She doesn’t wave. Just stands there, watching, her face calm and bright eyed. The same thing she’s given me since I was six. A safe place. A warm meal. The certainty that someone in the world would notice if I disappeared.

I turn back to the road. Kick the bike to life.

Haemok unspools behind me as I ride. The harbor shrinking in the mirror. The rooftops of the houses on the hill growing smaller, blurring. The road curves along the coast and the town slips sideways, tucking itself behind the bluffs, and I watch it go. Watch the last sliver of familiar coastline thin to a line and then to nothing.