Page 14 of The Way Back Home

“Is there anywhere,” I asked, “any place he mentioned, before he left? A shop he talked about, somewhere he thought about working? Anything like that?”

He thought about it for a long moment, brow furrowed, tapping his knuckle against the table. “There were a couple garages up in Busan he used to deal with, back when he was still doing work in Haemok. Parts, mostly, or referrals when a job was too much for the shop he had. I don’t know if it means anything. It’s been years. But if he ended up staying in that line of work, maybe someone there might’ve heard something.”

He wrote the names down on a napkin because neither of us had paper, his handwriting cramped and slanted, and slid it across the table to me. I thanked him more times than was probably necessary, and he waved it off, told me to come find him again before another six years passed, made me promise.

Now I’m standing across the street from the second of those two names, the first one already a dead end this morning, an older man behind the counter shaking his head at Ryowoon’s name, never heard it in his life. This one might go the same way. Probably will. But I came all the way down here, so I step off the curb and start crossing anyway, salt on my tongue, my heart thumping slowly in my chest as the shop gets closer.

The garage swallows sound and spits it back out, the whine of a drill deep inside the building, a radio playing trot music through tinny speakers, someone laughing at something I can’t hear over the rest of it. I stand just inside the roll-up door for a second, letting my eyes adjust to the dimmer light after the glare outside, and then I call out, pitching my voice to carry.

“Excuse me? Is anyone up front?”

Nobody answers right away. A car sits up on the lift closest to me, its underside exposed, a pair of legs in stained coveralls sticking out from beneath it. Further back, two men lean over the open hood of a sedan, murmuring to each other, one of them gesturing at something with a wrench. Neither looks over.

I call out again louder, and a man finally straightens up from behind a stack of tires near the back wall, wiping his hands on an oil-stained rag. He’s younger than me by maybe five years, with a buzzed head and grease smudged along his jaw like war paint.

“Yeah?” he says, walking over, still working the rag between his fingers.

“Sorry to bother you,” I say stiffly, cringing at my city-polished dialect that slipped out by accident. I’m not in Seoul, I remind myself, if I talk like that it makes me an outsider here. “I’m trying to find someone. A man named Cha Ryowoon. I was told he might’ve done business with this shop a while back.”

The name doesn’t seem to mean anything to him. His brow furrows with polite confusion.

“Doesn’t ring a bell. You’d have to ask the boss, he’s been here longer than any of us.”

“Is he around?”

The man tilts his head toward the back of the shop and hollers a name swallowed by the noise of the drill still going. A minute passes. I use it to look around, my eyes moving over every face in the shop like I’ve been doing all morning, scanning for something that might not even still exist in the shape I remember it. The man beneath the lifted car. The two hunched over the sedan. None of them are tall enough, none of them have that set to the shoulders I’d know even from behind, even after all this time.

I don’t know what I expect to find, honestly. It’s not like I think he’s going to be standing right here in some random garage in Busan, wrench in hand, exactly the way he looked at twenty-three. But some part of me keeps looking anyway, can’t stop myself, imagining all the ways ten years might have reshaped him. Maybe he’s bulkier now, all that wiry, restless muscle getting heavier from years of manual work. Maybe he cut his hair short like half the guys in here, shaved close at the sides. Maybe there are new scars, ones I’ve never seen, over the ones I have.

The boss comes out from a back office, an older man in his fifties, with a face like sun-roughened leather and reading glasses pushed up into thinning hair. He looks me over once, sizing me up, trying to place whether I’m trouble or a customer or not.

“You’re looking for someone?” he asks in a gravelly voice.

“Cha Ryowoon,” I say again. I see a flicker of recognition in his eyes that makes my pulse jump.

“Ryowoon,” he repeats, thoughtful, scratching at his jaw. “Yeah, I think I remember that name. Used to deal in parts, way back. Bought and traded with me a few times when I was still running things out of the old lot before we moved here. Sharp kid, good eye for what a car actually needed instead of what people thought it needed.”

My chest tightens, hope catching the smallest spark. “Do you know where he is now? Have you heard from him recently?”

The boss shakes his head, and the hope drops snuffs right out. “Nah. Haven’t heard that name in years, honestly. He never worked here, if that’s what you’re asking. Just did business with me a handful of times, a long while back.”

“Do you know anything else? Anywhere he might’ve gone, anyone else he worked with?”

He thinks about it, but I can already see the answer in the way his mouth purses, the way he shakes his head slowly. “Sorry. Wish I could help more.”

I thank him anyway, thank the man in the coveralls too, and step back out into the sun feeling that same flat disappointment I’ve felt at every stop today. It’s not devastating anymore by the fourth or fifth time. It’s just tiring, a lump in my stomach.

I cross another name off Sihyung’s napkin and check the map on my phone, walking to the next address a few blocks down. The heat’s picked up since this morning, humidity thick enough to make my shirt stick to my back by the time I reach the next shop, a squat building with a corrugated awning and three cars parked out front in various states of disassembly.

It’s all the same. I step inside, call out, wait for someone to come find me, ask for Ryowoon by name, explain I’m looking for an old friend, watch their face for any flicker of recognition. This time it’s a woman running the front counter, and she frowns and says the name doesn’t ring a bell, that she’s only been here two years, but she can ask around if I want to leave a number. I just thank her and leave, walking back out into the glare.

By the third stop I’ve got my explanation memorized well enough to recite it smoothly without thinking, the words losing their stiffness the more times I repeat them. I’m looking for someone. Cha Ryowoon. Might’ve done business with this shop, years back. Same careful scan of every face in the room while I wait for an answer, sweeping over shoulders and jawlines and the way men carry themselves when they’ve spent a lifetime doing hard labor with their hands. None of them are him. I don’t know why I keep expecting they might be.

By the fourth stop, an old man with liver spots dotting his hands and forearms squints at me for a long moment after I say the name, long enough that my heart trips over itself, thinking maybe, finally. But then he just shakes his head and says sorry, doesn’t know him, thought maybe I meant someone else, a different family with a similar name that used to run a shop up near Gimhae. Not the same person. I thank him and leave anyway, because there’s nothing else to do.

The fifth address turns out to be closed down entirely, the building gutted, windows boarded, a faded for-lease sign taped inside the glass door with a phone number that’s probably disconnected by now. I stand in front of it for a minute, staring at the dark interior through a gap in the boards, feeling the flavor of hopelessness that comes with dead ends, useless information, months old NUL when it reaches you.

By the time the sun starts sinking toward the water, I’ve walked into so many shops I’ve covered half the metro area. My feet ache in my dress shoes, wrong choice for a day like this, but I hadn’t planned on spending hours crossing Busan on foot when I packed this morning. My shirt’s stuck to my back with sweat and dried again twice over, and there’s a dull throb behind my eyes that’s been building since noon from too much sun and too much disappointment stacked on top of each other.