Page 33 of The Way Back Home

“It’s different when you’re the one teaching.”

He makes a skeptical sound and goes back to looking at the sky. A beat passes.

“You’d be good at it,” he says quietly.

We never talk about my dad, but his absence fills the house the same way his presence used to, in every corner and on every surface. The yard where he taught us to play cards. The kitchen stool he sat on while my mom cooked and he read the paper out loud to her, doing funny voices for the headlines until she laughed so hard she burned what was in the pan. The dent in the wall by the front door where he used to lean his work bag.

I catch Ryowoon sometimes staring at the seotda deck left out on the table. Or pausing in the doorway of the family room, his gaze lingering on the empty spot on the floor where my dad used to sit when the three of us watched baseball games on the small TV, his hand frozen on the door frame.

We never talk about the outline of a man, traced in all the spaces he used to occupy.

Summer moves along. My mom works and works and works. The fridge stays empty. Ryowoon keeps showing up with bags of stolen food and I keep eating it. Mrs. Nam feeds us and scolds us and keeps her watchful eye on both of us, and if she notices that Ryowoon is wearing long sleeves through the hottest weeks of July, that he’s started flinching when people raise their voices or move too fast near him, she doesn’t say anything about it in front of me. She makes sure he stays at the store until late, sends him home with extra food wrapped in newspaper.

Ryowoon’s dad is getting worse. I know it even though Ryowoon doesn’t talk about it. He shows up and he’s Ryowoon, loud and scrappy and ready to fight the world, but there are mornings he moves stiffly, he winces when he lifts his arm to throw a rock, mornings his smile doesn’t show in his eyes. I find him sleeping in the playground tunnel twice that month, curled up on the concrete with his jacket balled under his head. The second time I don’t try to wake him, I sit at the mouth of the tunnel and wait, keeping watch until he stirs on his own and blinks at me, disoriented, then sits up and runs his hands through his hair and says nothing about why he’s there.

One afternoon the air that’s been sitting on the town like a wet cloth for weeks lifts by a few degrees, the cicadas stop screeching and the shade under the trees feels cool instead of just slightly less like the inside of an oven.

I pack a bag with the textbooks I got from the Parks. Mrs. Park cleaned out her son’s old room last week and left a box of his high school and middle school books by the curb for trash pickup, and I grabbed every single one before the garbage truck could get to them. Most of them are outdated by a few years, the covers bent and spines cracked, someone’s old highlighting bleeding through the pages in faded yellow streaks. I don’t care. They’re books, and they’re free, and the science one has color diagrams.

Ryowoon is waiting for em at the creek, crouched on a flat rock near the bank with his pants rolled up past his calves and his shoes tossed to the side. Nuri’s in the water up to her belly, snapping at minnows, her tail waving back and forth through the surface and sending up little fans of spray. She spots me and lets out a bark, bounding up the bank to shove her wet nose into my palm before circling back to what she was doing.

“Took you long enough,” Ryowoon says without looking up, his hands cupped near the surface, fingers spread, eyes fixed on a spot between two mossy rocks.

“Had to grab a bag.”

He grunts. His hands dart down and he comes up with a frog clamped gently between his palms, a small green one with gold-flecked eyes that blinks at the sudden daylight. Ryowoon grins at it, turning his hands so the frog sits in the cradle of his fingers, and tilts his head, studying it from different angles. He’s always been this way with animals. Reverent. Patient like he is with nothing else.

“Big one,” he murmurs, then opens his hands and lets it spring off toward the reeds.

I find my spot on the bank where the ground rises into a natural shelf, a patch of grass and packed earth above the waterline, shaded by a pine leaning out over the creek. I dump the bag and spread the books out beside me, crack open the science textbook to where I left off last night, and settle in.

The creek fills the silence, burbling over the rocks, and Nuri splashes downstream. Ryowoon wades in up to his shins, turning over stones, peering into crevices, occasionally making a low clicking sound with his tongue to coax something out. I read. The chapter’s on Korean ecosystems, plants native to the peninsula, and it flows into a section on national symbols. I comb over a full-page spread on the mugunghwa with a botanical illustration so detailed I can see the veining in the petals.

I pull a loose sheet of paper out from the back of the textbook and dig a pencil stub out of my pocket. The illustration in the book is done by someone who obviously knew what they were doing, and mine won’t be anywhere close to that. But I start sketching anyway, copying the curve of the petals, the way they open outward from the center, the pistil rising up from the middle, getting the proportions wrong and erasing and trying again.

The light shifts through the branches above me, dappling the page, and the shadows of leaves crawl across my sketch as the sun tracks west. Nuri’s given up on the minnows and is lying on a warm rock downstream, her tongue out, eyes half-closed. Ryowoon’s been quiet for a while.

His shadow falls across the page as he drops down beside me on the bank, still damp from the creek, smelling of mud and wet dog and creek water. He leans over my shoulder, his chin nearly touching it, and looks down at the sketch, then at the textbook page.

He snorts. “What is that?”

“A flower.”

“Looks like a jellyfish.”

I elbow him off my shoulder. “It’s a mugunghwa. The national flower.”

He resettles beside me, stretching his legs out, mud between his toes, and tilts his head at the illustration in the book and then at my version on the loose paper. His lip twitches.

“Okay, that one looks like a flower,” he says, pointing at the textbook. Then he points at mine. “That one looks like something Nuri coughed up.”

“Shut up, I’m still working on it.”

He leans back on his hands, tipping his head curiously. “So why’s it the national flower?”

I flip back a page to where the chapter starts, running my finger down the text. “It’s been a symbol of Korea for centuries. The name means ‘eternal blossom that never fades.’ They bloom all summer and into fall, and they keep coming back. You cut them down and they grow again. The whole thing is about resilience.” I tap the passage near the bottom of the page. “And it’s on the national emblem. See? Right there, surrounding the taeguk on the coat of arms. The flag itself has the trigrams at each corner, and those come from—”

“Is there going to be a quiz?”