Page 77 of The Way Back Home

He shrugs, chewing. Then he taps the register sitting on the counter, its buttons yellowed with age, and slides a ledger across to me. The cover is worn, the binding cracked, Mrs. Nam’s handwriting visible on the spine.

“The physical stuff I can handle.” He nudges the ledger closer with two fingers. “But I need you to figure out the numbers. Go through the books, see what we’re dealing with. If there’s anything left over worth selling, what’s in the back, what’s still on the shelves that someone might actually want.”

I take the ledger without arguing, flip it open. Mrs. Nam’s columns march down the pages in neat rows, her penmanship deteriorating as the dates get more recent, the numbers growing sparser. The last few pages are filled in by a different hand. The shopgirl, probably. I start reading through them as Ryowoon finishes the breakfast, standing at the counter across from me, eating in silence. When the lunch box is empty he snaps the lid back on and goes right back to the freezers.

I put the ledger down after the first pass and go help him.

We spend the morning gutting the store. Shelving gets stripped bare, the contents sorted into piles: garbage, salvageable, unknown. I pull cans out of a bottom shelf that have expiration dates from three years ago and drop them into a bag. Ryowoon hauls the freezer trays out through the back and dumps them, comes back smelling like old frost and spoiled fish. We don’t talk. The work fills the space. Most of what passes between us is functional. Hand me that. Move this. Over here.

Every time Ryowoon comes near me I brace for some shift in the air, some brush of his arm or shoulder that passes the invisible boundary between us. But he keeps his body angled away from mine when we’re in the same aisle, reaches around me instead of past me, never close enough to feel his warmth. And still I catch myself watching for it. Every time I feel his gaze on the side of my face I try to turn fast enough to catch him looking, but he’s always already fixed on something else.

I grit my teeth and go back to scrubbing the counter.

The cleaning takes longer than a single day. By the next afternoon we’ve got most of the interior stripped and wiped down, the floors swept, the shelves bare and pushed back against the walls, and Ryowoon takes his walk. I can hear him outside, circling the building, his footsteps on the gravel, the scrape of the old ladder he found propped against the back wall as he leans it up and climbs. Inside, I spread the financial records across the counter and start tallying, working through Mrs. Nam’s books page by page. The numbers are grim. There’s almost nothing left in the operating account, and what little inventory remains has no resale value.

The front door creaks and Ryowoon ducks back in, dusting his hands against his thighs, a cobweb in his hair.

He plants himself in the middle of the store and looks up at the ceiling, then around at the walls, his eyes scanning. I’ve seen that look on his face when he was under the hood of someone’s car.

“Alright.” He blows out a breath. “The wiring needs to be redone on the whole east side, there’s rot in two of the ceiling beams, the roof’s got at least four spots that need patching before the rains or this whole place is going to leak like a sieve. Plumbing in the bathroom’s shot. The hot water heater back there is basically a paperweight. And—” he gestures to the gaping hole in the ceiling where a column of daylight pours through, illuminating a perfect circle of dusty floor, “—that’s going to need more than a patch.”

I tap my pen against the counter. “How long do you think all that’s going to take?”

He rubs at his chin. “Who knows. Couple weeks if we’re lucky.” His eyes drift back up to the hole. “First things first, I need supplies.”

“What kind?”

He rattles off a list. Plywood sheets, roofing tiles, copper wiring, PVC pipe, caulk, a handful of tools he doesn’t have, joint compound, nails, brackets. I’m frowning before he’s halfway through.

“I don’t think any of that’s fitting in my Genesis. Maybe we should just order it.”

Ryowoon’s gaze drifts past me, through the back hallway, toward the courtyard.

“Mrs. Nam’s old truck is still back there under that tarp.”

I grimace. “I’m pretty sure no one’s run that thing in years. It’s probably got a family of chipmunks living in it.” I fold my arms across my chest. “Even you can’t get that running.”

The grin he gives me is paired with a gleam in his eyes. “Never say never.”

I shouldn’t be surprised. I shouldn’t be, and I’m not, not really, when I hear the unmistakable wheeze and cough of an engine turning over the following afternoon. Then the wheeze becomes a rumble, and the old short-cab truck comes puttering around the side of the building and stops in front of the store. Ryowoon is behind the wheel, one arm hanging out the window, grease smudged across his jaw and the bridge of his nose, looking annoyingly pleased with himself. Yuro sits in the cab beside him, ears perked, tongue out, riding shotgun.

I stand in the doorway with the broom in my hand and press my lips together to fight off my grin.

Ryowoon raises two fingers off the steering wheel in a lazy salute and the truck rolls off down the hill, belching a puff of grey exhaust.

He comes back that afternoon with the truck bed piled so high I can’t see the cab from behind. Plywood sheets stacked and roped down, bundles of roofing tiles, coils of wire, PVC lengths sticking out past the tailgate, bags of joint compound, a new toolbox. I help him unload, the two of us hauling everything into the courtyard piece by piece, stacking it against the back wall while Yuro supervises from his spot on the warm stones.

I stand back when we’re done, hands on my hips, looking at all the pieces spread out around the yard. Plywood leaned up in rows, tiles in stacks, tools laid out on the ground, spools and pipes and bags of hardware.

“Can you do all this by yourself?”

Ryowoon gives me a look, wiping his forearm across his brow. “I won’t take offense because you probably don’t remember. But I’m definitely the most resourceful person you know.”

I roll my eyes. But I don’t challenge him on it.

For three days we work in parallel lines that never quite intersect. Ryowoon takes the physical repairs, hauling himself up on the roof each morning, the sound of hammering and the whine of a drill filtering down through the ceiling while I sit at the counter below and comb through numbers. I organize Mrs. Nam’s records into coherence, sort through the inventory logs, go through what’s left in the storeroom, make lists. Ryowoon comes in smelling like sawdust and sweat and asks me where the electrical panel is. I point him to the back without looking up. He brushes past and I hear him prying off a panel cover, muttering to himself. Neither of us brings up anything that isn’t about the store.

Evenings, I clip Yuro’s leash on and walk up the hill to my mother’s house. She always has dinner waiting, always asks how things are going, always looks at me carefully, with a searching expression when I say fine. I eat, I shower, I lie in the spare bedroom staring at the ceiling until I fall asleep.