Page 81 of The Way Back Home

Mrs. Park presses a hand to her chest. “Oh, look at him. He’s all grown.”

My mother preens, hooking her arm through mine like she’s about to parade me through the village. She waves up to the Parks with her free hand. “I’d better get him inside and feed him, he looks half-starved from the trip.”

“Mom, I don’t look half-starved.”

“Hush.”

They all wave and I have to bite down on a laugh as she tows me bodily toward the door, her grip on my arm surprisingly ironclad for a woman her size. I duck through the doorway, tilting my head at the last second. Too tall now to just walk through the way she does. The low frame of the entrance catches a strand of my hair as I pass under it and I smooth it back, turning my head as I straighten inside.

Everything’s neat. My mother’s always kept it neat, even when she was working doubles and barely sleeping. The family pictures line the shelves by the TV. My eyes skim the frames, the three of us at the park, my dad grinning, my mom squinting into the sun. My graduation photo beside it. The smell coming from the kitchen reaches me and my stomach lets out an aggressive roar.

I came through from Seoul without stopping. Slept through every rest stop, my body so used to the bus by now that I just went under and didn’t surface until the driver announced my stop.

My mother takes my bag out of my hands and pushes me toward the kitchen table with the flat of her palm between my shoulder blades.

“Sit. Sit, sit.”

I sit.

What follows is less a meal and more of an assault. She sets down rice first, then a platter of braised short ribs glistening with sauce, then galbi-jjim, then side dishes that keep multiplying across the table surface: pickled radish, seasoned spinach, fried anchovies, egg rolls sliced into neat rounds, kimchi that smells like she made it fresh this morning. She doesn’t stop until there isn’t a visible inch of table left and I’m staring at enough food to feed the entire block.

“Mom.”

“Eat.”

She doesn’t sit down until my mouth is stuffed so full of rice and short rib that speaking becomes physically impossible, and only then does she settle across from me at the table, her chin propped in one hand, watching me with a borderline rapturous expression. Her eyes are bright and damp and a soft, full smile wobbles on her lips.

I chew, swallow, point my chopsticks at her. “Stop staring at me like that.”

She sniffs and waves a hand. “I can’t help it. You’re just so grown.”

She dabs at her eyes with the heel of her palm and I snort through a mouthful of egg roll.

“You can blink, you know. I’m going to be here all summer if you need time to stare at me.”

She swats at my arm across the table but giggles girlishly, making her sound twenty years younger. I grin at her as I shovel more rice into my mouth. She prods me about my classes while I eat, wants to know about my professors, about the coursework, about the reading list she saw on my desk the last time she visited. I tell her about the paper I’m working on for my education seminar, about the research assistantship I applied for, about the professor who pulled me aside after a lecture and told me I had a talent for this. Her eyes get brighter with each thing I tell her and she keeps pressing her hand to her mouth like she’s trying to hold herself together.

I ask about her work and she brushes it off, says the restaurant’s the same, that Mrs. Yoo got remarried, did I hear? I choke a little and she laughs as I cough rice into my fist, asking who? She fills me in on the town gossip while I work through a second bowl. The new school they’re building by the harbor. The stray cats that have colonized the alley behind the post office. Mrs. Nam, she assures me when I ask, is as formidable as ever, terrorizing the neighborhood kids from her register the way she’s terrorized every generation before them.

We end up in the living room, me cross-legged at the low table with a cup of barley tea warming my hands. My mother curls up on the floor cushion across from me, her legs tucked to the side, still smiling, still looking at me like she can’t believe I’m here and real and sitting in her living room. We talk until the light outside starts to change, turning gold through the windows. I just sit in it for a while, the sound of her voice, the smell of the house, the warmth of the tea seeping into my palms.

My eyes drift as we run through the last of the gossip, wandering over the shelves, the familiar pictures. They land on a photo I forgot was there, tucked between a vase and a stack of my mother’s magazines. The six of us at the fish market, maybe fourteen, crammed together in matching rubber aprons and elbow-length gloves, all of us looking various degrees of disgusted and delighted. Haeil in the middle with his arm slung around Jinwon’s neck, both of them hamming for the camera. Sihyung laughing so hard his eyes are creased closed. Yoohan holding up a fish like a trophy. And there I am on the end, next to Ryowoon, who has a sea bass in each hand and the most shit-eating grin I’ve ever seen on a human face. Mrs. Kim caught Haeil slipping one of her fish and put all six of us to work for two days to settle the debt, nevermind that only one of us actually did the stealing. My mouth twitches at the corner.

I look up. My mother’s watching me, still smiling softly. She knows me too well.

“Where is he?”

She doesn’t ask who I mean.

“He’s been working at a garage,” she says, “on the other side of town. Moon’s, you know the one past the school? He’s been there most of the year.”

I unfold my legs, pushing up from the table. My mother bats at me.

“There’s no hurry! At least shower first, go rest a little, you just got off a bus—”

“I’ll rest later.”

I can’t yet. Not until I’ve seen him. The entire bus ride down my leg wouldn’t stop bouncing, a restless current running under my skin that wouldn’t settle no matter how many times I shifted or closed my eyes. I need to see him first. Then I can rest.