Page 20 of Angel of Thursdays

“That means she likes you,” Cassiel said.

May’s shoulder stayed a beat longer than the sentence required, then withdrew. The contact cooled. The space was his again. Cassiel’s arm stayed where it was.

“So how did you two meet?” Minju asked.

“I work at a restaurant in Chinatown. Lau Kee. He came in while I was out front covering for someone on break, and I just—” The pause was perfectly timed. “I mean, look at him.”

His mother’s hand covered her mouth. Minju made a face. David smiled into his rice.

“The siu yuk rice was good,” Cassiel said. “That’s the story.”

“That’s your story. The real story is you came back four times in two weeks.”

“The rice was very good.”

Minju asked how long, and May said two months. By design, the timeline tracked against the real one cleanly enough that Cassiel’s prepared answers weren’t needed. The embarrassment he felt was real, it was the other feeling he hadn’t prepared for.

Minju looked at him. Her eyes stayed on his face. She picked up her water glass, took a sip, and offered no further commentary.

“He eats well,” his father said. It was the first full sentence he’d spoken since the meal began. He wasn’t looking at May. He was looking at his plate, moving a piece of namul with his chopsticks.

Cassiel put it alongside every ‘drive safe’ and every quiet pat on the shoulder, and the fact that his father had come in once, a year ago, and stood watching him work on a movement for forty minutes without speaking, and then quietly left, satisfied. One of his father’s rare declarations. All of them short. All of them meaning something that neither he nor Cassiel articulated. Only he suspected that his father knew the words and Cassiel, most of the time, did not.

* * *

By 8:30 p.m., the energy in the house had deflated. Jaewon was on the couch between May and David, demonstrating something on his iPad that required May’s full attention and David’s languid supervision. Minju was in the kitchen cleaning up while his mother had migrated to the living room. His father had returned to his chair. The baby was sound asleep.

Cassiel stood in the hallway. The bathroom door was behind him, closed, the light off.

He pressed the back of his head against the wall. The paint was cool. He counted five breaths. The hallway light was off. He hadn’t turned it off; it had been off when he’d arrived, and he’d chosen not to correct it. The bathroom fan hummed at a frequency he could feel in his teeth. Why was it on? It shouldn’t be on. Cassiel gritted his teeth. Through the wall, the living room was muffled, but it was the sound of his family with someone in it who fit, leaking through drywall, while he stood in a hallway.

His phone had buzzed twice in his pocket. It was Lauren, probably responding to the egg tarts update with follow-up questions he had no bandwidth for. He left it. She was being a good friend. He was not, and in that moment he did not care.

From the living room, he heard May’s voice followed by Jaewon’s giggle, the pure, helpless laugh of a child who’d been surprised or delighted or… whatever. David’s voice underneath, low and amused. They were fine.

Breath in for four seconds, held for seven, out for eight.

Cassiel ducked into the bathroom and turned off the fan, then straightened his shirt and went back.

May was talking to his mother, who had shed her apron and was sitting in her armchair in the living room. Not through Cassiel—to her, directly, the Korean bypassed entirely, working in English that his mother was following with the intent concentration she gave to recipes in foreign cookbooks. Mooncakes. Mid-Autumn Festival. Same moon, May was saying. Different cakes, same calendar. His family did this too, the lunar thing, the harvest thing, everybody eating too much.

His mother was nodding. She asked a question Cassiel didn’t catch, and May answered with his hands, forming the shape of a mooncake, the gesture of pressing one into a mold. She said ah and compared it to something, her own hands moving. The two of them were having a conversation without a buffer, with nothing even resembling a script, and it was working. He heard ‘mandu’ as he sat back down.

* * *

At the end of the night there were two sets of containers packed: one for Cassiel, one for May. Galbi, japchae, kkakdugi, jeon, rice. The containers were his mother’s good ones, the thick glass with the locking lids, and giving them to May meant she expected them back.

“Make sure he eats this. Don’t let it sit in the fridge,” she warned.

“I’ll tell him.”

“We’ll make mandu when he comes again. He agreed.”

This was news to Cassiel. The containers suddenly felt heavier in his arms. May accepted his set with both hands, a small bow and a “Thank you, Miss Mary,” that made his mother laugh.

At the door, his father gripped Cassiel’s shoulder. The Lim Sungho special, thought a voice in his head that sounded more like May than Cassiel. Then his hand moved to May’s shoulder, a brief pat and a nod.

His father produced a business card from his shirt pocket and held it out to May. Cassiel was intimately familiar with the layout of this card. Sunny’s Dry Cleaning: Standard. Large font, central placement. Then, two font sizes smaller, placed beneath: SUNNY SUNGHO LIM - OWNER & PROPRIETER. May, who made no comment on the misspelling of ‘proprietor’ and who, as far as Cassiel could tell, did not own anything that required dry cleaning, took it with both hands and solemnly thanked him.