Page 27 of Angel of Thursdays

Fleet Week was a week-long ordeal that San Francisco saw fit to inflict upon Cassiel. The Blue Angels banked over the Marina, the crowd cheered, and every dog in the Inner Sunset lost its mind for six consecutive afternoons. Cassiel’s apartment was not soundproofed. His headphones were fine but not rated for F/A-18s at three hundred feet.

By Thursday morning, his neck was a column of concrete and the prospect of spending the evening in Fremont, where the hills absorbed the sound and the suburbs sat in their blessedly quiet sprawl—felt less and less like a burden. He was almost looking forward to it.

BART was its own relief. Beyond his headphones, the tunnel reduced the city noise into vibration as the train entered. Manageable nothingness. Cassiel breathed and turned up the volume. The East Bay opened up beyond the window.

He’d offered to meet May at Fremont Station—a reasonable offer, logistically sound, the same platform where they’d met before Chuseok—and May had declined. I’ll get there on my own!!!! Gotta return Miss Mary’s lidssss don’t worry about it !!! and a smiling emoji. No further information about how a man who lived in the Outer Richmond planned to reach Fremont on a Thursday afternoon. The Outer Richmond to Fremont was over an hour on a good day, BART transfer at minimum, possibly a bus on top of that, and May had a shift at Lau Kee before this.

The walk from the station to the house was fifteen minutes through residential streets that hadn’t changed since he’d walked them to middle school. The same pavement, the same overgrown jasmine on the Feeneys’ fence. Parkmont at dusk was sprinklers, someone’s TV through a screen door, a dog barking two blocks over, and crucially, no jets.

His parents’ house was ranch style, built in the 70s, paint updated twice in Cassiel’s memory and both times to a shade his mother selected from a fan deck in under thirty seconds, which he’d found agonizing. The bulkhead light on the porch was forever the wrong color temperature. 5000K, bluish, suited for morgues and horror movies. He’d bought his parents an incandescent lamp for it two Christmases ago. His father had installed it in the garage instead, where its wattage was too low to be of use to anyone.

Cassiel counted the shoes at the entryway as he approached. His father’s, his mother’s, and a pair of blue canvas shoes that had been placed at the end of the row. May was already here.

Cassiel heard the voice first from the kitchen window.

The kitchen smelled like pork, sesame oil, and scallion, and underneath that, the residue of rice flour that meant his mother had been prepping for hours. She stood at the counter in her apron, the one with the embroidered peonies that Minju had brought back from a Seoul trip. Her hair was clipped back and her hands were in a bowl of filling.

May stood beside her, his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a dish towel slung over one shoulder in an imitation of a chef. His hair was damp still. He’d gone home to shower, then, rushed from his shift and then rushed here, and made it faster than Cassiel.

“Minseok-ah, there you are,” his mother greeted in Korean. She looked up, smiling at him. Her hands continued working—pork, glass noodles, tofu, and vegetables cut fine enough that the ratio in each dumpling would be flawless. She’d been making mandu since before he was born.

“He’s been helping,” she said, approvingly.

May looked over his shoulder and winked.

“Hey. I’ve been promoted to filling station.”

“From what?” Cassiel asked.

“Observation deck. Auntie said I was hovering.”

On the counter beside the stove, three glass containers with locking lids sat in a neat, clean stack. The Safeway bag they’d arrived in was folded beside them. May caught him looking.

“Returned,” May said. He straightened, chin lifted imperiously. “Washed, inspected, ready for redeployment. Delivered in person to the source.”

His mother glanced at the containers and then at May and made a hm of satisfaction. She picked up the stack, opened the cabinet above the rice cooker, then placed them on the second shelf where the good containers lived. May watched with big eyes.

Cassiel stood in the kitchen doorway. Three people in the room and two of them were working and one of them was him, watching. This was not unusual. At Chuseok, the kitchen had been full. Minju, David in orbit, Jaewon underfoot. Tonight was smaller.

His mother took pity on him, tapping on the edge of a bowl on the counter. Wrapper dough.

“Sit,” she said. “Roll.”

He took the bowl, found the rolling pin in the drawer where it lived, then sat at the kitchen table and rolled.

The dough was the right consistency—elastic, smooth, not too sticky, yielding under the pin without cracking at the edges. His mother’s dough was always the right consistency.

At the counter, she was showing May the fold. She took a wrapper from the stack Cassiel was producing, placed a spoonful of filling off-center, and her fingers moved—pleat, crimp, seal—in a motion that took her three seconds. She set the finished mandu on the tray. It looked machined, as Kang Miyoung’s mandu always did.

“Here,” she said, placing a wrapper in May’s palm.

His first attempt was earnest. Cassiel brought the stack of wrappers to the counter and watched May’s hands. The filling went in, the fold went wrong, the pleat puckered instead of crimping, and the seal leaked at one corner. May held it up and turned it slowly, examining the damage.

“It’s leaking,” he said with a pout, and now Cassiel was watching his mouth, watching his bottom lip poke out, wanting to do something about it.

His mother’s voice disrupted the thought, which was just as well: “Too much inside.”

She was already correcting the next one, her hands on May’s hands, repositioning his thumb on the pleat the way she’d repositioned him on the songpyeon. “Not so much. And here, not here.”