Page 28 of Angel of Thursdays

“Like this?” May squeezed.

“More hard,” she said.

May pinched hard. She inspected it, rotated it once, and set it on the tray with a happy nod.

“Congratulations,” Cassiel said, still standing there, because he hadn’t wanted to sit back down. Then May turned his grin to him, a smudge of flour on his nose, and bumped Cassiel’s shoulder in celebration.

“Wow, that almost sounded genuine,” May said. “We should take a group selfie to mark the tremendous occasion. Or is it ‘selca’? Is that what the kids are saying?”

His mother’s mouth curved. She didn’t look up from the next wrapper. “He talks a lot,” she said in Korean.

“Yes.”

“I like it.”

He almost said I do too, but caught himself.

Cassiel watched May’s hands work the next mandu. The scar on the back of his left hand caught the kitchen light.

“Did you know, Minseok moved to Seattle?” His mother had switched to English. A tiny shake of the head. “So lonely.”

“But he’s back now and not lonely at all,” May replied brightly.

Cassiel moved back to the table and resumed his work on the wrappers. Thinner at the edges, the way his mother preferred.

His father appeared in the kitchen with a glass of water and stood at the far end of the counter, drinking it slowly. Lim Sungho in the kitchen was Lim Sungho in observation mode; he did not cook, he did not help, and he was not expected to. His role was not to cause problems and he was a master. He finished the water, set the glass in the sink, and looked at the tray of mandu.

“Looking good,” he said, to no one in particular, and then to May, “You watch football?”

May’s head came up. “Niners?”

His father’s eyebrows rose a fraction of a degree. Cassiel had specifically told May not to bring up the Niners.

“I—yeah.” May was now navigating a minefield he’d been warned about. Any distress was not a result of Cassiel’s lack of diligence. “It’s been a… they’re having a season.”

His father regarded May.

“You don’t follow football,” came the conclusion.

“I’ve got a jersey?” May’s grin was sheepish. “Couldn’t tell you the quarterback’s name. Oh, my brother once almost got to take a picture with Sourdough Sam but they picked a sadder-looking kid.”

His father nodded. This was apparently sufficient. He tilted his head towards the living room. “Pregame is on.”

“Why are you stealing my assistant to watch TV?” his mother groused to her husband.

“Minseok is here,” his father said.

“I am still here,” Cassiel confirmed.

May glanced at Cassiel, a quick check, eyebrows raised, as if asking an autistic man for advice on social cues was a logical course of action. Cassiel returned the expression. They were all communicating through eyebrows tonight. May shrugged and followed Cassiel’s father out of the kitchen.

“Bring those to me,” said his mother. She gestured at the stack Cassiel was working on. “Go supervise—Appa might scare him away by boring him to death.”

So Cassiel supervised from the doorway. His father stood beside his chair, and May stood beside him, hands in his pockets and the pregame playing at the volume both Cassiel and his father preferred. The analysts on screen discussed something about the defensive line. May nodded along at one point, which was generous given that he almost certainly couldn’t tell a defensive line from a hedge.

His father said nothing. May, who liked to fill silences, said nothing.

Most people couldn’t sit with his father’s quiet. They would rush to fill it or take it as absence. May had been in this house twice and now stood in front of a television watching something he didn’t understand, next to someone who hadn’t asked him to do so, and neither person seemed to need anything else.