Page 4 of The Way Back Home

We sit across from each other at the low table on the living room floor, the same one she’s probably had since before I left, its surface scratched and worn smooth in places from years of use. Steam curls up from the stew between us, the smell of soybean paste and green onion filling the small space.

She’s quiet as she ladles rice into my bowl, quieter than I remember her being, and I watch the way her hands move, careful but slower than they used to be. My mother’s tired but different then when she used to work over a stove for ten hours. This tiredness sits behind her eyes, weighs down the corners of her mouth. I remember her coming home from the restaurant when I was young, her clothes smelling of fermented paste and grease, her shoulders slumped, but there was always something underneath that exhaustion, some spark that kept her moving. Now she just looks worn thin, hollowed out.

“So,” she says finally, setting down the ladle and looking at me with an expression that’s trying so hard to be normal. “Tell me about your job. How are your students?”

I take the opening gladly, grateful for something easy to hold onto. “They’re a handful,” I say, picking up my chopsticks. “Last week one of them asked me if I was married because, and I quote, ‘you look really sad for someone your age.’”

That gets a laugh out of her, my lungs loosen slightly at the sound of it.

“Middle schoolers have no filter,” I continue, warming to the subject now that I’ve got her attention. “One kid told me my haircut looked like I lost a bet. Another asked if I dye my hair because I’m ‘trying to look younger than I am.’”

“Oh, stop.” She waves a hand at me, though she’s smiling now, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “They sound like little terrors.”

“They are. But they’re funny,” I admit, spearing a piece of radish. “There’s this one girl who insists on correcting my grammar in front of the whole class. In English. She’s convinced she knows better than me.”

“Does she?”

“Sometimes,” I say honestly, and she laughs harder, reaching over to pile another spoonful of rice into my bowl even though I haven’t finished the first serving yet. She keeps doing that throughout the meal, adding more before I’ve made a dent, like she’s trying to make up for every meal she couldn’t share with me over the years I’ve been gone.

“How’s Yuro?” she asks after a moment, and her face lighting up at the mention of my dog. She’s never met an animal she didn’t immediately fall in love with, though growing up we never could’ve afforded to keep one fed.

“He’s good. Getting fat, actually. The dog walker’s going to take him out a bit more this weekend while I’m out.”

“You should’ve brought him,” she says, a little wistful.

“I didn’t think I’d be staying long enough to justify it,” I admit. A look flickers across her face before she smiles again and changes the subject, filling the space with talk of the neighbors instead. Mrs. Yang’s stove broke again, apparently, for the third time this year, and she’s convinced the repairman is deliberately sabotaging it so he can keep charging her for visits. Old Mr. Han across the street got into another argument with her about the stray cats she’s been feeding by the gate, something about them getting into his garden, though my mother insists the man just likes having something to complain about.

“He’s been alone too long,” she says, shaking her head as she talks about him, without judgement, just a familiar fondness born from decades of being neighbors. “Grumpy old fool. I keep telling him those cats keep the mice away, but he won’t listen.”

I let the conversation distract me, comforted by the mundane hum of it, the deliberate way she steers us clear of anything that might lead toward tomorrow. Neither of us mentions the reading, the funeral that already happened without me, the reason I’m sitting here at all. It’s easier this way, I think. Easier to talk about broken stoves and stray cats than the hollow space Mrs. Nam left behind in the middle of both our lives.

By the time we finish eating, the light outside has faded into a soft indigo, and my mother stands to clear the dishes, waving off my offer to help.

“Go wash up,” she says, gentle but firm. “You need to leave early tomorrow. The reading’s at the provincial office, ten o’clock.”

I nod, throat tightening at the reminder, and murmur a goodnight before heading down the hall.

The spare room is dark when I close the door behind me, only the faint glow of a streetlamp slipping through the curtains. I lie down on top of the blankets, still in my clothes, staring at the ceiling as the sound of the harbor drifts in through the cracked open window, the gentle knock of hulls against the dock, the low creak of rope pulling taut. It’s a sound I grew up with, one that used to mean home without question.

Now it just makes my chest ache.

I close my eyes and let memory pull me under, thirty years of it pressing down on my sternum like a stone. I feel more alone here, in this house my mother built with money I sent but never visited, in this town that raised me, than I ever felt in the quiet of my apartment in Seoul.

The morning air is still chilly off the water, and I keep my jacket zipped as I make my way down the hill toward the provincial office, my shoes crunching over gravel and old leaves stuck to the sidewalk from last night’s wind. I’ve got twenty minutes to spare, plenty of time to make the walk without rushing, but my feet slow anyway when I reach the mouth of a narrow side street I haven’t set foot on in years.

I stop there, one hand braced against the corner of a low wall, staring down the length of it. The street doesn’t look like much, just a strip of cracked pavement between two rows of houses, some of them new, most of them the same faded pastel color they’ve always been. I chew on my bottom lip, debating with myself over something that shouldn’t require this much thought. I have time. I could just keep walking to the office and be done with it.

Instead, my feet carry me down the street, moving like they’re on autopilot. The way etched into bone and muscle.

The walk feels shorter than it used to, though I know that’s just because I’m not eight years old anymore, my legs not near as short as they were when I ran down this path barefoot in the summer. I pass three houses, then four, my chest tightening a little more with every step until I reach the end and stop in front of an empty lot.

There’s nothing here now. Just a patch of overgrown grass and weeds pushing up through cracked concrete, a rusted pipe sticking out of the ground where a gate used to stand. No walls, no roof, no gate with a name painted across it in faded characters. Just empty space where a house used to be, swallowed up by weeds and time.

I stand there for a long moment, feeling a kind of quiet settle over me, heavier than the morning air. My eyes trace the outline of a house that isn’t there anymore, but I can still see it clear as anything. The low concrete wall that used to wrap around the yard, the faded square where a doghouse used to sit. The blue gate that never quite closed all the way, no matter how many times someone tried to fix the hinge. The small dooryard where we used to sit on upturned buckets, eating popsicles from Mrs. Nam’s freezer, dripping down our wrists in the summer heat.

I can still see the doorway too, the frame a little crooked, paint peeling near the bottom where the wood had swelled from years of rain. I remember standing in it the last time, eighteen years old and furious, saying things to the man inside that I’ve never quite forgiven myself for, no matter how much he deserved every word.

Further back, other memories surface, unbidden, one after the other like photographs shuffled out of order. A six-year-old boy grinning at me from that same doorway, missing his front tooth, daring me to race him down to the harbor. Seven, sitting on the low wall with a comic book between us, arguing over who got to read first. Eight, hiding behind the gate from his father’s shouting, both of us too scared to breathe. Thirteen, gangly and awkward, sneaking out that same door after dark to meet me at the corner store. Sixteen, taller than me by then, with lean long limbs and a bad haircut, laughing so hard at something I said that he nearly fell off the wall. Eighteen, standing in the doorway one final time, the hollow look in his eyes that still haunts me some nights.