Page 72 of The Way Back Home

At lunch I’m quiet. I sit on the school roof with my bento balanced on my knee, chopsticks idle, staring at the food. Jinwon and the others are talking around me about the soccer tournament next week, Haeil complaining about his math teacher. I tune it out, doing arithmetic in my head again, looking for a different answer.

Ryowoon drops beside me, his own lunch a convenience store triangle kimbap and a carton of chocolate milk. He eats half the kimbap in two bites, then turns his head and looks at me.

“What’s with you?”

I shake my head. “Nothing.”

I can feel his attention still trained on me. He takes a sip of his chocolate milk and waits.

I set my chopsticks down.

“There’s no way I can afford it.”

The others’ conversation continue a few feet away, oblivious. Ryowoon chews the last bite of his kimbap, swallows, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“How short?”

I tell him. The number sounds worse out loud than it did on paper. Ryowoon whistles low through his teeth and leans back on his palms, looking up at the sky.

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

We sit there as the breeze picks up, carrying the smell of salt and the distant clanking from the harbor. Ryowoon balls up his empty kimbap wrapper, tosses it into the air, catches it. Doesn’t offer solutions or platitudes.

That night I come home late from the store, bone-tired, my shoulders aching from restocking the back shelves. The house is dim and I expect it to be empty. My mom’s usually at the restaurant until nine or ten, sometimes later. But when I kick off my shoes in the entryway and pad into the kitchen the light above the table is on and she’s sitting there waiting.

She’s still in her work clothes, apron folded over the back of the chair beside her, but she’s scrubbed her hands clean and her hair is tucked behind her ears. The kitchen smells like sesame oil and garlic, a pot simmering on the stove. She looks at me when I come in and pats the chair across from her.

“Sit down. I want to show you something.”

I lower myself into the chair, frowning. She reaches beside her and slides something across the table toward me. A booklet, thin, the cover soft with age, a standard-issue bank ledger you get at a savings account window. It’s been well-handled, the edges worn fuzzy.

“Open it.”

I pick it up and flip to the first page. Rows of numbers in a neat grid, deposits logged by date, each one small. Tiny, really. Five thousand won here, ten thousand there, occasionally twenty. But they go on. Page after page, logged with consistency from someone who never missed a single month. I flip further. The dates start from before I was born and stretch forward, year after year, through the years I remember my parents scraping by, through the years my mom’s shoes wore through because she couldn’t afford new ones, through the summer we ate nothing but rice and radish because there was nothing else in the house. The deposits never stopped. Not once.

I turn to the last page. The balance printed at the bottom.

I blink hard, wipe my eyes with the heel of my hand, look again. It’s enough. More than enough. Tuition, dormitory, books, meals for four years.

“What is this?” I say hoarsely.

My mom folds her hands on the table. “Your father started it the month you were born.”

I stare at her.

“He opened the account at the bank in Yeonsan,” she continues. “Every paycheck, before anything else, he put a little aside. Sometimes it was only a few thousand won. When things were tight he put in less, but he always put in something. He told me it was for you. For school. So that when the time came, you could go wherever you wanted.”

My throat closes up. I hold the ledger with both hands, my fingers shaking. I flip back through the pages, seeing it now for what it is. Every deposit, a date. Some of them I can match to specific memories. This one, the month my dad worked double overtime and came home so tired he fell asleep at the dinner table. This one, the month my mom told him they couldn’t afford fish that week and he shrugged and said rice and soup was fine, rice and soup was plenty. This one. This one. Years of small sacrifices stretching back eighteen years, never once mentioned to me.

“If you had this,” I start, and I have to stop to swallow and try again. “If you had this, why didn’t you … Mom, after Dad died, we couldn’t pay the bills. You were working sixteen-hour days. We had nothing in the fridge half the time. Why didn’t you use it?”

She smiles tiredly. “Because your father left it for you. Not for me, not for the bills. For you.”

“But—”

“Seyeon.” She reaches across the table and takes my hand. Her fingers are calloused from years of kitchen work, scarred from hot oil and sharp knives. “I know it was hard. I know you went hungry some nights. I know you saw me come home exhausted and you worried. But I made a promise to your father that this money would go to you, and I kept it. We survived, didn’t we? We got through it.” She squeezes. “I always believed you’d get in. I just needed to make sure that when you did, nothing would stop you.”