I was speechless, and then a thought occurred to me. “Do you think the parents told him to check up on you? I deal with parents all the time, and they worry—”
“I doubt it. They talk to the kids every day,” she said.
“What if you changed the code? You know all that tech stuff. You could figure it out.”
“It’s not my house, I wouldn’t do that. There could be a real emergency.”
The tingling in my hands increased. I rubbed my free hand on my shirt. The bathroom floor seemed to tilt. I focused on a single corner of a black tile in the diamond pattern. “Have you told Harabeoji about him?” I asked. Thinking of my grandfather often helped me. At eighty-eight years old, he was younger in spirit than my parents and didn’t make me doubt myself. The sensation in my palms dissipated. The bathroom came back into balance.
“I’ve been meaning to call him. Dad’s in rehab again, so Harabeoji’s alone.”
The phone line went silent, so I wondered if we’d gotten disconnected. “Channing? Are you—” I said.
I heard muffled voices before she returned to the phone. “I have to go. He’s here again.”
“Who’s there?”
“Kent Cho, the guy I’ve been talking about.”
“Do you think he could be dangerous? I can be there in four hours if I leave right now,” I said.
“No, no, it’s fine. It’s more annoying than anything.” There was another pause. “Maybe you’re right. Just to be safe.”
“I’m calling Harabeoji. We’ll come for a few days. If I leave in the morning—” I began.
“I have to go,” she repeated. “Dahee, thank you. You have my location, right?”
I checked my phone and told her I did. Besides attending a few non-essential meetings and setting up my classroom, I had nothing urgent on my to-do list before my teaching job started in September.
A calm settled over me, then I felt a flicker of excitement. I’d always idealized East End. Unlike my nomadic parents, who moved every few years, Channing’s family had settled in this town with a large Korean community and put down roots. Her father was my dad’s older brother, so they’d arrived in the United States first and then helped us when we came. Channing had lived in East End until eleventh grade when she’d been forced to move to Boston. Now she was back after fourteen years for this temporary job. If I had a home base anywhere, it was this place.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be there soon,” I told her.
Chapter 2
I loved leaving the city. My plan was to drive to Boston to pick up my grandfather and then go together to help Channing in East End. Whenever I mentioned the name of this town to friends, they assumed I meant a region in Long Island, so I had to explain that it was located in New England, about eighty miles south of Boston.
“Never heard of it,” they’d say, as if they doubted it existed.
Maneuvering around the heavy traffic that encircled Manhattan didn’t faze me. Fridays were particularly brutal, but I was ready. I’d driven this route many times. I went so often that the principal at the school where I worked asked me why I didn’t live there. The truth was I couldn’t tell her I was afraid to try. I’d gone to college and graduate school in New York, and one of my professors had recommended me to the principal I worked for now. It was important for me to be certain, to keep risks low and have a steady income.
Channing was the opposite. She didn’t want to be tied down to a job and other people’s rules. I didn’t understand what she did exactly—she was a programmer—but apparently, she was good. Really good. She’d had job offers from Google and SpaceX and other companies, but she preferred to work for equity in friends’ startups, which rarely became successful. She believed in their ideas and wanted to support them rather than be a cog in the wheel of commerce. The problem was she still needed tomake money somehow. Her father’s health care was costly, and he couldn’t work anymore. They’d sold everything they’d owned over the years. Even with my parents pitching in each month, Channing was paying more and more for his care and falling behind on bills.
It was mid-afternoon when I turned onto my grandfather’s street. There had been more construction on the highway than usual. He rented the third-floor apartment with my uncle Albert, Channing’s father, so Harabeoji had planted flowers and a small vegetable garden in large clay pots out front. Greens and purples and pinks burst from containers, bordering the facade of the clapboard house. Everywhere he lived benefited from his ability to grow a bounty of food and beauty.
It might seem odd that Channing and I were the ones who looked after our grandfather. Some of it was just practical: My parents moved to Vancouver, Canada, after I went to college and were wrapped up in their import/export business, and Channing’s father was unmoored after his wife died. I heard my parents say he’d lost an astronomical sum of money for investors in a real estate development project and eventually was forced to leave East End. He couldn’t hold down a job after that, constantly going in and out of treatment for alcohol use. My grandfather took care of him and Channing. As Channing and I got older, we tried to take care of our grandfather as best we could.
Harabeoji was special to me. He always said the words I needed to hear. It was never a burden to be with him. I enjoyed his company and worried about him, hoping he was comfortable.
Now, as I neared his apartment, I saw him before he noticed me. I stopped the car a short distance from the driveway and tried to memorize his appearance. He was bent slightly, sweeping debris from the sidewalk witha long common broom. His small navy-blue duffel bag, bearing the round logo of a company Channing had worked at for a couple of months, sat in the walkway with a stocky brown paper bag propped up beside it.
He was six feet tall with jet-black wavy hair that he put some sort of oil into to sweep off his forehead; it made him look like an old-time movie star. He was wearing his tan cotton twill jacket with a two-button strap collar that he’d owned for as long as I could remember. Channing said it was from the 1970s in Korea. Below that, I saw his usual crisply pressed short-sleeve button-down shirt. This one was in that plaid print with pinks and oranges and greens. He ironed his clothes without fail and took such good care of them that he never had to replace them. Below his sharply creased khaki pants, he wore brown leather dockside shoes I’d bought him last Christmas.
He’d made me take a penny for them, so he purchased them from me rather than accepted them as a gift. He said that if you give shoes to someone as a present, then it will allow them to walk out of your life. I told him my parents had bought me my shoes, so did they want me to leave them? He said that was different. So, I pocketed the penny. And I was just glad he liked the shoes enough to wear them.
He was most comfortable tending to his garden and fishing, telling stories about the farm on which he’d grown up. He attributed his knowledge of plants, cooking, weaving, and knitting to his grandmother who raised him. It was as if Channing and I knew her through him. Everything they needed to live, he said, they grew on the farm. What they ate and drank, the clothes they wore. Everything. His description of it felt cozy and reliable.
When I pulled the car back on the road, he lifted his head in my direction, and I saw that he had spotted me. He raised his hand high, and I felt an immense feeling of relief. It was always the same, and I knew it had to do with how safe he made me feel, as if each time he was pulling me up out of that deep hollow in my yard I fell into once when I was a child.
