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  The second Kevin took off his shoes, she grabbed his arm and pulled him through the foyer. “I cook morning, I cook afternoon, I cook! Fifteen minute, you eat, okay?”

  “Okay!” Kevin said.

  And with that she was gone. At the threshold of the living room, Kevin leaned against the wall and observed his father. After seven years of peritoneal dialysis, the process had lost its effectiveness. His father felt tired all the time now, spending most of his life on the La-Z-Boy, dozing in front of the television. Because his circulation had gone south, his hands and feet were always cold; even during last month’s scorching summer heat, his father wore mittens and furry slippers at home. And lately he had trouble walking, his ankles turning a bruised shade of blue all by themselves, the bottoms of his feet too tender to properly support his weight. Every time Kevin saw his father, he was reminded of the easy frailty of the human body, how it could all fall apart. It wasn’t that long ago that he would walk to Trader Joe’s two miles away, come back with a shopping bag in each hand.

  Even though he was in pain most of the time, his father never complained. He had always been a man of few words, and continuous suffering hadn’t changed that. Kevin knew of his father’s difficulties only through visual cues, noticing the way he’d favor one leg over the other, or how he’d sit gingerly on the couch, usually meaning his hemorrhoids had flared up again. In the communications department, his father was no different than Snaps, Kevin’s German shepherd; they both conveyed their feelings and needs through physical hints and gestures.

  His father was sitting in front of the fireplace in his armchair, underneath the gaggle of framed photographs on top of the mantel, his eyes closed. The pictures were organized chronologically from left to right, starting with baby pictures of Kevin and Judy and ending with an eight-by-ten of the family at Christmas three years ago, when everyone had been there, Alice at Kevin’s side and Brian at Judy’s, their parents in the middle. It’d been taken in this very room, during Judy’s photography phase. She’d set up the tripod and clicked on the delayed shutter on the camera and ran back to her position beside Brian, smiling and breathing hard. The whistling sound between her teeth made everyone laugh.

  Now both children were alone, and Kevin wondered if his father felt responsible for their failures at couplehood. Probably not, because it wasn’t something his father would even think about. He was not someone who dwelled on the past, except now, he was going to have to, because there were questions that needed to be answered.

  “Dad?” Kevin asked.

  His father’s eyelids fluttered. “Hello, son.”

  Kevin pulled up the matching recliner and sat at the edge of the seat. On the drive over, he’d thought about this very moment, the words he was going to say. He told himself that he needed to keep calm, but now that he sat in front of his father, what he felt more than anything else was sadness for his loss. He still hadn’t recovered from losing his mother last year, and now he felt like an orphan.

  “I got tested last week,” Kevin said. “For compatibility.”

  His father shook his head. With his mother, who had worked as a translator in Princeton University’s East Asian Studies, he’d always been picking up new words, improving his English, but now that he was living with Soo, his vocabulary was sliding backward. Kevin pointed to his kidneys and added a few words of Korean he sort of knew to get his dad to understand, and it was very obvious when he did because the anger in his voice was unmistakable.

  “No,” he said. “No, why? Why you do that? I say no, you stop.”

  There was fear behind his words. Maybe that’s why he’d been so against Kevin getting tested, for fear of the truth coming out. Kevin turned away to compose himself. The last thing he wanted to do was yell, but that’s where this was heading.

  “Your kidney, your kidney,” his father said. “You young, you need two. I am old man. I get old man kidney, dead man kidney.”

  Kevin had to say it, just blurt it out.

  “Who is my real father? Jin-cha ah-pa?”

  Kevin had looked up the words in his Korean dictionary, to make sure he was being clear. A number of emotions vied for space on his father’s face: surprise, dismay, disgrace, rage. But the one that won out in the end was nothing at all.

  “Me,” his father said. “Jin-cha.”

  “Dad,” he said. “Come on.”

  “I grow you,” he said quietly. “I grow you, I your father.”

  “Dinner!” Soo said, startling both of the men. “Sorry, sorry. Dinner.”

  To say Soo had gone all out was an understatement of an understatement. Kevin felt as if he’d stepped into a restaurant; little bowls of colorful Korean hors d’oeuvres (kimchi red, spinach green, fish cake beige) surrounded a trio of main dishes: a serious stack of scallion-oyster pancakes, a heaping pile of beef short ribs, and a still-bubbling red miso tofu soup in a stone bowl.

  “Dig in!” Soo said.

  Kevin did as he was told, using his chopsticks to pick up a few strips of soy-marinated eggplant, and although he wanted to continue to question his father, the food was a welcome distraction. He didn’t think he was hungry, but once he started eating, he couldn’t stop. Everything was so delectable, even stuff he usually didn’t care for, like the dried anchovies, which were lightly sautéed in sesame oil and crunchy and salty like tiny slivers of potato chips. With a dab of rice, the combination was heaven.

  “Mah-shee-suh-yo,” he told Soo, a Korean phrase he knew by heart: It’s delicious. He’d said it often to his own mother, and she’d reply to his Korean with her own, “Gahm-sah-hahm-nee-dah,” thank you.

  “More, more!” Soo said, spearing the longest short rib with her chopsticks and dropping it on his plate.

  Kevin glanced at his father, on the opposite side of the dining table, who sat in front of a kid-size rice bowl. Before he got sick, his father would take enormous, mouth-filling bites, a messy diner who took to piling small stacks of devoured ribs around his plate.

  His father said something in Korean to Soo, and a rapid-fire exchange took place. Kevin caught the words jin-cha ah-pa, but that was all, and in the end, Soo looked at Kevin with understanding eyes. “Ah-eeh-goo,” she said, another familiar Korean phrase: Too bad. And there was no surprise whatsoever in her demeanor, meaning she’d already known about this.

  Kevin put his chopsticks down.

  “I want his name,” he said.

  His father ignored him.

  Kevin slammed his fist against the table, and the little dishes rattled like discordant chimes. Soo drew in her breath.

  “Sorry,” he told her. “I’m sorry.” But he wasn’t, the harshness in his voice betraying his words. Even when Alice left, there had been no screaming, just quiet melancholy. In his youth, Kevin had a terrible temper and would gladly display it, especially on the tennis court, carrying three racquets with him to every match because there was a good chance that he would break at least one against the hard court. He would eventually learn to control his anger and channel it to his game, but this was no game.

  Soo uttered another few words in Korean, and now it was his father’s turn to slam his fist down on the table. But Soo, expecting this one, wasn’t fazed, and she rose.

  “Ahn-juh!” his father yelled, commanding her to sit, but she was already gone.

  For a moment their eyes met, and Kevin realized anger was more than just an emotion. It was also an unfortunate heirloom, a darkness passed down from parent to child, and Kevin flashed back to those nights when his father returned from his job as a railway mechanic, his fingernails grimed with grease and dirt, walking straight from the front door to the den without a word to anyone. He drank his scotch in that room, alone, not enough to brand him an obvious alcoholic but enough to methodically destroy his health. In Korea, he’d been a train engineer, driving a thirty-car freight that ran seven daily round trips between Seoul and Incheon, until two people stepped onto the tracks of his train.

  His mother hadn’t wa
nted to tell Kevin, but eventually she did, when he was old enough. His father had yanked on his horn and flashed his lights, over and over again, but the figures did not move. The impact wouldn’t even be felt by him, no different than a bug splattering on the windshield of a car. Mother and daughter. That’s what he saw as he drove toward them, the mother wrapped in a black shawl, the child in a red dress, couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, barely tall enough to come up to the middle of her mother’s thighs.

  His fellow engineers told him that these things happened, it was a part of the job, but Kevin’s father never recovered. The police told him the woman was insane, her daughter an unfortunate victim. His father had nightmares for months, probably still had them even now.

  Soo returned with a manila envelope in one hand and a Korean-to-English dictionary in the other. She held out the envelope for Kevin.

  “Chaang-nyuh,” his father muttered.

  Chaang-nyuh? That sounded like it could be a name. Inside was a letter-size piece of paper. It was glossy stock, and at one point it must’ve been white, but now it was yellowed with age. It was blank on both sides, and as Kevin fingered it, he noticed it was actually two sheets stuck together. At the bottom was a date, 3-14-1973.

  “Is that his name? Chaang-nyuh?” Kevin asked as he peeled the sheets away from one another.

  Soo shook her head and flipped the Korean dictionary to look for the word so she could show him its meaning.

  They were actually three sheets connected to display one long pictorial. The first crease was below her naked breasts, and the second crease was above the shock of black pubic hair. It was a centerfold of an Asian woman.

  The black and white pages of the Korean-American dictionary slowly invaded the field of Kevin’s vision. Soo’s fingers pointed to the entry, a noun, with two possibilities: whore and prostitute.

  “Jin-cha um-ma,” his father said.

  “Okay,” Kevin said, though this was not okay. It was not okay that no one told him his father wasn’t his father, and it was furthermore not okay that his birth mother was staring back at him without any clothes on.

  Soo tapped the back of the centerfold, her finger poking the belly button. Kevin turned it around and recognized his mother’s handwriting on a piece of tacked-on white paper. The old brown tape around the note fell away when he touched it.

  Dear Kevin,

  You’re right here, sleeping on my lap, as I write this. It’s the night of your dol, your first birthday. In Korea, rice cakes are devoured, gifts are lavished, and many cups of soju are drunk in your honor. None of those things happened today because we’re in America, so your father and I held our own small celebration instead. Our neighbor lent us his Polaroid, so years from now, you’ll see yourself on this day as I saw you.

  Except a picture cannot tell the entire story. Looking at this centerfold in front of me, all I know is what I see. I don’t know who she is, her name, her situation. This woman is your mother, Kevin. I’m sorry that it’s not me. It is one of the greatest sorrows of my life.

  I’m not able to have children of my own, which I found out about a week before I found out about you. A friend of a friend knew an ER nurse out west, and that’s where she saw you. She knew how to make it happen for us. So I got you and brought you home. We were so unhappy, your father and I, and then you came and we were a family and it was as if a thousand anvils had lifted off our chests. We love you so much, every tiny centimeter of you.

  Were we being smart about this? Of course not. We could’ve waited like normal people, gone through the proper channels, but this felt right to us. It felt like destiny, and all it took was a small chunk of our savings. You were worth the risk, Kevin. I’d do it all over again.

  This is not an easy

  Kevin turned the sheet, but there was nothing more. He showed the letter to his father.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Your mother do all. I do nothing.”

  “She says here that she couldn’t get pregnant.” Kevin again went through gestures until his father understood.

  “Doctor wrong and stupid. Judy, Miracle Baby, your mother say.”

  Kevin placed the letter behind the centerfold, as his mother must have done almost forty years ago before she slipped them into an envelope and sealed it. What had she been feeling at that moment? He wished he knew. He wished she were here, so he could ask.

  7

  What if he didn’t show? What if he’d changed his mind? It wouldn’t have been the first time Judy was stood up. It wouldn’t have even been the tenth.

  Just stay calm, she said to herself. Just fucking calm down, okay?

  This was the reason why she didn’t date anymore, why she’d given up this part of her life. It was hard. It was hard to put on mascara, hard to wear heels that jammed her toes, hard to sit here by herself in this restaurant, to wait for her man.

  She took another sip of water. The waiter, lurking at his station in the back of the room, met her eyes and smiled, but when the smile wasn’t returned, when the smile, in fact, was answered with venom, the waiter dropped his gaze and slunk away through the flapping double doors of the kitchen.

  Great. Can’t wait to taste all that spit in my food.

  She stared at the only thing she could stare at without repercussion, the mural on the wall adjacent to her table, a scene of what she assumed was some place in Italy. She’d come to Gaetano’s many times, but she had never had the occasion to study its mural this closely. The waves of the sea were three shades of blue, and where the color was the lightest, the beige stucco poked through.

  This was the way it was, wasn’t it? With everything. With everyone. From afar, people and things looked solid, but upon closer examination, faults revealed themselves. A perfect example of this was her own life. From afar, someone might consider her a brave soul who defied society’s preconceptions and lived life on her own terms. A person of courage who didn’t tie herself down to a meaningless career and was willing to sacrifice financial security for the pursuit of . . . of what, exactly? What was it that she was so passionate about that required her to give up so much?

  “Are you doing okay, miss? Anything you need?”

  Her mousy waiter had been replaced by a girl in a ponytail with a smile so wide it had to hurt her jaws. Had Judy been waiting so long that the first waiter’s shift ended? She glanced at her wrist, but she wasn’t wearing her watch. The frayed leather strap was one small yank away from ripping apart, so in an effort to appear as beautiful as possible, she’d dispensed with the need to tell time.

  “Yes,” Judy told the girl, “I’m doing fine.”

  “You’re waiting for your party to arrive.”

  No. I just like to come to a restaurant and not eat.

  The girl returned a moment later, but not for her. She delivered desserts for the table next to Judy’s, tiramisu for the man and a fruit cup in a martini glass for the woman. This couple had ordered their meal at the same time Judy had been seated. She’d promised herself that if Roger did not show by the time they finished their meal, she’d leave.

  Unfortunately for her, they took their time with their final course. The man sipped his coffee, the woman stirred her tea, and after eating half of their respective desserts, they switched plates to share in their gastronomical delights. Even though the restaurant was almost full, Judy caught enough of their conversation to know that they were husband and wife and that tonight was their anniversary, but there was something else there, an edge she felt as the man clinked his spoon against the martini glass in an attempt to extract the last piece of fruit.

  This was where her imagination was supposed to supplant reality. In her last screenwriting class she took at the community college, her instructor, a man who always seemed as though he was on the verge of saying something important (but never did), stressed the importance of extending the limits of reality into the realm of fiction. He’d told the class that stories existed everywhere, but only portions, just
the roots. It was up to the artist to nurture and grow these buds into flowers of creativity.

  As exciting as it had sounded, when Judy thought about it later, his advice was no different than the songs crooned by other cut-rate teachers she’d taken over the years—Mary Jane the sculptor who baked oblong vases in her barn, Vladimir the photographer with his fetish for orchids, Yuri the poet who forced everyone to write in rhymes. Even in these sad little classes, there were people more talented than she was, or if not talented, just more driven. It was obvious in the ways they talked, the ways they held themselves, their voices high and strong, making Judy wish she’d stayed home.

  Home. That’s where she would be going, because the couple was done. The man signed the credit card bill, and they rose, and Judy’s evening was thankfully over.

  But here was Roger, hurrying toward her, not even letting her have this crumb of satisfaction.

  “My car,” he said. “It wouldn’t start, AAA took forever, and I kept getting your voice mail?”

  She’d forgotten that she’d silenced her cell earlier in the day to avoid the wrath of Beverly, the woman at the temp agency who’d been ringing her phone on the hour, as robotic and as inescapable as the Terminator. Judy knew all Beverly wanted to do was let Judy have it, tell her what a fuckup she was for walking away from her job. Scanning the call history, Judy felt stupider than ever.

  As soon as Roger sat down, the waitress with the unstoppable smile pounced on him to offer him a drink. “A beer, please,” he said, and he asked Judy if she wanted anything.

  What she wanted to say was that she’d like to leave, but instead she ordered a martini.

  “Have you seen our special drinks menu? Our choco-tinis are really yummy. You also can’t go wrong with the key-lime-pie-tini.”

  Even an hour and a half ago, she would’ve found this girl tiresome, but now, after the shitstorm of self-doubt and self-hatred she’d endured, Judy tapped into a malignant growth of negative energy, the sort of dark force that would’ve made Darth Vader proud. She felt herself enlarging, strengthening, ready to tell this goddamn moron of a waitress what she needed to hear.