I open the orange notebook, the one from senior year. June was long away at Columbia by then. Here the rules apply only to me. I’d gotten into bullet journaling by then, and beside each handwritten date is another number. My weight. Most days feature a string of numbers, the entries crossed out and rewritten over and over. My weight after peeing. Before and after the gym. Before and after drinking water, eating two inches of a six-inch subway sandwich, a bag of Baked Lay’s, not eating at all. I remember how it felt, pushing the surface of the digital scale with my toe, stepping on with my eyes closed, praying for a miracle.
I climb onto the edge of the tub and screw the vent back into place.
I stow the diaries in my bag. As well as the cigarettes.
I’m awake now and I need something. A diversion. I pad downstairs, phone in hand. Avoiding the creaky parts of the steps.
The family pie’s sitting on the table. They’d all had a slice, but I hadn’t. I pop open the lid, muscles clenched so as not to make a sound. I lick my finger to catch a crumb and dissolve it in my mouth. Then I break off a piece of crust. It melts on my palate. The doughy butteriness floods my senses. I open the dishwasher, again tensing to dampen the noise, and reach for a fork, but since there are none, I grab a pair of chopsticks. I poke into the pie, in a dotted line, perforating a small slice for extraction, and eat it standing in four bites. I brush the crumbs off my house dress, close the lid, and toss the chopsticks into the sink.
Guided by my phone flashlight, I walk over to the enormous lacquered armoire next to the looming black television and open its doors. A silk butterfly charm dangles off the rounded knobs. Inside are our photo albums. There’s one for each of us. All our photos used to be kept in paper envelopes from the drugstore until I organized them in color-coordinated albums. I grab my favorite. The red one. The one assigned to June. As I open it, a page falls to the floor, separated from its glued binding. She was always the cutest kid. Sweet, expressive eyes, always in the middle of something. There are three photos to a page, and in the center one she’s about four, cross-legged on the floor, looking up at her porcelain clown doll, the one that she broke, propped up on a chair. I slot the page back in and put it away.
The fridge rumbles. I look back into the kitchen. That slice of pie was way too small. I’m aching for a proper slice now that I’ve broken the seal. I get up. This time I get a butter knife and cut a good-size wedge. It’s a calorie bomb, but I want it. I deserve it. I came home and I’m owed. I slide it onto a paper towel and then, using my hands, I mash all the stray crumbs together to make one giant crumb and eat it. They’re mine.
I hear myself sigh.
Body humming with sugar and fat, I help myself to a glass of water and peer at the pie box again. Dread creeps along the ridge of my shoulders. There’s only a third left.
I google “twenty-four-hour H-E-Bs.” There’s one an eighteen-minute Uber ride away.
A plan forms. I need to finish this pie and buy a fresh one. I must eat three slices out of the new one to cover my tracks.
“Hi, Jayne Baek.”
I whip around. It’s Dad. With his own iPhone flashlight shining into my face.
“Oh.” Even in the swampy heat of the house, he’s wearing a cardigan. I brush crumbs off my T-shirt. He shines his phone at the open armoire. “Why are you up?” I ask him, clearing my throat. I’m struck by how small he looks in the dark. How angry and foreboding he seemed when we were young. I watch as he opens a low kitchen cabinet to pull out a large mason jar. In it is a pale-brown sludge.
“I have to feed the mother,” he says, shining the light under his face as if he’s telling a ghost story around a campfire. For a moment it’s as if Mom’s power lies in this jar of muck under the sink.
He pours liquid from another jar into the murky vessel and returns it to its hiding place. “It’s my SCOBY. For kombucha.”
Another large glass jar comes out, this time from the fridge. This one with a wide mouth. “Sourdough starter for bread,” he says, spinning off the lid. “I have to keep my family alive.”
He smells it and then holds it up to my nose.
It’s inviting. Warm, not quite bready but beery.
“It’s gluten-free,” he says.
“You’ve always been into this stuff since way before anyone else,” I tell him. I remember all his failed businesses. How the magnets and crystals and jade face rollers were so prescient for him to sell. How it had all been too early. How Texas had been all wrong. My father was the first person I knew who’d tried to import sheet masks from Korea. This was before every Korean product purveyor practically minted money. Before the Danny Songs of the world were on the covers of Vanity Fair. Before random non-Koreans at work would ask me which K-dramas I watched and then instruct me on the ones I should be watching.
“How are you?”
“Good,” I tell him, nodding to make it convincing. “Fine.”
He smiles gently. “It’s been so long since you’ve been back,” he says. “I think I saw more of my parents when I served in the military.”
“I know,” I tell him. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for,” he says. “How are you and June getting along?”
“Okay, I guess.” He chuckles, stirring the fluffy, shaggy dough and then lifting some of it out with a wooden spoon and putting it into a Ziploc bag.
“Where’s he going?”
“I have to separate this little guy for the good of the rest of the family.” He places it into the freezer. “Thank you,” he says to it, and then shuts the drawer. “We can’t keep feeding everyone, so he goes into suspended animation.”
“Tough break.”
He pours some flour into the rest of the jar. “It’s a pretty heroic role, if you think about it.” He mixes with the handle end of his wooden spoon.
“It’s good that you and June are together in New York,” he continues. “Life’s too hard over there to do it by yourself.”
He adds water to his mix.
“Even if being together feels just as hard sometimes,” he says. “Family’s like that.” He stirs for a while and then screws the lid back on. “But they’re the ones who will help when no one else will.”
He stoops down to return his jar to the lower cupboard, closing it softly. The other back into the fridge. “It’s when you really don’t want to ask for help that you might need it the most.”
He pats my shoulder.
I remember when Mom was gone. How sad he was. And how mellowed he seemed after.
“Put everything back exactly as you found it,” he says, swinging his light to the open armoire.
“I will.”
“Because she’ll know.” He shakes his light in my face, chuckling.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Good night, my daughter.”
“Good night, my dad.”
chapter 31
“You get in line,” she says to me the next morning, shoving the shopping cart toward the register. Mom’s a genius when it comes to tricking us into manual labor. June wanted Mom to take her to the Korean store to get snacks, and I’m a sucker, so I tagged along. There are about four people ahead of us in line. I used to hate this as a kid. Having to awkwardly let people go ahead when my mother invariably vanished at the crucial moment. “You, see if you can find some glutinous rice flour.” She directs June down another aisle. “The good kind. If they have the Vietnamese variety, even better. It has an elephant on it. Also, grab a fish sauce, the one with the three crabs on the label, not the one with the fish.”