I smile sadly, cheeks pinching up against his skin. “Okay, then. Tell me stories however you want.”
“What if I want to go chronologically?”
“Now who’s being difficult.”
“Still you, Simba.” He nestles his head deeper into the pillow. “Anyway, here’s a story about the first sweet potato I ever ate from a street vendor and how it made me into the man I am today.”
He paints me a picture of his childhood: waddling barefoot through a wood-floored apartment, toy in one hand, green crayon in the other. His mother, always at her desk, hair in a bun, a steaming cup of tea on the coaster, writing pieces for whoever wanted them about a single Korean American woman who grew up in Queens and saw South Korea for the first time at age twenty-eight.
“Did you ever get to read anything she wrote?” I ask.
“A few pieces my aunt hung on to before we moved to Seoul. The rest are probably recycled coffee filters by now.”
Alex describes their upper-middle-class lifestyle, supplied by a father he only ever saw in sporadic bursts. He tells me he remembers his parents smiling at each other, but sometimes fighting, too. He never knew what any of it was about. What he knew was he and his mom spoke English at home and Korean in public, and he loved baked sweet potatoes so much, it became the only way his mother could console him if he was the slightest bit ornery.
Her name was Charlotte.
Alex tells me about the Korea International School where he went for elementary. How he hates to think about it because it’s tainted with all the sting of his mom getting ill, of her dying. But Charlotte Yoon never let Alex see her at her sickest. She never prepared him to expect a world without her, and it still makes him angry to this day.
He tells me about her funeral in Queens. His aunt, cousins, a grandfather who isn’t alive anymore, and strangers whose faces he never raised his eyes far enough to see. For years after that, he felt guilty every time he loved his aunt’s cooking because his mother’s had always tasted like ash.
I hear about the moment Alex got back to the States. He was at the airport being shepherded by a flight attendant when his father appeared before him just like he’d done a dozen times before, and said this:
“‘I can’t be the type of parent she was,’” Alex repeats for me, his eyes glazed with memory. “‘But I swear I will never turn my back on you.’” He shifts beneath me. “And he lived up to it.”
There are stories about boarding school. Pulling back from speaking Korean. Figuring things out about money, how much of the stuff Alex had tangential access to. Researching his father on the internet. Staring at a picture of his wife, blond and white and prim faced, and feeling confused, even disoriented, and kind of angry for her in a way that surprised him.
He tells me about his first kiss at Choate with a student who was two years older than him.
“Were you popular?” I ask.
“There were hardly enough students to know.”
“So, unpopular.”
Beneath me, he scoffs. “Adriana in the eleventh grade certainly didn’t think so.”
At some point, I nod off, lulled into the bright black nothingness of slumber between Alex’s recounting of a heated classroom debate on Maine versus Connecticut lobster rolls and subsequent memories of his freshman year at Harvard. His voice bleeds into my dreams, and I’m on a plane to London, but he’s there, too. I whine because my acoustic guitar doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment. Alex laughs and tells me to buy the guitar its own ticket.
When I wake up, I’m tucked under my covers, head on a pillow, and Alex is gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
On the day before Thanksgiving, the blocks closest to Grand Central Station are more claustrophobic than a Bassnectar concert. I’m holding a bouquet of roses. Miriam’s got a fir-scented candle and some peppermint chocolate in a shopping bag—welcome gifts for my parents to make their midtown hotel a little homier, since they seemed disappointed when I told them staying at our place was logistically out of the question.
My phone is empty of new messages from Jerry or Dad. I frown, feeling like an anxious parent picking my child up from summer camp. I try to track them on Find My Friends but give up once their contacts start jumping around.
“Remind me why we’re meeting your folks at Grand Central?” Miriam asks me.
“They wanted to arrive in the city like people do in movies. Which is absurd, because they traveled by plane and took an Uber here from LaGuardia.”
She snorts. “That’s adorable.”
“Get this.” I throw her a grin. “At first, they assumed I was picking them up from the airport. The airport, as in, they didn’t even know which one until they double-checked their flight itinerary.”
Miriam cackles, doubling over and clutching her stomach. “Didn’t you sell your car before you moved here?”
“Yep,” I confirm, popping my consonant for emphasis. “I had to shoot their plan down on account of the fact that hell will freeze over before I take a one-hundred-dollar Uber just to meet someone at baggage claim. Walking to their hotel from here was their next suggestion.”
Miriam shakes her head. “The drama.”
“Gotta love ’em.”
“You realize your dad’s going to write a country song about New York City.”
I groan. She’s right. Holding my hands up in prayer, I mutter, “Lord, have mercy on the country music industry. Preserve the sanctity of its lyrics about dirt roads and summer nights and cold beers in the truck bed of a Chevy. This might sound sarcastic, heavenly father, but I couldn’t be more sincere. Don’t let Marty Maitland ruin a good thing.”
“Amen!” Miriam shouts, pumping a fist in the air.
Inside the terminal, we dart like minnows between New York’s railway-inclined holiday travelers. “Jerry!” I shout when he picks up the phone. “Where are you?”
“Heading in! Sorry we’re late, I had to yank your dad away from a busker with an extra guitar on the sidewalk outside.”
I laugh, grabbing Miriam’s hand as we push through the throng. My eyes smart the closer we get, and then I don’t just hear Jerry’s voice on the phone. I see him.
He’s grinning ear to ear, and Dad is behind him, and I have a full-on breakdown right there in Grand Central Station during the chaos of holiday rush hour. Dad’s hair has more salt than pepper now. Jerry got new glasses. I haven’t laid my eyes on them in almost two years, and the time apart hits me in the chest right now, asking me to pay the toll of time and distance and whatever self-preserving walls I constructed from a half-assed belief that I had to be who I was without them.
Tears stream down my face as I get swallowed into a hug. Dad ruffles my hair. All southern twang and long vowels, he says, “Hey, honey!”
He and Jerry smell like old leather and I breathe it in like a balm.
When I turn around, Miriam’s crying, too （fourteen years of friendship will do that to you）。 She and I hug, because why the fuck not, and then she and Jerry and Dad hug.
“Your father did really well on the plane,” Jerry tells me. “He only cut off my circulation three times and yelled at a very small flight attendant once!”