The woman had met her husband at a student club in college. He was older than her. The friend he mentioned was also someone she knew from the club. The interior decorator who would take charge of the remodeling claimed she too had briefly been a member of the same club. After meeting her and hearing her name, the woman had the feeling that she had, indeed, seen her before. As the construction began and her husband’s friend and the interior designer and their workers made a lot of bustle and noise on the third floor, the heightened energy seemed to infect the woman’s husband as well. He, who had never lifted a finger to help her clean after they moved in, was all excited about remodeling the office his friend was going to use, gushing to her about every little step of their progress. The woman had no idea he’d be so enthused about anything having to do with taking care of the building and welcomed this development.
The child fervently hated the fact that a new tenant was moving into the third floor. The noise drifting up to the fourth floor must’ve been unbearable as she was now always going down into the basement to hide.
The woman also found it hard to tolerate having the stairs constantly covered in dust and the sounds of drills and hammers coming from below. Aside from when her husband called for her or the second-floor tenant lodged the occasional complaint, the woman also spent most of her time playing with the child in the basement.
In addition to the red, ornate robes on the mannequins and the shoes with toes so pointy they seemed impossible to put on, the child was good at finding all sorts of odd metal boxes in the basement. These boxes occasionally had locks or sealing mechanisms with keys attached to them, but even with the keys, it was difficult to figure out how to open them. The child handed over one box. The woman awkwardly played around with it, and when the box double-locked itself in her hands with a loud clunk, she nearly jumped out of her skin. The child laughed brightly. At first, the woman found it unsettling when the cold lump of iron suddenly went clunk in her hands apparently on its own accord. But watching the child laugh as she locked the odd-looking boxes one by one, she forgot that strange feeling and laughed along with her.
The seemingly endless remodeling efforts finally came to an end and her husband’s friend moved into the office. Despite the great lengths they’d gone to redo the third floor and how spacious the office was, the friend seemed to have no employees; it all struck the woman as peculiar. Her husband explained that it was because his business was just starting out and he praised the friend for being cautious with his overheads. Her husband, as if he were an employee himself, was always in the office. Whenever she peeped in, he was always sitting across from the friend with a narrow desk between them, both talking urgently into their phones. Occasionally, the husband’s friend would call her down to the office and offer her a dark-colored drink. The drink was so sour and tart that she could only manage two sips the first time in the name of good manners before giving up. Her husband’s friend claimed the drink was made from some government-subsidized crop in Europe and had cancer-fighting, antioxidant, and anti-aging properties, going on a long rant using terms she couldn’t understand. Her husband nodded along to the friend’s spiel until his phone rang and he immediately answered it.
Before even three months had passed, her husband’s friend vanished with their seed capital. In the office, aside from the small desk and the plush “CEO’s chair,” were crates upon crates of juice containers. She assumed they were the drink the friend had kept pushing on her. Emblazoned on the containers’ packaging was a picture of tiny blue berries. The same berries that were rotting away in a fridge in the corner of a room.
“We still have his security deposit, so we haven’t lost that much money,” said her husband nonchalantly. “And he left all this product behind. It’s 200,000 won a box … Think of all the money we can make selling them.”
Vowing to minimize their losses as much as possible, he called up everyone he knew and spewed the same information about the blue fruit’s anti-cancer properties, marketing them as best he could. But the thought of all the boxes stacked on the third floor made the woman despair that he would ever sell them all.
Then, the phone calls began.
If only they hadn’t tried to remodel, if only they hadn’t rented it out to her husband’s friend … These regrets crossed her mind again and again.
She knew there was no use in agonizing over the past. But the regrets revisited her anyway. It would’ve been the same for anyone else in her position.