“It’s all right,” said the woman as she shook her head and forced a smile. “Sometimes, adults get into complicated situations.”
She tried to raise the corners of her mouth, but tears kept leaking from her eyes.
The child crouched before her and gazed wordlessly at the woman as she cried.
The blood-sausage restaurant owner never did get her premium.
The owner's husband was found dead in the kitchen of their restaurant. When his body was discovered, it was said that a part of his corpse had been boiling in the giant stockpot they used to make broth.
As the police descended on the crime scene to investigate the grisly murder, the likes of which had never been heard of before in the neighborhood, the owner’s daughter and son-in-law, who were said to have been employess there, suddenly vanished without a trace.
A few days later, the woman saw in the papers a photo of the black-clad “assistant” the old man had brought with him that time. According to the accompanying article, the assistant was a gangster who had been found dead in the bed of his lover.
This lover, who had discovered the body, stated to the police that she had left for work after seeing he was still asleep but had found him lifeless upon her return. The man’s upper body had been crushed in a strange shape, leading the police to suspect that a rival gang had taken some kind of revenge on him.
Even as she played with the child in the basement, the woman couldn’t shrug off these strange events.
But not being threatened was admittedly a good thing. There was no one to report them to the tax office or demand the difference on their premium, which meant she didn’t have to worry about money for the time being. The clothing boutique that had been planning to move into the first floor was now dithering between breaking their signed lease or pushing back their move-in date, but the woman didn’t have to worry about such things anymore.
Clunk
The woman looked up in surprise. The child had brought forth a new locked box from somewhere and was playing with it in front of her. This one had a simple lock that released when it was twisted. The child seemed amused by repeatedly locking it shut and then twisting the lock open. As the woman stared at the brightly smiling child’s hands locking and twisting open the contraption, she was suddenly reminded of a line in the news article she had read earlier: “The body’s torso had been crushed into a particular shape …”
Clunk
The child looked up at the woman and smiled proudly.
Life is a series of problems. Especially when one is married and has a family. Because even when you manage to avoid the problems of the outside world and return home safely, your family is there waiting with a whole different set of problems of their own.
Although the issue with the blood-sausage stew place’s premium was resolved （albeit in a way that left a queasy feeling in the woman’s stomach）， the caller did not relent with her attacks. They’d been receiving calls long before that, but her husband did not pick up on purpose and the woman didn’t have any strength left over to make an issue of it. This agitated the caller even more. The caller somehow got the woman’s private number and began to harass the woman on her own phone as well.
—Your husband is sleeping with the interior designer!
—You pretending to not see makes me sure that you’re a scammer, too!
—The three of you went to college together, I’m convinced you were the one who introduced the interior designer to your husband!
—I know you are the one who goaded your husband into having an affair and ripping off my husband and that you’re only pretending to be a victim!
—Make your husband return the money he stole and tell me where my husband is!
—I can’t breathe with these creditors coming after me. Tell me where my husband is or take legal responsibility for his debts!
The more the woman listened to the caller, the more she thought of this wife of her husband’s friend as mentally ill or something close to it. She could almost pity her. Because, from the caller’s perspective, her husband had simply said he was going into business before one day disappearing altogether, and now creditors were swarming around her, demanding to be paid.
But the woman herself could not afford to help this other woman who cursed and shouted down the phone at her at all times of the day.
According to the incendiary text messages saved on her husband’s phone, he and the interior designer had been seeing each other for a long time. The twenty million won her husband had said he’d invested in his friend’s defunct company had actually been handed over to this interior designer. Her husband’s friend had never asked for the office to be remodeled. All he had said to him was, “If you have an empty office in your building, can I use it for just two months?” And when her husband had begun remodeling, his friend had messaged, in a disconcerted tone, “You’re going to too much trouble for me, I just need a place to sit down for two months.”