Joseph liked Mr. Kang, and the feelings were mutual. Joseph and Leah Han were the highest-paid nonrelative employees in his company. Joseph earned a thousand dollars a week （four hundred of it was reported, and the rest he was paid in cash）， and Leah made five hundred （two hundred fifty was reported）， though she worked as both cashier and seamstress. Mr. Kang would never pay the wife the same as the husband, though he always paid widows more than wives for the same work. Like most Korean businesses, European Cleaners offered no health insurance or paid vacations, but for Tina’s wedding present, Mr. Kang had sent Joseph five thousand dollars, which Tina had asked be used for her medical school tuition. For Christmas bonuses, they got two weeks’ additional pay and a large smoked ham. By paying them so well and treating their families with high regard, Mr. Kang ensured that his best managers would never be tempted to strike out on their own. “A full belly is hard to give up”—that was another of Mr. Kang’s epigrams.
It was closing time—six o’clock on a Friday evening—and the delivery boy had already parked the van in the lot before going home. The young women from St. Lucia who sorted clothes in the back room had also left for the evening. Joseph shut down the cash register and went to lock the front door. He wore a two-button gray suit with side vents, a white dress shirt with French cuffs, and a red-and-blue repp tie. He’d borrowed his customer’s, Mr. Walton’s, gold cuff links. Mr. Walton habitually forgot to remove his cuff links from his bespoke French shirts when he sent them to the cleaners. Every week, Joseph returned them without fail in a small Ziploc bag taped to the receipt, and every Christmas, Mr. Walton rewarded his honesty by enclosing a crisp five-dollar bill in his engraved Christmas card, which always made for a good laugh between him and Leah about rich people’s idea of generosity. Tonight, when he’d changed into his new suit in the store bathroom, Joseph realized that he’d forgotten his cuff links, and he didn’t hesitate to wear Mr. Walton’s.
Leah noticed him doing this but said nothing. She was busy checking off the guest list for Tina’s wedding. She sat behind the black marble counter, her small head craned over her slips of paper. On the floor behind her were two shopping bags filled with gifts for Chul and the Baek family, including a stainless-steel Cartier watch for the groom that cost two thousand dollars. These gifts should’ve been exchanged during the engagement dinner back in early December, but since that had been their first meeting as families, it would’ve been too awkward, and though they’d meant to have another meal between the engagement and the rehearsal dinner, Chul’s family had put it off. That the families were meeting for only the second time before the actual wedding day and that the family wedding gifts were being presented during the rehearsal dinner was unusual as far as Leah knew, but she hadn’t known how to influence the outcome any other way. Chul’s mother had been exceedingly charming on the phone the three times they’d spoken but evasive on any of the substantive issues. Tina said his mother was sort of like that—friendly but impossible to commit. Chul said his mom, a radiologist, wasn’t the kind to bring cupcakes for the class on your birthday. Joseph refused to comment on the matter, recognizing the slight, but for the rehearsal dinner, he did buy a new Italian suit and an English necktie from the luxury Korean department store on Thirty-second Street.
Leah had sewn herself a new dress: a blue light-wool shift with three-quarter-length sleeves. The illustration on the Vogue pattern had shown a short-haired brunette resembling the young Elizabeth Taylor. It was a dress in the 1950s style, a dress for a modest young woman—something a professional girl who typed in the secretary pool might have worn on an important date. The dress was shown in a red wool, but Leah bought a cornflower blue fabric, never having worn red herself. It had crossed her mind to make a suit, something older—after all, she was forty-two years old, no longer a young woman—but she’d found herself irresistibly drawn to the pictures of pretty dresses in the neglected pattern bin located in the back of Steinler’s Dressmaker’s Shop. Her black Bandolino pumps with the two-inch heels were also brand new. This was the first pair of shoes she’d ever bought at full retail price—nearly one hundred dollars.
The store was quiet. Neither Joseph nor Leah was a great talker. At work, they didn’t speak much. When they weren’t with customers, they preferred to listen to sermon tapes or choral music on the tape deck. When Joseph had a free moment, he read any available Korean newspaper. Even so, Leah noticed that since Joseph’s building had burned down, a different kind of silence had fallen between them like a dry mist of starch. Joseph really seemed to have nothing to say anymore, as though the fate of the building were like everything else in his life, subject to total loss. Elder Kong said the insurance money would be more than enough for the down payment of another small building, but Joseph didn’t seem interested in trying again. And though he said Chul was a nice boy, Tina’s marriage didn’t appear to please him much. Sometimes Joseph stared at the newspaper, not turning the pages. Leah found herself missing his tut-tutting the bad news invariably found in the papers. Last Wednesday, when she came home from choir rehearsal, she found him sleeping through his favorite program on WKBS. Asleep, he looked older, and it made Leah feel afraid.