“I’ll eat after this.” Charles faced the hymn music.
“If you want, I can come early on Sunday morning, and you can go have dinner now. You must be starving.” She wished she had something else in her purse beside the bag of blue Halls. The grumbling in his stomach grew louder.
“Did you eat dinner?” Charles asked. Suddenly he was ravenous.
Leah shook her head no. For lunch, she’d eaten a navel orange. She rarely ate before practice because she was so nervous. Even now she was nervous just to be sitting in front of him. But she didn’t worry about her own hunger. “You have to eat. You’re getting over being sick. You must take refreshment.” She was talking to him like a child, like one of her brothers, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“Ever since I was a boy, I’d forget to eat when I was concentrating on something.” When his mother was alive, that was always the first question she’d ask him. “Moon-su ya, did you eat today?” Even when he lived in Germany and she spoke to him on the phone, she’d ask him the same thing. It drove his brothers crazy how she’d ship special foods to him from Korea like toasted laver, custera, and dried squid from the best shops in Seoul. Up till her death, his mother had worried that he didn’t eat enough. The thought of his mother made him feel a kind of ache.
“I am really hungry,” he said, surprising himself in the admission. “Is there a place around here where I could buy a sandwich? I could run out, and you could wait for me.”
There was no place that was open this late. You’d need a car to get to the nearest diner.
“There’s a restaurant about five minutes’ drive from here. I could go and get you a sandwich if you want to wait.”
“Let’s go, then. We can both get something to eat.” Charles picked up his bag and sweater.
Leah swallowed. How could she do that? It would be preferable to lend him her car, she reasoned. They could not go to a restaurant together.
“Do you have a license?”
“No. I don’t know how to drive.”
“Oh.”
“Never mind,” he said. She was nervous about going with him. She was a married woman, and married Korean women didn’t do things like go to restaurants with single men. He’d somehow forgotten that her world was still in the nineteenth century. “We’ll practice for a bit, then I’ll eat something near my house.” He bit down on his cough drop and unwrapped another one.
Leah knew that even if they practiced for thirty minutes, he wouldn’t be home for another hour and a half.
“I’ll take you.” She picked up her purse.
“Okay, then,” he said, and followed her out the door.
The hostess asked them how many were in their party, and Charles said two.
“Table or booth?” she asked.
“Booth,” Charles answered.
Leah sat in the brown leather booth at the Astaire Diner. She’d understood that they’d get the food to go, but now they were sitting alone at a restaurant. How could she explain this to Joseph?
Charles ordered a hamburger deluxe with onion rings and French fries, a large chocolate shake, and an extra order of half-sour pickles. Leah asked for a cheeseburger and a ginger ale. No one took notice of the Korean couple. Framed photographs of Fred and Ginger dancing lined the orange-colored walls. The restaurant was somewhat crowded, but Leah saw no one from church. The food came quickly, and Charles asked Leah questions between bites.
“When did you come to the States?”
“In 1976,” she answered. “And you?” She took a small bite of her burger.
“I’d been coming for visits since I was a boy, but I guess I settled here when I first got married in 1980.”
Leah nodded, having heard of his two marriages.
“But I’ve moved around a lot. Went to school in England and Germany and here, of course.” He felt so much better eating again. “I was starving.”
Leah laughed, thinking, How could such a smart man be so foolish? Men were like children. This was what the older women in her town had told her when she was a girl, and it was often the case.
“You must have been very busy to forget to eat.”
“I’m working on a song cycle right now.”
Leah wrinkled her brow. “A song cycle?”
“A group of songs sung together in a sequence. A common theme or a story unifies them.” He shrugged. He hadn’t spoken to anyone like this in a while. Sometimes he felt that he wasn’t fit for company since he spent so much time alone. That was the thing he missed about marriage, always having someone around that you liked enough to do things with, to talk things over with. The problem was that at the end of his marriages, all he had wanted to do was never be home.