“Baby, do you want me to go?” Delia asked, moving toward him.
Ted wanted her to read his mind. Normally, he would have tried to say something optimistic—to make something difficult sound better than it was. But he didn’t have the heart for it today.
Delia rubbed his neck. “Let me go with you. I’d like to meet your family.”
She then made the hotel reservations for the two of them, ordered the plane tickets and funeral wreaths, and arranged the car service to the airport. She wanted to make sure that Ted wouldn’t have to clutter his mind with these mundane details. Delia was determined to prove that she was a good ally. When he had asked her to marry him, he had said to her, “You and I are the same,” and Delia had taken that to mean that they had both grown up poor. But that wasn’t it. They were the same because they would survive anything. She wouldn’t let him survive this alone.
He drove them in the rental car to his parents’ house. From the end of the street, he pointed out the modest house covered in beige aluminum siding, no bigger than what Delia had grown up in with her mother and three brothers. Several cars were parked in the front. Ted slowed the car. Delia thought he looked different, as though he were frightened.
Ted had described his summer jobs at the cannery when he was home from prep school, how he used to do his SAT practice exams during his lunch break while the other guys were feeling up ugly girls in the employee locker room. They both had grown up with nothing, but Ted had climbed out of his hole by studying. Delia had hated school. Her dyslexia was diagnosed late in middle school, but she had always thought that she was just stupid. Her senior year, to graduate, she had slept with some of her teachers. She got a 98 in English without ever having gone to class, although she had let Mr. Shert play with her boobs and rubbed him off in his car behind the Benjamin’s Hardware store on Friday afternoons whenever he phoned. He was the only one who’d fooled around with her who thought it was wrong to have intercourse with a student, but everything else was okay. The biology teacher had no qualms at all about anything, including anal intercourse, which remained Delia’s least favorite sex act, being the most painful.
She had gotten decent grades in art, gym, and drama on the merits. But for all the other classes, it had been easier to barely pass or to put a grown man’s hand inside her blouse or to get on her knees rather than write about why Othello killed the woman he loved, when she had difficulty forming the sentences with her pen. Her high school transcript was uneven, but she graduated and did five semesters of college at St. John’s before hooking up with a Kearn Davis trader on a commuter train who encouraged her to apply for a sales assistant post. Delia had no wish to ever sleep with another man besides Ted for the rest of her life.
Ted parked the car and came round to open her door. They left their luggage inside the white Ford Taurus.
Mrs. Kim opened the door.
“You came,” she said in Korean. She didn’t look happy to see him. “But it’s right that you came.” She smiled weakly.
How odd it was to be home, Ted thought. To hear his mother’s Korean, which sounded so different from Ella’s father’s dialect. A dozen or so church people sat in the plainly furnished living room. A group of women peeped out at him and Delia from the kitchen. He couldn’t see his brother or sister.
Ted bowed in the direction of the seated Koreans, who nodded at him. They bowed back. This was Teddy, the son who’d gone to Harvard, made millions of dollars a year, bought his parents and brother and sister homes. He was married to the beautiful Korean girl whose pictures they’d seen. She was a doctor’s daughter who called her mother-in-law every Sunday night even when the son was too busy working. They had a baby daughter who must have been over a year old by now. The guests didn’t know what to make of the American woman standing next to him.
Mrs. Kim noticed Delia, too. “Mahp soh sah! You brought her to your father’s funeral?” She couldn’t help shaking her head. The girl looked like someone you’d see in a magazine—bright orange hair, shiny blue eyes, and red lipstick. She wore a tight black turtleneck and black pants. The girl had big breasts and a small waist, with none of Ella’s quiet loveliness. Teddy had thrown his life away to be with this sexy mi-gook girl. Now all three of her children were dating Americans.
“Do you have rocks for brains?”
Ted thought about turning around and leaving. “Mom,” he said plaintively.
“Ella sent that.” Mrs. Kim pointed to the enormous arrangement of white roses on the coffee table.