The church women who’d left the kitchen abruptly hadn’t finished clearing up the leftover food. Mrs. Kim picked up the Saran wrap and covered the cakes and doughnuts that hadn’t been touched. No one could eat all these things. It seemed like such a waste to throw away all this expensive food.
Mrs. Kim had her back turned to Ted and Delia. She wanted everyone to leave her house, to leave her alone. All her life, she had been a hardworking woman. For over forty years, she had canned salmon and mackerel at Lowry’s alongside her good husband. She had raised three children and had dinner made every night. For over ten years, she had taken her husband for his dialysis three nights a week. On Saturdays, she had cleaned the house, done the grocery shopping and the ironing. On Sundays, she had gone to church and made a meat dinner for her family, and now that her children were grown, she cooked for her grandsons. She had never asked anyone for a dollar or tried to do anyone harm. But something had still gone wrong. Michael, who had a steady job at the post office, was always threatening to quit. Her oldest also couldn’t keep a girlfriend for longer than a few months. And Julie, who had married that short high school boyfriend Craig Muller who’d beat her after he drank, had finally gotten rid of him but could barely afford to raise her two sons by herself. Craig was often late with the child support. And now Teddy had cheated on Ella, who was better than a daughter to her, and had left her for this person who was standing in her kitchen. Her only comfort was that her husband wasn’t alive to see this. Hadn’t he suffered enough?
“You left Ella for that girl? For that girl? You must be crazy,” Ted’s mother muttered to herself in Korean. “What did Ella do to you?”
“Nothing,” Ted said. “We just don’t love each other anymore.”
“No, Teddy. I know Ella loves you. She’s a good girl. She doesn’t stop loving you just because you did something bad. Nobody just stops loving. That’s the stupidest thing to say.”
“No, Mom. She doesn’t love me anymore. She wants the divorce.”
“She wants the divorce because she knows you don’t want to be married. If you wanted to be married, she would work things out.”
“Well, I don’t want to be married to her anymore. All right?” Ted clenched his fists.
“And what will you do when you don’t love this one anymore? Will you get rid of her like bad fish and find someone else? Why do people in America care so much about sex? Love isn’t sex,” she said.
Ted had never heard his mother ever say the word sex. She had to say the word in English. He put his arms behind his back the way he did before making a presentation. He towered over Mrs. Kim, who was not even five feet tall. Ted thought to say something, then refrained. He would let her say these things to him, because he could not explain what had happened with Delia. What he felt for her was stronger than what he had ever felt for another person. Delia was like home to him. Ella was the house on the hill he’d dreamed of buying. But he could never relax in her presence. Also, he’d come to see her niceness and mildness as unattractive. She seemed to have no needs or desires of her own. At a Fly Garden party the spring of his senior year, a psych major had said to him, “The wife you choose will be your personal and social mirror. She is how you see yourself,” and he had held on to that through the years. When he met Ella, he felt he had to marry her because she was exactly the image he wanted reflected. She was well educated, well bred, and unimpeachably beautiful. But meeting Delia had changed what he wanted from a wife. Delia was a more accurate reflection, he realized. Ted loved her more honestly. He also didn’t want to grow old with someone he wasn’t in love with—to have a good-looking life with manners covering their lack of romantic feelings. This was what Ted had reasoned out in the time after he’d left his wife. And last, he could afford the divorce. Excluding stock options, his last bonus was close to three million dollars. His new job had a guaranteed contract with far better terms and a bigger upside if there were more deals. There seemed to be no limit on how much he could earn. All this would have been at best difficult to explain to a close friend in English, but it was impossible to say these things in this kitchen. Here, happiness, romance, and love were frivolous and worth sacrificing. So Ted stood there silently. As it had turned out, love was more important to him than he’d thought. He would let his mother yell all she wanted.
“Now Irene has to grow up without a daddy.”
Delia raised her head when she heard the baby’s name. She had no idea what they were talking about in Korean, but she could recognize some of the names. Mrs. Kim called Ted’s daughter “I-lene.”