“I should let you go. You must be busy. Thank you for calling.” Leah waited for Charles to hang up. She always waited for the other person to hang up before putting down the receiver. That was just her way. But as she waited, she heard no click, only his quiet and measured breath. She remembered the lemony detergent scent of his white undershirts, how she had held it up close to her nose when she had folded his laundry.
Leah put down the receiver. Maybe this was all right. He had let go of her first.
Approaching Van Kleeck Street, Casey fidgeted with the bows of the baby gift. Clothes for Timothy from Baby Gap. She was grateful that Unu had agreed to come with her. On the N train, he had even read out loud passages of Middlemarch that she had underlined, speaking in a mock English accent to make her laugh. His being so nice to her made it easier not to return Hugh’s charming calls. Casey was excited to see Tina’s baby in person but anxious about going back home, her first visit in four years. The photographs of baby Timothy showed a marshmallowy face with a shock of black hair. Unu had called him Don King. Timothy and Tina were reason enough to have boarded the train heading toward Grand Avenue.
The apartment building appeared shorter than she remembered it. She didn’t know what Unu would make of the bulletproof glass, the tacky framed posters in the lobby, the roach spray odor in the halls. There was no doorman. “Are you kidding?” she’d replied when he’d asked about one. When she was a kid, she and her sister were afraid to throw out the garbage because a man who lived in the apartment next to the incinerator used to leave his door open while he walked around in his undershirt and shorts. The man was probably harmless, but as girls, they used to run when he’d say hello to them. Unu emphasized that the building was nice, and she laughed at his politeness. The building was a dump; it would never get better, and her parents would never leave it.
Joseph let them in, and to Casey’s relief, Unu spoke Korean with her parents, putting them at ease.
She felt awkward standing there in the living room while her father was pouring a Scotch for her boyfriend as well as one for himself. They were sitting on the burgundy sectional from Seaman’s, but she didn’t feel that she could join them.
“How are your parents?” Joseph asked Unu. He watched the boy curiously.
“They’re well,” Unu answered. This was true enough. He hadn’t heard any bad news, so it was safe to infer that everything was okay in Texas. His siblings were incapable of messing up. When he’d told his mother that he wasn’t working, she had said nothing about it. His father had said, “You know what you’re doing. I guess.” Unu picked up his glass after Casey’s father had taken a sip.
Joseph was wondering if the boy would marry his daughter. Unu was divorced, and that fact alone might have at one time dismissed him as a marriage candidate, but with Casey, he wouldn’t have raised an objection necessarily. He knew by now that if he said red, she would say blue. So he would say nothing. He asked more questions about the boy’s family.
Unu patiently answered Joseph’s questions about his parents, two brothers, and a sister. Two Dallas lawyers and a pediatrician. He was the only one in finance and the only one to have left Dallas. Joseph asked a few more things, then told him a little about his own family in Wonsan, details Casey had never mentioned beyond the fact that her father was a war refugee from the North. There was something regal about Casey’s father, a kind of courtliness in the way he spoke Korean. He was masculine in his restraint. You couldn’t help but be curious about him. He was so evidently proud, and you had to wonder where all that came from. His own father, the owner of a highly successful insurance firm, was someone who made jokes with everyone, tried hard to put people at ease. He used the word sir often and insisted on good manners for his children. These seemed to be things Casey’s father had little interest in doing. He also had nothing to say to Casey, who had by this time left the living room where the men sat. After seeing to it that he was okay with her dad, she’d gone into the kitchen, where her mother was putting out the food in dishes.
“You’re coughing like crazy. What is that?” Casey asked. The walls of the kitchen appeared to have moved in somehow, but that was impossible. They weren’t bright white as they had been before. Her mother had been religious about using Fantastik on them. But it wasn’t reasonable to expect things to stay the same. “You okay?”
Leah nodded, unable to speak. She took a small sip of the ginseng tea that she had poured out earlier. Then immediately she spat it out in the sink. So bitter. Her stomach felt sour, too.