Could anyone see her own connection with her dead mother? Ella wondered. Her father never spoke of her mother anymore. In the third grade, when she learned the story of the birth of Athena, Ella had wanted to believe that she, too, had sprung forth from her father’s head. That was a child’s magical thought, but in the presence of Casey’s mother, Ella felt her mother’s loss far more profoundly than she’d thought possible.
Leah took a tissue, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose loudly. She smiled bravely for Ella’s sake. None of this was the child’s fault. She was being loyal to her friend. In a way, that was admirable.
“Would you give Casey something for me?”
“Of course.” Ella wanted to be useful somehow.
Leah opened her Bible, and from the middle of the book, she pulled out a fat white envelope—the dry-cleaning store address printed on its upper left corner. Every month, along with eleven other women from her church choir, Leah put two hundred dollars into the geh pot. Each month, the pot rotated among them. Last month had finally been her turn. Leah had put the entire two thousand four hundred dollars in the envelope for Casey. Leah slid the envelope toward Ella. “Here. Please give this to her. Tell her that Mommy wants her to call. When she can—” Leah’s voice broke again.
Ella tried not to cry herself.
“Your father said you’re marrying. . . Ted. A nice boy who helped Casey get a job.”
Ella nodded, proud of Ted’s act of kindness, never having believed that he was as selfish as others saw him.
“I hope you will be blessed. With Ted. And in your life together.” Leah smiled. Such a pretty girl, she thought, without question the prettiest girl at church, and so ladylike. She moved like a girl who had come from the best family—it showed in the way she walked, how she spoke, the way she looked at you. Wealth didn’t make you proper, Leah thought, having seen so much evidence to the contrary, but once in a while, there was proof that there was a kind of proper breeding. Everything about Ella revealed her yangban home. But even in this beautiful apartment with expensive furniture with everything already paid for, Leah could see the child’s loneliness, and she felt a kind of ache for her.
Leah smiled, and this time she spoke in English, even though her words were limited. “You’re a good daughter to your father. Ella, try and be happy. With all your fortune—” And Leah shook her head at herself, knowing that fortune didn’t have the same meaning in English that it did in Korean. “You have so much blessing.”
Ella smiled at her, having been told this many times before （the word Casey’s mother was searching for in Korean was bok—a kind of luck and blessing rolled up into one）， and it did not occur to her to argue with these kinds of well-wishers that she would’ve given up nearly everything if her mother could have been alive. No one wanted to see how she might be missing something, too—that if Ella were to run away, she had no mother who’d search for her.
Ella fingered the white envelope, then found herself moving it near the tissue box. “Casey works in midtown. You know that already.” She looked into Leah’s eyes, making sure that she hadn’t been the one who’d told her this.
“Your father said she works with Ted. At Kearn Davis. Nor far from me. At the store. I have a customer there,” Leah said, recalling Mr. Perell, a customer who was someone important at that company, and how he liked to have his shirts hand-pressed and got very angry if the collars got smashed flat during delivery.
“Would you like to go visit her at the office?” Ella asked her, realizing the absurdity of her own question. It was hardly possible to imagine Leah—a slight Korean woman with a crown of white hair, wearing a dark woolen home-sewn coat—in the vast marble lobby of the investment bank. Even in her living room, Casey’s mother looked out of place and out of time.
“During the week, I. . . ,” Leah stammered. “My husband doesn’t know I’m here. He thinks I’m getting a haircut. On Saturday mornings, he can work without me for a while, so I can run errands,” she explained hurriedly in Korean, thinking that a young American girl like Ella couldn’t possibly understand the details that made up her life: sorting dirty shirts, darning missing buttons, and taking up hems of designer jeans for teenage customers whom she addressed as “miss”; trying to find the best cut of meat that was on special at the Key Food for dinner, scrubbing toilets on Saturday nights, cooking her husband’s dinner at a set hour and making sure there was always enough beer and whiskey in the house for him; and lastly, all the places a woman like her didn’t enter.