They were setting out dishes on the porch, the golden hour giving way to the gloaming, Vinod already reading on his area rug in the newly mowed meadow below them, leaning back on one elbow, his legs too stiff to be crossed.
“I don’t do Korean,” Ed said. “It’s a whole different skill set. And it’s still too cold for naengmyeon. And our family’s not from the North, anyhow.”
“At least do kimchi fried rice. I’d make it, but I burn everything. I have no patience. The last thing my mom said before she died was that I was always destined for a short marriage.”
Ed tugged on his cigarette and exhaled a tight, ungenerous stream. “What’s happened to you, noona?” he said. “I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“About the kid. This virus will be over someday, and then you’ll have to say goodbye to her. She’s not your daughter, you know.”
“Thanks, Ed,” Karen said. “What would I do without your blistering honesty?”
“You want to be Korean all of a sudden, then talk like one.”
“Why do you hate me?” she said.
“Why do you think I hate you?”
“Because of Dee.”
“I’d have a chance with her if it wasn’t for your fucking product. And don’t tell me she’s not good for me like you’re an expert on what’s good.”
She looked at him. He still had most of his hair, and his jawline remained strong, but age was creeping up around his eyes. She thought of tomorrow’s lesson with Nat. How did you say “spiderweb”？ A spider was a geomi, so…
“And another thing,” Ed said, using his lit Gauloise as a teaching tool, “don’t pretend like Nat doesn’t have issues. I’ve heard her screaming her head off over nothing.”
“She’s barely eight.”
“And repeating things over and over, not making any sense. Masha’s a therapist. She can help her.”
“Masha’s a fucking mess, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Why not stick to what you know,” Ed said. “Why not stick to manipulating people into despair.”
“Oh, Ed,” she said. “What do you want me to say to you? I never wanted to hurt you.”
He didn’t say anything. The smoke continued to issue forth in the tight blue notes that formed the bulk of her father’s vocabulary. It was so hard for her to think of Ed as a romantic when he had already seemed like a fifty-year-old ajeoshi as far back as college, exhaling smoke out of one corner of his mouth, inhaling liquor into the other, the mannered expensive dress, the sunglasses.
“Joesong hamnida,” Karen said. Just yesterday, she and Nat had practiced apologizing formally in Korean, in case Nat ever accidentally stepped on J-Hope’s foot or shoved an elder on Seoul’s metro when the two of them would finally be able to visit.
“Your accent,” Ed said, “is atrocious.”
* * *
—
The days passed, and soon naengmyeon weather would be upon them, even if Ed refused to make the icy summer dish. The air smelled moist and dank, and at midday the neighboring lawns glistened and the poorer denizens of the road washed their cars. The apple blossoms had come out and Senderovsky parked his nose on a low branch. Aaah! The gullies by the road ran dry and the visiting geese learned to do with less. Steve the Groundhog turned up by the pool deck, rushing about sun dazed and boisterous like a London taxi driver taking his two weeks on the Costa del Sol. Bees and carpenter ants, the unionized workers of the animal kingdom, began to carry out their parallel construction projects. Peony, rhododendron, and dogwood seasons came in turn, bombarding the property with their pollen, and only Ed in his sunglasses refused to sneeze, brushing at his nose with his wrist when the urge to do so struck him. In the Lullaby Cottage, Vinod donned kurta pajamas and looked more elegant and natural in the new heat than his fellow colonists. Among the fairer residents, raw, wind-chapped hands became soft and pink. And just when the unisex seventies rugby shirts Karen ordered for Nat finally arrived, it was too hot to wear them （though she did, anyway, because Karen-emo got ones to match）。
The pool was ready to be opened and dewinterized as soon as Senderovsky found the funds to satisfy an outstanding debt to the company that serviced it. In the meantime, the promised badminton net was set up on the front lawn, and they learned that Vinod, dressed in T-shirt and dhoti, and even with his pulmonary capacities reduced, played hard and dirty, pretending to scramble clumsily for the shuttlecock to deliver a light serve at best, then spiking it across the net with glee. He even developed an uncharacteristic evil laugh to match, an approximation of the mustachioed demon on the bottle of Hawaban, the powerful laxative known all over India, who says, “I am hungry,” after shitting copiously. Vinod and his brothers would try to imitate his supposed laugh as they squished and elbowed one another on the pleather couch left over from the previous renters—which could alone have served as the crest and coat of arms of the county of Queens—shouting, “I am hungry!”