“Yes, all of them.” Mina paused. “All two hundred of them.” She smiled. “An entire cult. They were all mine.”

The women gasped. Beside her, Mrs. Shin choked on a laugh. The nosy one shot her a dirty look and raised her eyebrows at the other women, who fidgeted in their plastic folding chairs.

Mrs. Shin said, “Her daughter and husband are dead. Are all of you happy now? Really?”

After that day, the women avoided her. Perhaps they didn’t know how to identify with Mina, a relatively young woman without a family, or they didn’t like that joke about the cult. She at least still had Mrs. Shin, who had been in America for a few years already. She was always busy with work, a dry-cleaning business on Vermont Avenue, but after service, they would have lunch at church, or she would invite Mina over to her house where Mina would admire her family, her life. She lived in a large two-bedroom apartment in Koreatown with a funny and kind husband and two awkward teenage kids.

When they sat together eating lunch on Sundays, Mina wanted to tell her all about work but didn’t. She wanted to tell her how tired she was, how she hated the boss, but she didn’t. Instead, they ate mostly in silence. She asked questions about the kids. But they always avoided talking about Mina’s life.

Mrs. Shin hadn’t known Mina’s husband and daughter well, but enough to imagine what it had been like to lose them. Yet no one knew how to talk about death. As a culture and country, they had so many tragedies from wars already that they persisted in a kind of silent pragmatism that reflected both gratitude for what they had now and an unquenchable, persistent sadness that manifested itself differently in each person. Some had become drunks, surviving off the tenacity of their families in denial. Some had become obsessed with status symbols—luxury cars, designer clothes, and watches. Others worked diligently, a form of numbing the pain that at least had some kind of productive outcome—money in the bank, a roof over their heads, food on the table.

Mrs. Shin tried to fill the silence between them with gossip about people who lived in her building, about women at church. She told Mina about a woman in her forties who cheated on her husband with a younger man.

“She’s nuts,” Mrs. Shin said. “He’s, what, ten years younger than her?”

“Ten years?”

“And she’s saving up money to run away with him.”

They laughed.

“She’s crazy,” Mrs. Shin continued. “She’ll end up pregnant. And then what?”

Margot

Fall 2014

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, MARGOT HAD RETURNED to the apartment alone after touring apartments for Miguel, close enough to his new job in Burbank, which he’d begin next Monday. He had gone out for a drink with a man that he had met online after Margot assured him she would be okay by herself. He promised to meet her back at the hotel tonight, the same hotel where they had been at since finding her mother.

They considered moving to Margot’s mother’s apartment in the next couple days to save money. Once Miguel found a permanent place this week, Margot would then stay at her mother’s alone until she could finish cleaning and packing or donating their belongings. Her mother had already covered the month’s rent, and Margot’s supervisor in Seattle had approved extended time off—unpaid.

According to the landlord, her mother had a boyfriend, a man who visited her often during the summer. Could he be the same person that she had been yelling at last weekend, the same weekend that she had died? Although Margot couldn’t quite trust the landlord, he had no reason to lie. She needed to figure out who her mother was with, if anyone, that night. Officer Choi had yet to return her phone call, but she didn’t have any more time. She couldn’t wait for him or anyone anymore. Her mother’s body was proof that sometimes there was not one more hour, one more day, one more week in this life. Sometimes, all you had left was right now—the seconds ticking away.

Margot switched on the overhead light inside her mother’s bedroom. Despite the sharpness of the evening air, she had left all the windows open for the past four days to release the smell of death that lingered in her mother’s apartment, their apartment, the one they had shared for as long as Margot could remember. She paused to parse through what she could sense outside—a rich red pork pozole next door, a skateboard rattling over cracks in the sidewalk, a woman speaking rapidly on the phone, the exhaust from a choking diesel car—both familiar and strange. This neighborhood had both changed and stayed the same.

Many of the Koreans that she had known as a child had moved out for homes in the suburbs once they had saved enough, and now most of the neighbors were Latino. Yet they all lived here to survive, while longing to be somewhere else. How did the world become a place where jobs and wealth were so concentrated? Why did borders define opportunity? Was it that bad for her mother in Korea? Was she more trapped there than here?

Parting the white curtains, Margot looked down at the alley with the garbage bins where the neighborhood kids played soccer and handball up against the side of the building after school and at night. She then looked inside the closet where her mother’s clothes hung neatly, unlike Margot’s own back in Seattle where every sweater or pair of pants seemed to already be on the floor. Her mother had accumulated and saved so much through the years—nothing of real value but had still meant something to her—a dated leather jacket from the ’80s, a cobalt blue dress with large shoulder pads, a simple black sheath, some knee-length skirts from Korea that hadn’t fit her for years. Margot dug through the pockets of the pants and jackets, finding coins, faded receipts, a lipstick, small bills.

A pair of black tennis shoes, covered in a fine rust-colored dust, smelled of mineral and sage.

Margot was again reminded of that long drive to Vegas once years ago, more vividly this time. How the hot air whipped her skin through the open windows, caking her face and arms with a fine powder like konggaru on tteok, which she could taste inside her mouth, dry and grainy. Big white clouds hovered above as the world—clay and ocher, brittle and burnt—streaked by. Her mother’s eyes, hard as stones, focused on the road. Sweat streamed down the sides of her face and neck.

“Where are we going?” Margot had asked from the back.

“Somewhere very special,” her mother said.

“Will there be ice cream?”

“I hope so,” she said, eyes softening. “Yes.”

“Why are we driving so far for ice cream?” Margot asked in English. She laughed.

“It’s not just for ice cream,” her mother said in Korean.

“It must be the best ice cream in the world. The biggest ice cream.”

Her mother adjusted her collar, cleared her throat. She fidgeted with the radio dial for a minute, frustrated with the shrill sounds, the waves of static, a news reporter’s voice, snippets of classical music.

“If you behave well, I’ll buy you ice cream. Any flavor you want.” Her mother glanced at her in the rearview mirror. A car behind them honked. As he passed on the left, the driver yelled, “Go back to Chinatown, bitch.”

Margot flinched as if a stranger had thrown a rock at them. She could see her mother’s hands gripping the wheel, knuckles whitening. But she drove on, still dipping below the speed limit.

“Do you want some water?” her mother asked an hour or two later. Margot had fallen asleep.

She was thirsty, but she responded, “No. I’m fine.”

“We might . . . we might meet someone special in Las Vegas.” Her voice cracked. “Someone I haven’t seen in a long while.”

Her mother was trying hard not to cry. Daytime had turned to dusk, a wash of hot-pink streaks and a purple horizon.

“I wonder if this is the right thing to do—bringing you here, on this trip. But I had no one to watch you.” It was as if her mother was talking to herself or another adult, rather than attempting to reason with a six-year-old, but only later did Margot realize that as much as she resented her mother for leaning on Margot, her mother was deeply and unimaginably alone.

The only people who did not judge her were God and perhaps Margot as a child.