Girl One(80)

Tom had waited in the car at our request. I kept thinking about the fact that Barbara Kim was married. It was almost more disorienting to me than finding Isabelle drowning herself or Emily in the attic. A new family. A new life. All the rest of us had stuck to our two-person bubbles, for better or for worse.

A voice floated from the back of the store: “Coming!” A second later, Barbara Kim came hurrying to the front counter, smiling, her face a bright question mark. Her dark brown hair was tucked behind her ears, and she wore a belted dress, looking as crisp as the flowers surrounding us. She was trailed by a girl, maybe twelve or eleven, with a high ponytail and a striped T-shirt, intent on her Gameboy.

“Can I help you?” the woman asked.

She looked so much like Barbara, but the timing was off. She was closer to my age. I’d slipped backward in time, into the 1980s, and I tried to get my balance. “Helen?” I asked.

The young woman laughed, and the girl looked up from her video game system, contemptuous. “Helen? She’s Soo-jin.”

Helen—Soo-jin—whoever Barbara’s doppelg?nger was, she kept smiling at us. “Are you here about the Smith-Roberts wedding? I have some lovely cascades ready for you.”

It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t recognize us. Surely Soo-jin had seen our mothers’ faces frequently enough that some familiarity would sneak through. Maybe the dyed and chopped hair was enough to throw her off. Or maybe—maybe—

“We’re looking for your mother,” Cate said, taking over. “Is she here?”

“Oh, she’s busy.” Soo-jin sounded genuinely regretful, like this was her loss as well as ours. “But I can help you. I’ve been helping my parents with this place since I can remember.”

“We’d really love to speak to Barbara,” I said. “We’re—”

“Old family friends.” A warning note in Cate’s voice. She didn’t want me to say too much.

“I’m sure my mom would love to talk to you, but—”

“She’s downstairs,” the younger girl broke in. “She’s getting flowers ready for a baptism. Just go down.” She jerked her head in the general direction of the back of the store.

Soo-jin smirked gently, a what-can-you-do? expression. There was something so different about the Yoons: every other Homesteader pair had been solitary, I realized now, tucked inside that isolated mother-daughter pairing, no room for anybody else. These two girls seemed happy together in a way that made my heart squeeze.



* * *



Light came in through thin rectangular windows that were interspersed at ground-level, revealing the grass and flowers growing right outside. Barbara was standing in front of a long, thin table covered in daisies, wielding a small pair of scissors in one hand, ribbon in the other. She turned when she heard us, smiling, clearly expecting one of the girls.

I felt the three of us become predators, walking into this woman’s ordinary day with our impossible questions. One of us was a murderer; one of us had brought a dead woman back to life; one of us had been dead days ago. Being around the Yoons made me feel how far we’d fallen from normal life, its small, familiar pleasures.

Barbara’s smile faltered for a moment, a razor’s edge of grim shock, and I could almost see her deciding what to do next. Then she pinned the smile back in place. “Can I help you ladies? This space isn’t for customers.” She was softer now than when she’d been on the Homestead; she wore slacks, feet seamed with pantyhose. Glasses subtly changed the angles of her face.

“Barbara,” I said. “We’re here about my mother.”

“Your mother? How do I know her?” Barbara asked, a warning underneath the politeness. “Is she—are you friends of—”

“My mother was Tonya Bowers,” Cate said. “She died last year. Josephine is Margaret’s daughter, and Isabelle is Patricia’s daughter.”

Barbara’s expression wavered, then turned stony. “What are you doing here?” she asked, voice tight with suppressed anger. “Don’t you know better than to come by here? This is my family business. Our livelihood. Anybody could see you marching in here.” She glanced up at the ceiling. “My girls,” she breathed. “Did you talk to them? What did you say?”

“Don’t worry,” Cate soothed. “We barely spoke. They have no idea who we are.”

“Didn’t your mother tell you to leave me alone, Josephine?” Barbara said. “I told her I didn’t want anything to do with her or you.”

“You heard from my mother?” I asked, that old optimism springing up again.

“You aren’t listening to me, young lady,” Barbara said. “I don’t want you here.”

“Please,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve seen on TV that my mother might be in trouble—if you know anything about her—”

For one cold moment, I thought: I could make her tell me. I was tired of playing nice, always trying to ease information out of people who didn’t want to talk to me. These women who’d been involved in my very creation and wouldn’t tell me the things I needed to know, cloaking my history from me, keeping me from my mother. I just wanted to know, and I had the power to find out. What was I doing standing here, limp and compliant? It would take almost nothing to drag it out of Barbara. No harm done. Not really.