Shelter(22)

“But you’re acting like I’m the only reason you and your parents get into it so often. You have your own list of things to worry about.”

“You’re right,” he says. Right again.

At the hospital, the visitors’ lot is full, so Kyung leaves the car in an emergency lane and runs inside, jangling all the coins and keys in his pockets. His father and Reverend Sung are sitting in the waiting room together. Of course, he thinks. The reverend is here again. The nurses probably assume he’s a relative.

Jin is hunched over in a chair, wearing a thin white T-shirt, baggy drawstring pants, and a pair of slippers—all hospital issue. He seems tired and irritated. The bruises on his face look worse than they did the day before. They’re Technicolor now. Purple and blue, yellow and red.

“Have you been waiting long?” Kyung asks.

“No,” the reverend says. “He signed his discharge papers a few minutes ago. I’ve just been telling him about the arrangement we discussed last night.”

Jin looks up, his expression curious. Kyung tries his best to smile. The reverend does too, although their conversation the night before was hardly cordial. The reverend called to tell him that Mae and Jin would be his guests at the parsonage after their release. Kyung said absolutely not. They belonged at home with him, with family. He was startled by the speed and force with which he responded, the lack of hesitation, but he meant what he said. He no longer trusted his parents’ care to anyone but himself.

“Your house is too small,” Jin says.

“We have the guest room all ready for you.”

“Guest room,” he mutters.

Kyung expected this reaction. In many ways, he deserves it. Brick by brick, he’s built a wall around his life, trying to preserve his family and home as his alone. He helps out his parents when asked and visits when invited, but not too often, and never as much as he should. It’s the most he’s willing to do, the absolute minimum he can get away with and still be considered a son.

“If you don’t have enough space, it really wouldn’t be any trouble for Jin and Mae to stay with us.”

Kyung ignores the reverend. They’ve settled this already. “Ethan and Gillian are in the car waiting.” He mentions Ethan first, aware that time with his grandson motivates Jin in a way that other things don’t.

“All right, then. Let’s go.” Jin gets up stiffly and shuffles toward the exit. Empty wheelchairs line both sides of the corridor, but Jin doesn’t ask for help, and Kyung knows better than to offer.

Outside, a meter maid is walking away from his car, shaking her head at the audacity of his parking job, angled into a lane clearly marked for ambulances. Gillian lifts and lowers her shoulders as if to say she tried. Kyung pockets the ticket as he opens the passenger door. Something about the height or angle of the seat makes Jin flinch and cover his ribs with his free hand. Suddenly, Kyung sees his father curled up on the kitchen floor—knees up, head down—while Dell kicks him in the chest. He closes his eyes, trying to turn the image into something different, something blank.

Through the open window, Jin and the reverend say their good-byes.

“You can call me anytime, day or night,” the reverend says.

“I will.”

“And I’ll see you on Sunday?”

Jin pauses. “Mae’s being released later this week. We’ll have to see how she’s feeling.”

There’s something not quite honest about his answer. The reverend seems to understand this, but he lets it go with a smile and a wave. Kyung drives off and watches him in the rearview mirror until he disappears with a curve in the road. He wishes he could remember the name of the cartoon character he reminds him of, the one in the children’s magazine he used to read in grade school. There were two of them, actually—twin brothers, he thinks—one who was polite and well behaved, and the other, who wasn’t. Kyung always feels like the bad twin whenever he sees Reverend Sung around his parents, doting on them as a good son should. It’s silly to resent someone for having a relationship that he never wanted, that he actively sought not to have. Still, he dislikes the way the reverend kept offering the parsonage to his parents as if Kyung weren’t able to care for them. Unable and unwilling aren’t the same thing.

Ethan leans forward, clutching the back of Jin’s headrest. “I’m sorry you crashed your car, Grandpa.”

This is how they’ve chosen to explain it to him. Grandma and Grandpa had an accident.

Jin seems confused for a moment. Then he looks at Ethan carefully. “You’re so big now. You’ve gotten so big.”

“My birthday was in April.”

“I know. Have you been riding your bike?”

“What bike?”

Kyung refused to show Ethan the box that his parents had left on the front steps, wrapped in thick blue ribbon with a matching satin bow. He just covered it with a tarp and dragged it to the basement, where no one has touched it since. Gillian looked up the make and model online, and learned it was a six-hundred-dollar Italian tricycle, popular with the children of celebrities. She was excited about it until she noticed the look on Kyung’s face, and then the obvious became obvious to her. They couldn’t allow his parents to give Ethan a gift like that, not when their own gift consisted of a plastic tool belt and a puzzle.