Shelter(36)

By the time he gets out of the car, Mae is talking to the landscaping company, asking someone to send a crew over to cut the grass and tend to the flower beds, which are lightly scattered with dead petals and leaves. There’s also an issue with the trees, she says. One of the Japanese maples needs its branches trimmed. Tomorrow? he assumes the person on the phone asks, because Mae fires back: “No, it has to be done today.” Then she adds, “?Rápido, comprende?” and he’s not sure what surprises him more—the fact that she knows some Spanish, or the sharpness of her replies. Not once during the conversation does Mae say the words “please” or “would you” or “could you.” She just sounds curt and entitled, oblivious to the fact that it’s a Sunday, a day when most people—even her gardeners—have other plans. Kyung doesn’t see the problem as clearly as she does. The landscaping appears slightly less perfect than usual, but the Japanese maple that supposedly needs trimming looks no different from its twin on the left, and the grass is still short and even from the last time it was mowed. When Mae gets off the phone, she surveys the rest of the house, shading her eyes from the sun.

“Do you think it’s necessary to have that work done now?” he asks.

“That’s what I pay them for.”

“But is it really necessary for them to come today—of all days?”

“This house is my business,” she snaps. “You just mind your own.”

Their arguments always begin like this. He gets angry with her for getting angry with him, and suddenly both of them are being equally awful to each other. This time, he resolves not to take the bait. The only way his brain can cope with what happened to Mae is to find a more peaceful way of being with her, to manufacture a silver lining even if he runs the risk of suffocating in it. He follows her up the lawn silently, trying not to notice the same things he saw the week before. Instead of the bank of drawn curtains, he stares at the pattern of the flagstone path. Instead of the flowerpot filled with marigolds, he studies the wrought-iron hummingbird feeder hanging from its post. When he unlocks the door and pushes it open, he braces himself for her reaction, but Mae doesn’t even stop, much less react. She just speeds past the damage as if she doesn’t notice it, stepping awkwardly over the broken furniture and toppled plants. There’s something not quite right about this, something almost frightening about the way she disappears into the kitchen and returns with a fistful of garbage bags.

“Take these,” she says. “You can start in here.”

“Doing what?”

She waves her hand at the floor without looking at it. “Sweep up. But put any valuables you find on the dining table so I can go through them.”

Kyung catches her wrist, holding the birdlike bones in his fingers. “You’re sure about this? You don’t want to—talk or something?”

Mae shakes herself free. “No, I just want to know what I lost.”

She leaves him in the entryway, uncertain if he should follow or simply do as he was told. He’s tempted to remind her that what she lost amounts to more than just things, but the longer he stands there, the more it makes sense. Her greatest source of pride, her greatest source of security in life was this house and all of its contents. Caring for them was the only thing she did that his father ever praised. Maybe putting it all back in order will help her feel normal again, whatever normal means now.

Kyung finds a broom in the hall closet and starts on the floor, sweeping potting soil and bits of broken glass into piles that look like glittering anthills. He takes several slow passes over the entryway, but despite emptying his dustpan twice, everything still seems dirty. Even the air feels thick with dust that makes it hard for him to breathe. He distracts himself by studying the debris collecting under the yellow bristles of his broom. In the entryway, it’s mostly dirt and glass. In the living room, it’s mostly paper—loose pages from Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, The Call of the Wild, all ripped from their spines. It bothers him to see so many books he loved as a child, plucked off the shelves and destroyed for no good reason. He always imagined giving them to Ethan one day. The books, the furniture, the valuables. Everything, actually.

At thirty-six, Kyung is beginning to accept the possibility that his fortunes will never change. It bewilders him, though, how he followed his father’s example, but produced such different results. From an early age, he was led to believe that if he studied hard and worked even harder, he’d eventually be rewarded for his efforts. If an immigrant could come to this country and make something of himself, his son would surely continue that line of progress, multiplying the gains of one generation for the next. Kyung, however, hasn’t moved the line forward so much as back. Other than his debts, he wonders what, if anything, he’ll have in his own name to leave behind. The best he might be able to do for Ethan is pass on what he inherits from his parents, a thought that makes him feel oddly proprietary, as if the damage in the room were somehow done to him. It’s only now that he realizes what good work Mae did, curating the house in such a way that nothing ever seemed out of place until it all suddenly was.

When he finishes sweeping the living room, he moves on to the hallway, which is littered with broken picture frames and glass, hundreds of splinters and shards scattered everywhere. In between, he finds knickknacks of the half-broken or lost variety. A porcelain bird’s head, but no body. Jagged pieces of a china plate that appear to have no match. Torn photos too damaged to piece together again. He picks up a handful of scraps and examines them, but can’t figure out who the disembodied eyes and ears and mouths belong to. The photos seem like junk now, things to be swept away with his broom, but he wonders if Mae would disagree. He imagines her spreading out the pieces, using tweezers and glue to reassemble them like some elaborate jigsaw puzzle. Such a waste of time, but what else does she have? He walks into the dining room and finds her sitting at the enormous twelve-person table, most of which is covered with collectibles and figurines. She’s been making a list of everything on a legal pad, writing out what each item is, what it looks like, and who made it. He looks over her shoulder and follows her delicate, curlicued script down the left side of the page—Limoges, Tiffany, Baccarat, Steuben.