Shelter(77)
“You should probably leave now, Kyung.”
“How? We don’t even have a car here.”
“I can call you a cab, or there’s the bus stop over by the middle school. The 38 drops off near those hotels downtown.” Gillian lifts a corner of the blinds. The rain is letting up, but the clouds still look bruised and gray, ready to open again. “It’s getting late. They’ll be home soon.”
She has it all worked out for him, as if she’s been planning this for days. They just needed to get past the funeral so she could send him away. If this is going to be their memory of the end, Kyung wants to leave the house like a man, a decent man, but the fact that she went to his father behind his back, that both of them have been keeping a secret from him—it’s a greater betrayal than he ever thought Gillian capable of.
“I still don’t understand how you could do this.”
“I did exactly what you did,” she says, lowering the blinds.
“What does that mean?”
“I asked your father for help because I knew it was the one thing you’d never be able to forgive. But unlike you, at least I got something out of it. Ethan and I might have a chance of making it now.”
She doesn’t sound entirely convinced of this, but she’s right about everything else. He can’t forgive her, no more than she can forgive him, and he understands that she probably planned this too. It eliminated the possibility that either of them would circle back in a moment of weakness, asking for another chance. It made the break clean.
“And my father—he’s, what? He’s just going to live here with the two of you? Pay the mortgage? Babysit my son?”
“I haven’t discussed any of that with him, but he’s welcome to stay as long as he wants.”
“You mean as long as he’s willing to pay the bills.”
Gillian looks out the window again. “I really need you to go before they get here. I’m asking you nicely. If you care about Ethan at all, please don’t let him see you angry again. He’s a little boy, Kyung. Just let him be a little boy.”
*
It’s ten past four in the morning when he pulls off the highway into a brightly lit service area. The lot is half-full of trucks and semis, with only a few passenger cars scattered in between. He parks his rental and gets out to stretch his legs, looking up at the open dome of sky. There aren’t any stars in western Pennsylvania. He assumed there would be, but the haze makes it hard to see anything other than a pair of commuter planes blinking red in the distance. Kyung buys a map, a bottle of water, and a pack of cigarettes from a bored-looking girl at the gas station and then walks next door to the diner. The people inside—all truckers, he assumes—look up from their plates when he enters. He hesitates for a moment, sensing that the crowd is rougher than he’s used to. The men are uniformly big and white and burly. They have bags under their eyes and constipated expressions that flicker with curiosity at the sight of Kyung. He’s not in a college town anymore, a difference he can feel as he slides into a seat at the counter and lifts an oversized menu in front of his face. He quickly orders a sandwich to go from another bored-looking girl who might be the sister of the one working next door.
“Coffee while you wait?” she asks.
He’s had nothing but coffee for nearly ten straight hours. Another cup would kill him. “No, thanks.”
The girl seems confused by someone declining coffee at this hour, but she takes her carafe and moves on. Kyung spreads his map over the counter and stares at it, not looking for something so much as trying to avoid being looked at. He traces his route from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, disappointed that the distance he drove barely amounts to the width of his pinky.
“Waste of time,” he hears someone mumble.
On the other side of the counter, a middle-aged couple sits side by side, stirring their coffee in slow, sleepy unison. Husband and wife, he assumes, because of the matching gold bands on their fingers. They’re also dressed in matching plaid shirts—blue for him and green for her—that appear soft and broken in from years of wear. Both of them are heavyset and unhealthy looking, with oily pink complexions that remind Kyung of lunch meat.
“If all you wanted was coffee, then why’d we even stop?” the man asks.
The woman rolls her eyes and runs a hand through her hair, which looks fried from too many dye jobs and home permanents.
“So?” the man says.
“So, what?”
“So drink it already. Let’s go.”
The woman downs several gulps of coffee and slams her cup on the saucer. She wipes the drops that spilled on her shirt with the back of her hand, camouflaging them into the plaid. “You happy now?”
“No, I’m not happy. We just lost half an hour. I thought you wanted to eat.”
“Oh, quit your bitching.” She peels off some bills from a small wad of money held together by a rubber band and throws them next to their check. “I told you I’d take the next leg.”
They collect their things and head for the door, lumbering single file because they’re too wide to walk next to each other.
As they reach Kyung’s end of the counter, the woman looks at him in passing. “Are we so damn interesting?” she snaps, not stopping or slowing down to wait for his response.
The bell on the door rings as it opens and closes, but Kyung doesn’t turn to watch them leave. He didn’t mean to stare at the couple, but it was hard not to. The farther he drives, the stranger people seem to him, and the smaller the town, the more everyone treats him like some kind of alien, as if they’ve never encountered an Asian person before.