Yolk(70)

I google “twenty-four-hour H-E-Bs.” There’s one an eighteen-minute Uber ride away.

A plan forms. I need to finish this pie and buy a fresh one. I must eat three slices out of the new one to cover my tracks.

“Hi, Jayne Baek.”

I whip around. It’s Dad. With his own iPhone flashlight shining into my face.

“Oh.” Even in the swampy heat of the house, he’s wearing a cardigan. I brush crumbs off my T-shirt. He shines his phone at the open armoire. “Why are you up?” I ask him, clearing my throat. I’m struck by how small he looks in the dark. How angry and foreboding he seemed when we were young. I watch as he opens a low kitchen cabinet to pull out a large mason jar. In it is a pale-brown sludge.

“I have to feed the mother,” he says, shining the light under his face as if he’s telling a ghost story around a campfire. For a moment it’s as if Mom’s power lies in this jar of muck under the sink.

He pours liquid from another jar into the murky vessel and returns it to its hiding place. “It’s my SCOBY. For kombucha.”

Another large glass jar comes out, this time from the fridge. This one with a wide mouth. “Sourdough starter for bread,” he says, spinning off the lid. “I have to keep my family alive.”

He smells it and then holds it up to my nose.

It’s inviting. Warm, not quite bready but beery.

“It’s gluten-free,” he says.

“You’ve always been into this stuff since way before anyone else,” I tell him. I remember all his failed businesses. How the magnets and crystals and jade face rollers were so prescient for him to sell. How it had all been too early. How Texas had been all wrong. My father was the first person I knew who’d tried to import sheet masks from Korea. This was before every Korean product purveyor practically minted money. Before the Danny Songs of the world were on the covers of Vanity Fair. Before random non-Koreans at work would ask me which K-dramas I watched and then instruct me on the ones I should be watching.

“How are you?”

“Good,” I tell him, nodding to make it convincing. “Fine.”

He smiles gently. “It’s been so long since you’ve been back,” he says. “I think I saw more of my parents when I served in the military.”

“I know,” I tell him. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for,” he says. “How are you and June getting along?”

“Okay, I guess.” He chuckles, stirring the fluffy, shaggy dough and then lifting some of it out with a wooden spoon and putting it into a Ziploc bag.

“Where’s he going?”

“I have to separate this little guy for the good of the rest of the family.” He places it into the freezer. “Thank you,” he says to it, and then shuts the drawer. “We can’t keep feeding everyone, so he goes into suspended animation.”

“Tough break.”

He pours some flour into the rest of the jar. “It’s a pretty heroic role, if you think about it.” He mixes with the handle end of his wooden spoon.

“It’s good that you and June are together in New York,” he continues. “Life’s too hard over there to do it by yourself.”

He adds water to his mix.

“Even if being together feels just as hard sometimes,” he says. “Family’s like that.” He stirs for a while and then screws the lid back on. “But they’re the ones who will help when no one else will.”

He stoops down to return his jar to the lower cupboard, closing it softly. The other back into the fridge. “It’s when you really don’t want to ask for help that you might need it the most.”

He pats my shoulder.

I remember when Mom was gone. How sad he was. And how mellowed he seemed after.

“Put everything back exactly as you found it,” he says, swinging his light to the open armoire.

“I will.”

“Because she’ll know.” He shakes his light in my face, chuckling.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Good night, my daughter.”

“Good night, my dad.”





chapter 31


“You get in line,” she says to me the next morning, shoving the shopping cart toward the register. Mom’s a genius when it comes to tricking us into manual labor. June wanted Mom to take her to the Korean store to get snacks, and I’m a sucker, so I tagged along. There are about four people ahead of us in line. I used to hate this as a kid. Having to awkwardly let people go ahead when my mother invariably vanished at the crucial moment. “You, see if you can find some glutinous rice flour.” She directs June down another aisle. “The good kind. If they have the Vietnamese variety, even better. It has an elephant on it. Also, grab a fish sauce, the one with the three crabs on the label, not the one with the fish.”

I’m pretty sure June doesn’t know what she’s looking for.

“I’ll be back,” Mom tells us both.

June saunters over with the right fish sauce but the wrong rice flour. “This is my fault,” she acknowledges.

“Yeah, it is.”

We’ve already been to the bank. I had to run in and deposit a blue leather envelope of cash while June and Mom got to wait in the car with the AC running. I am the youngest, which means I draw short straw until death.