Mom and Dad were heading out for a dinner date. I had heard them eagerly chatting about it in the days before. Some new restaurant opening in downtown Saint Paul that meant a new red dress. Mom hung it up, showing it off in a clear dry-cleaning bag on their bedroom door. I passed it each morning, admiring the fiery, silken fabric. The sheen made me want to smooth it over with my hands.
I returned home with Moni to be immediately assaulted with questions.
“Isla, have you seen my dress?” Mom demanded as she attempted to get the back of her earring on. Her blonde hair in perfect, hot-ironed curls arranged in rows over her shoulders.
“No,” I answered quickly.
“Are you sure?” she asked again, this time with more urgency. I watched her mouth move, the red lipstick just outside the lines.
“Yes. I thought it was on your door?”
She shook her head. “Not there anymore.”
Dad appeared shaking the car keys in his right hand as he slipped his wallet in his jacket. “Stella, please. We’re already late.”
She brought her arms up exasperated. “I don’t understand. It’s been there for days, Patrick. I bought it specifically for tonight.”
He shrugged sympathetically. “I know but . . .” He waved toward the garage. “I doubt they will hold our table for much longer. Maybe wear a different dress?”
Mom breathily returned a few minutes later. Her curls were now scattered and out of place and she wore a plain, black sleeveless dress. She gave me a cursory kiss good night, trailing Dad who was already out the door when she halted, her eyes darting up the stairs.
I followed her gaze. There she was. Perched at the very top, staring down at us like a bird of prey. Half her face guarded by the shadows, her hands folded in her lap.
Three weeks later, I was playing near the creek with Sawyer when I found it. Drenched and covered in streaks of mud. Barely recognizable, the skirt end fraying. I poked it with a stick, letting it roll in the water like a crocodile barreling with agitation.
The red bled through, deep and questioning.
CHAPTER 13
ISLA
1996
There are days for the lambs. And there are days for the wolves.
Moni used to say that to me.
Days I would scrape my knee raw, the weather gave me the blues, the kid in class mercilessly teased me. Days the ice cream truck circled back, the new green dress got a flurry of compliments, the sun dried my skin until it tingled at the pool.
“Days for the wolves,” she would plainly say, if I came into the kitchen sullen and worn.
A bowl of filling for mandu would be on the counter, a mosaic of minced pork, onion, cabbage, zucchini, and mushrooms. My nose would fill with brine and garlic; my eyes would take in her fingers so delicately pinching the dough, each drop of filling softly cocooned in a shell of white plushness. Each dumpling she would delicately drop in boiling water, then pull out onto a plate for me. It steamed in freshness as a drop of soy sauce and vinegar was added before my teeth sank in.
She would lean in, almost drinking in my satisfaction from her food. It never bothered me, her leaning in like that. Her round, forgiving face—beyond anything merely pleasant. Hers was a face of luminosity.
“Now. Time to let those wolves go. Let in room for the lambs.”
She arrived in the US when she was twenty-four.
Young-Mi Baek was one of only a few women out of the select number of students allowed to come over under the pretense of studying. It was 1957 and she was secretly pregnant with a son. She never spoke of the father. Not even to Dad. She named him Patrick, after the pastor who helped her learn English at the Methodist church a block from her boardinghouse.
Moni never liked to tell me stories of those early years. Possibly because she didn’t want me to pity her. Or maybe it was simply too much to repeat out loud, to live all over again. Dad once told me it was because she missed her family. She never saw them again after the war. There were too many stories like hers . . . I never pried.
But she loved telling me about Dad.
How he was the most beautiful little boy and all the other Korean mothers at church envied his button eyes and full lips. He loved hot dogs like all the other “American” boys but loved her ge jjigae, spicy crab stew, the most.
But he was teased the most.
“No one else look like your Daddy,” she would say as she pruned bean sprouts over a metal bowl. “Oh, he handsome now. Everybody say that. But your Daddy . . . he had to be brave.”
The kind of teasing that sticks like a barb in the chest, prickly, burrowing in further and further.
Her eyes would look a little bothered, as if she were worrying all over again about her precious son. He was the only one. The only one who ate kimchi. The only one who knew another language. The only one who wasn’t white. I wondered how much of this story was still left inside him, a reluctant pioneer.
“He have to be perfect. Perfect in everything. Best grades, best student. Even now. You know that, Isla?”
She didn’t have to use words for me to see how she ached over it. How she ached over him not having a father in his life. Maybe it was her drive that had pushed him to such rigorousness. She wore her mother’s guilt like a badge, tattered and useless, as it would do nothing to right any wrongs she may have committed.
It was impossible for me to picture her as anyone but the lenient and soft Halmoni she had always been in my eyes. A pleasant, agreeable woman who wore the same floral pink apron when she cooked for her family. Who always gave the best parts of a dish to everyone else, keeping the lesser scraps for herself.
The sacrifice.
That was the only way she knew how to live. The only way she felt whole. As if her skin existed to protect us all, stretching far and wide, so thin and transparent it would inevitably snap. A tear at first, fissuring, then ripping all the way.
The first summer after Ada and Sawyer moved in, our kitchen had grown extra warm with the air conditioner being on the fritz. The heat swelled an already rising strain in the house.
Dad decided to scoop out ice cream for us all.
