“Is there something you would like to talk with me about, daughter?” he asks, dipping his head to peer at me over his cloudy reading glasses. He still speaks with a thick and halting accent even though he’s been living in the States for at least a decade.
My throat lumps up at his question. The “daughter” is what gets me. Even though Brian Wilson is now imploring me in a high falsetto not to worry on the record player, guilt roils my stomach.
Why did I get in that fight with Hayato? Ruining any chances of…what exactly?
I once again scan Jae-Hyun’s face, trying to pick out any kind of resemblance to the Japanese billionaire who suddenly reappeared in my life last night.
Jae-Hyun is Korean, and Hayato is Japanese, but could they be related somehow?
Maybe…I think. Even before he got sick, Jae-Hyun looked way older than what I’m guessing to be his sixties, based on his love of 60s era California rock. He drinks too much, doesn’t get enough exercise, and eats terribly—if food isn’t pre-packaged or takes more than a few minutes to heat up in a microwave, it doesn’t go in his mouth. He already has a slightly hunched back from all the non-ergonomic drawing and a semi-permanent cough, thanks to all the smoking he does when I’m not here—which is three-hundred and fifty-five days out of every year.
Yeah, sorry, Brian Wilson. I’m definitely worried.
I lower my eyes back down to my barely drawn on pad as I consider how to broach the subject of Hayato and whatever possible connection he and Jae-Hyun might have.
“Jae-Hyun, have you ever been or lived in Japan?” I ask. “I mean before you came to California?”
He frowns and shakes his head. “I came directly to California from Korea. Why do you ask?”
I look around Jae-Hyun’s overstuffed apartment, trying to decide just how much I should share.
Because I’m not crazy, but Jae-Hyun…well, he kind of is. The room beyond the dining table we’re sitting at is stuffed with boxes, which are themselves stuffed with comics, most of which Jae-Hyun has already read and will never read again. Rather than get rid of or sell his precious comics, over the years, Jae-Hyun has stacked all the boxes in neat rows from the floor to the ceiling and arranged them so that there are three hallways.
The first hallway leads to the front door of the apartment. The second hallway leads to a small bathroom. And the third hallway leads to a kitchen. I’ve seen the kitchen. It’s also filled with boxes with only enough room left over for a dorm fridge and a microwave. Supposedly there’s a bedroom somewhere off the kitchen, but I have my doubts about whether Jae-Hyun actually uses it.
I once got here a little too early on a December 26th and used the key he gave me to let myself in when he didn’t answer the doorbell’s buzz. He was awake and in the apartment, not downstairs at the shop, as I’d thought when I originally came in. I could hear the shower going somewhere in the apartment. But he hadn’t gotten around to cleaning up for me yet.
There were bottles of Soju rice wine scattered about the table, along with several porcelain ashtrays filled with stubbed out cigarettes. Underneath the long table, which only ever hosted two chairs, one for me and one for him, I could see a sleeping bag with a Korean light novel turned upside down on top of it.
Jae-Hyun had never explained the way he lived. Why he never left his little shop, or why he’d filled his living spaces with already read comics.
That had been our relationship from the start after he’d agreed to mentor me after The Elemental Outpost’s closing hours. He was the teacher who never left his shop. I was the student who only appeared for ten days every year. We didn’t ask each other many questions outside of drawing, and we both liked it that way.
But he had looked aghast when he’d come out to find me standing over his Christmas mess. He’d apologized several times with bows and everything. And though I’d kept assuring him it was all right and even offered to help him clean up, it had been hard for me to keep our usual status quo going after seeing how he really lived when I wasn’t around.
For him, too. We somehow managed not to talk about it. But by the end of that annual ten-day installment, he’d begun calling me daughter. That had also been the first time he brought up the possibility of me moving into the empty apartment next door to his.
We’d started talking about me beginning my real adult life above his shop, without him really knowing who I am and without me understanding why he was the way he was. And I’d been alright with that. I’d loved that he didn’t have to know anything about me, to both refer to me as and treat me like a daughter.
