“Did she have any employees?”
“No, just her.”
“Was she friends with any of the neighboring store owners?”
“Yes. Well, there’s this woman . . . She has a children’s clothing store across the aisle from my mom.”
His pen scratched on the pad. “Did they get along? Did your mom get along with everyone?”
“I think so. When I was growing up, she had some trouble with being one of the few Korean store owners there. She thought the customers and the other store owners might not like her since her Spanish was bad.”
Margot remembered how her mother would yell, Amiga, amiga, to potential customers as they walked away on the green-painted pathways between the stores. Sometimes they would stop and wave goodbye. Other times they would simply ignore her. Occasionally they would pinch their noses around the Korean food that she brought from home. Her mother had the profound capacity to brush the insults off, but Margot could not. They would haunt her for her life. She had loved her mother more than anyone but was also deeply ashamed of her—her poverty, her foreignness, her language, the lack of agency in her life. She did not know how to love anyone, including herself, without shame.
Tears leaked out of her eyes. She grabbed a tissue from a box on his desk.
“I wanted you to know that you can call me if you need anything,” Officer Choi said kindly. “You have my card?”
“I just wish I knew what to do with her now. With her ashes.”
“Did she go to church?”
“Yes.” The clay Spanish tile roof. The tall creamy white building. The bell tower.
“Could they help you? Could they help you figure out what she would’ve liked?”
“Yes, of course. I don’t think I’m quite ready yet for that.”
“Your dad?” He furrowed his brow. “Is he still around? Can he help you somehow?”
The words your dad bit at her quick, like an eel hiding in seagrass.
“I don’t . . . I didn’t know him.” She had often been judged by people at church, at school, who didn’t understand how she could survive without a father. Don’t you wonder who he is? Do you think he’d ever come back? She had been pitied, too. But most of all, she had been excluded, unable to relate to the structure of family, both in America and in what she knew of Korean life. The message had always been that women without men lacked shape, women without men were always waiting for them to appear like images in a darkroom bath.
WHAT WOULD MARGOT DO WITH ALL THE MUNDANE objects that made up her mother’s life? A tangle of rosaries in a dusty ceramic dish. Faded school portraits of Margot with her gapped teeth and the horrible bangs that her mother cut straight across. An old single-CD boom box covered in a fur of dust. A dingy white teddy bear, glossy crooked nose, gripping a stuffed red satin heart. A framed photo of her and her mother on the day of Margot’s high school graduation. A box of albums that had gotten so old, most of the images slipped out, no longer held by the ancient adhesives. Closets and drawers full of clothes. She didn’t understand why her mother needed so many sweaters and pajama pants and blankets. It was Southern California after all.
It had been about a week since her mother had died and a few days since discovering her mother’s body. A part of her wanted to leave everything and go back to Seattle, let the landlord deal with it.
But then her own childhood possessions—her old clothes, schoolwork, photos, immunization records, notebooks—which she didn’t even have the courage, the energy to confront in the other bedroom, would be abandoned as well.
Eventually she’d have to go through her old room, which her mother had used mostly for storage, keeping the twin-size bed for Margot’s visits around the holidays. As a teenager, Margot would retreat there after dinner, disappear with a notebook and pen, crank up her moody music—PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple, Portishead—to drown out the sound of her mother watching the Korean channel in the living room. Sometimes she’d exit her room and catch a glimpse of her mother nodding her head as if in conversation with the screen. It must’ve been a relief after a long day in a foreign country to be immersed in images where you belonged just by sound and gesture and face. How much language itself was a home, a shelter, as well as a way of navigating the larger world. And perhaps that was why Margot never put much effort into learning Korean. She hadn’t been able to stand being under the same roof as her mom.
But now Margot could see that, despite moving to Seattle, she was everywhere inside of this apartment. It wasn’t just her mother’s objects covered in dust, but her own—the photographs of Margot as a gap-toothed little girl, the certificates of Margot’s grade-school accomplishments framed and hung on the walls, which meant nothing to Margot but clearly were a source of pride for her mother.
It was obvious now how much they depended on each other—for food, shelter, a sense of identity in this world—and how much Margot had resented that. She didn’t want to need or be needed by her. Her mother was too heavy with history, with sadness, unspoken and unexplained. She rarely mentioned her childhood and had only sometimes vaguely referenced the variety of jobs—a cook, a textile cutter, a seamstress—that she had been forced to work as a teenager to survive.
Margot knew that at some point her mother had moved from the orphanage into a boardinghouse where she had shared a room with three other young women, either orphans or exiles, without families for shelter—a particularly thrilling time when Mina had finally been free to live her own life, free from the scrutiny of adults.
Margot never felt strong or sturdy enough for the details of her mother’s truth. She could barely handle her own. Growing up American was all about erasing the past—lightly acknowledging it but then forgetting and moving on.
But history always rose to the surface. Among the wreckage, the dead floated to the top.
And here now—the rosaries, the dingy white teddy bear, the photo albums.
How could she even begin to separate her belongings from her mother’s? Why had she always counted on her mother to be here so that Margot wouldn’t have to make any decisions, place any value on the items that were the evidence of their lives—not just of their daily activities, but of what they simply couldn’t bear to get rid of, what they simply couldn’t bear to lose?
How much had her mother been carrying? How much had she been carrying for them both?
And now Margot would have to bear it all by herself.
Down in the garage—cool and dim and soundless except for the gentle knocking of pipes—Margot backed out of the spot behind her mother’s car. A tall figure appeared in her rearview mirror. She gasped and slammed on the brakes, the man scurrying out of the way. As she pulled up beside him, she lowered the window on her side.
“Sorry,” she said. “You came out of nowhere.”
“That’s okay.” He stood holding a broom and dustpan in hand. She recognized him as the landlord or maybe the janitor—she couldn’t tell which one—who had been there the day she found her mother’s body. He was wearing the same gray pullover sweater, pilling and rubbed thin on the elbows. Wrinkled and tanned, he had both the ease and the awkwardness of someone who had immigrated decades ago—a fluent English speaker who had probably grown up on American pop culture but for whatever reason never left Koreatown. He seemed a bit lost, out of place. Margot could certainly relate.