your husband coming back?” I type.
She looks at my text and shakes her head once. And then Miho jabs me in the back to tell me to stop asking.
I go to the kitchen table to check on the hot water I have poured into the mug. It’s a drinkable temperature now, so I bring it to the woman and she sips.
“Thank you so much for bringing hot water. It’s very thoughtful.” She holds the mug with both hands and then places it on her belly.
I smile weakly. It’s just as well that she doesn’t know I thought she was being raped and I was going to fling the boiling water in her rapist’s face.
“It’s so late. I feel quite terrible for keeping you up. Please return home and go to sleep. I feel so much better, really.” To illustrate her point, she stands up and smiles tremulously.
Miho and I look at the clock, which now reads 4:05 A.M. We both shrug. Miho keeps her own hours and can sleep in as late as she likes.
I have to be at work by 9:30. I haven’t had a dedicated assistant since Cherry never came back after that night; I’ve been laying low and haven’t asked for another one yet.
I take the woman’s hands in mine and squeeze them. They are bony and soft at the same time.
“Thank you,” she says, her eyes cast down to the floor in embarrassment. Miho murmurs good night to her and we leave together, closing the door softly behind us.
* * *
—
THE NEXT DAY at work, I am thinking about the lady. I can’t stop thinking about her desperate eyes—how, even despite her pain, she was unwilling to go to the emergency room because they might take the baby out of her.
I cannot imagine feeling that way. I cannot imagine having a child and you have to watch out for him or her and every moment of every day will be devoted to the child with no life of your own. I wonder how that transition happens and what it feels like when that instinct kicks in.
One of my customers said to me once that the problem with a lot of my generation in this country is that we do not live for tomorrow. He was a professor of sociology and had been quizzing the assistants about their life choices, which obviously made them uncomfortable. They would not be working at a salon if they could answer such questions positively, I wanted to say. But of course he and everyone else knew that already, and he was simply being cruel by bringing it up. “You have to grow up with parents whose lives become better as time goes by, so you learn that you must invest effort for life to improve. But if you grow up around people whose situations become worse as time goes on, then you think that you have to just live for today. And when I ask young people, What about the future? What will you do when tomorrow comes and you have spent everything already? they say they will just die. And that is why Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world.”
He said this in a lecturing way, as if to chide everyone who worked in the salon.
I wanted to ask if his own children were brilliant and filial and successful, because no one is actually like that.
Sometimes, it is a good thing that I cannot speak.
* * *
—
KYURI TEXTS ME around dinnertime.
“Our manager says there’s a chance Taein will come to Ajax tonight! Madam is not going to be here because she’s getting her annual health checkup tomorrow so she has to fast and not drink starting 5 P.M. today. This is perfect. Any chance you can get off work and come here by 9 or so? His manager is definitely coming with someone from Taein’s company and I am betting that it’s really him. And even if it isn’t, you can meet his manager at least.”
I stare and stare at this text and I can’t breathe and I have to