Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [40]
“Don’t fall asleep; remember to get off at Chongup Station.”
Mom commanded him—sometimes sadly, sometimes firmly, “Here in the city, you are your siblings’ father and mother.”
As he stood there, rubbing his hands together, only twenty-some years old, Mom would get up from her seat and open his hands and straighten his shoulders. “The eldest brother has to be dignified. He has to be the role model. If the eldest brother goes the wrong way, his siblings will go that way, too.”
When the train was about to leave, Mom’s eyes would fill with tears, and she’d say, “I’m sorry, Hyong-chol.”
It would be in the middle of the night when his mom got off at Chongup. The first bus to town would be after six in the morning. His mom would get off the train and walk, in the dark, toward home.
“I wish we’d brought more flyers to post around here,” he says, burrowing into his jacket against the night chill.
“I’ll come back tomorrow and do that,” Chi-hon assures him, and she pushes her hands into her pockets.
Tomorrow he has to escort the CEO’s aides to the model apartment in Hongchon. He can’t afford to excuse himself. “Should I have my wife do it?”
“Let her rest. She’s taking care of Father, too.”
“Or you can call the youngest.”
“Or he’ll help me.”
“He?”
“Yu-bin. When we find Mom, I’m going to marry him. Mom always wanted me to get married.”
“If it’s that easy to make up your mind, you should have done it already.”
“After Mom went missing, I realized that there’s an answer to everything. I could have done everything she wanted me to. It wasn’t important. I don’t know why I got under her skin over things like that. I’m not going to get on a plane anymore, either.”
He pats his sister’s shoulder and sighs. Mom didn’t like it when his sister got on a plane and went abroad. Mom’s opinion was that if it was during war you couldn’t help it, but otherwise you couldn’t leave your life up to fate like that, as if you didn’t care a whit about it. When Mom’s meddling about planes got worse, his sister boarded them in secret. Whether it was for business or for pleasure, if she had to take a plane, she left without telling Mom.
“The roses at that house were so beautiful …,” his sister says.
He looks at her in the dark. He has just been thinking about those roses. The first spring after he bought his house, Mom visited and suggested they go buy roses. Roses? When the word came out of his mom’s mouth he had to ask, “You do mean roses?” as if he’d misheard her.
“Red roses. Why? Isn’t there a place that sells them?”
“Yes, there is.” He took Mom to a nursery that supplied the saplings lining the streets in Kupabal. “I think this is the prettiest flower,” Mom said, and bought many more rosebushes than he had expected. Later that afternoon, she dug holes near the wall around his house and planted them. He had never seen Mom plant something to look at, not to harvest and eat, like beans or potatoes or seedlings of cabbage or radishes or peppers. Watching over her bent form, he asked whether she was planting the roses too close to the wall. Mom looked up at him and said, “That’s so that people outside can enjoy them, too.” Every spring, the roses came into full blossom. People passing by outside during the rose season paused under the wall and inhaled the scent of roses, just as Mom had hoped. After it rained, red rose petals would be strewn everywhere, having fallen on the other side of the wall.
At the bar in the big box store in Yokchon-dong, his sister, who downed two draft beers in place of dinner, takes out a notebook from her bag, opens it to a particular page,