Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [73]
“Park So-nyo.”
You laughed then. I don’t know why I did what I did next, just that I wanted to get you to laugh one more time. Even though you didn’t ask, I told you that my older sister’s name was Tae-nyo, which means “big girl.” Our names—Little Girl and Big Girl. You laughed again. Then you said that your name was Eun-gyu and your elder brother was Kum-gyu. That your father gave you names containing the words “silver” and “gold,” with the hope that you would earn money and live well. That he called you Silver Coffer and your brother Gold Coffer. That, perhaps because of that, your brother, Gold Coffer, lived a tiny bit better than you, Silver Coffer. That time I laughed. You laughed, watching me laugh. Then or now, you look best when you’re laughing. So don’t frown like that in front of the doctor; smile. A smile doesn’t cost you any money.
· · ·
Until your baby was three weeks old, I went to your house once a day and let the baby suckle. Sometimes it was early morning, sometimes in the middle of the night. Could that have been a burden for you? That was all I did for you, but for thirty years after that, I went to you whenever I hit a difficult patch. I think I started to go to you after what happened to Kyun. Because I just wanted to die. Because I thought it would be better to die. Everyone else made things difficult for me; only you didn’t ask me anything. You told me that any wound healed as time passed. That I shouldn’t think about anything, just calmly do what I was supposed to do. If you hadn’t been there I don’t know what would have happened to me; I was out of my mind with grief. You were the one who buried my fourth child, the stillborn, in the hills. Now that I think about it, did you move to Komso because I was too much for you? You weren’t someone who was meant to live on the coast or work as a fisherman. You were someone who tilled the earth and planted seeds. You were someone who didn’t have land of his own, and so tilled someone else’s. I should have realized, when you went to Komso, that you left because it was hard for you to put up with me. I see that I was a terrible person to you.
It must be that a first meeting is important. I am sure that, deep down, I always thought you owed me, and I showed it by doing whatever I wanted. Just as I found you after you stole my basin on your bicycle, I found you after you moved to Komso without telling me. You didn’t fit in at Komso. You looked out of place and strange standing by the sea. I can still see the expression on your face at the salt fields by the ocean. I was never able to forget that expression, but now that I think of it, maybe your expression was saying, Did she manage to find me even here?
Komso became a place I couldn’t forget because of you. I always came to look for you when something happened that I couldn’t handle by myself, but when I recovered some peace of mind I forgot about you. I thought I forgot about you. When you saw me in Komso, the first thing you said to me was “What’s wrong?” I’m only saying this now; when I went to see you then, it was the first time I’d gone just to see you, not because something had happened to me.
Except for that one time when you ran off to Komso, you always stayed in the same place until I stopped needing you. Thank you for staying in the same place. I might have been able to go on living because of that. I’m sorry for going to see you every time I felt unsettled, but not even letting you hold my hand. Even though I went to you, when it seemed like you were coming to me I acted unkindly. That wasn’t very nice of me. I’m sorry, so sorry. At first it was because I felt awkward, then because I felt we shouldn’t, and