Appa has been a widower for three weeks. Five times that length was the first time I heard the word “uncontrollable” to explain the lump in my mother’s brain, and the first time my grandmother, who believed in ghosts but not God, started praying.
It is easy to do the math, really, when you count in weeks. You can do it on your fingers like airborne arithmetic.
In truth, Appa had been a divorcee for longer than he had been a widower. With his beer-belly and a voice that seemed to reach the tip of his uvula and dangle there, like one of those odd water droplets clinging to round surfaces after rain – by the first November rain, Eomma’s mind had already left him. I could tell in the way her voice stuck tightly to her, a second layer of skin, and the way that her hellos always sounded like goodbyes.
Appa and I have known each other for sixteen years, twice a week for forty-three weeks, and three more whole weeks now. I wonder if there is a word to describe this distance, something like the way Appa looks at the car behind him in his concave sideview, ‘objects in mirror are closer than they appear.’
“Nice weather today,” Appa says.
“Yeah,” I say from the back seat of the car. The seatbelt digs heavily into my collarbone, its tightly woven polyester weaving a red ant line. It is then I remember that safety hurts as much as recklessness.
Eventually, we reach Eomma. She is in a columbarium, a 납골당. The “골” stands for bones, and I think that the heavy white marbled walls suit it.
Appa stands next to me as I gaze at Eomma’s little glass cabinet. It holds itself almost like a dollhouse. I don’t say anything; I just look.
Eomma’s photos are recent, but not close enough for me to see her sunken cheeks or the circles under her eyes, although she slept through most days. Eomma looks like the Eomma I want to preserve, but not the Eomma that I remember.
“I’ll be right over here if you need anything,” Appa says, as if this grief is not his to see.
“Okay,” I say. It is only customary.
The daylight hits just right on the glass door, where I can see watercolor outlines of my reflection.
“You look so much like your mother when she was your age,” I remember my grandmother saying. It’s true that Eomma and I looked alike, before.
But as I see my empty reflection, I can’t help but see only Appa’s face in mine.
“Let’s go,” I tell Appa, who is caught between taped chrysanthemums that mean grief and orchids that mean eternal love. I see him peer into the small cabinets, trying to unwrap their lives.
“Do you want anything for dinner?”
“I’m not hungry,” and Appa and I exchange few words on our way back, but he doesn’t pry. He never does. We stew in our silence, spooning empty grief like banchan dishes, hoping that our uvula-clinging voices will be swallowed whole.
I wonder if Appa saw my mother in me, or if he saw his sadness spread thin and flat. I wonder which one he tried to see, and which one he tried to forget.
After dinner, Appa peels apples. He is foreign at best, the knife jolting through the waxy skin and carving out less-than-desirable chunks of the yellowed, dense flesh.
The apples are slightly sour, as if pried open too early.
“If your peels are continuous, you’ll make a good wife,” Eomma used to say to me. Her cuts were flowing and as thin as papercuts, falling in curls between her long, slim fingers. Eomma’s fingers were one thing that I didn’t inherit; my hand resembled Appa’s stubby and coarse ones.
Looking at Appa’s pencil shaving peels, I wonder if the superstition applies to husbands as well. I had always questioned what had caused Eomma to marry Appa – he was nothing like one of those dads we always giggled over on the TV, more Homer Simpson than Phil Dunphy.
“He’s a good man,” Eomma said, as if that explained everything. “He gave me you — and that’s reason enough, no?” I had just shrugged back then, unsure of what to make of the compliment. It wasn’t until my mother stopped cleaning after Appa’s beer cans, after she stopped sighing after his shadows, that a good man was all that really was of Appa for Eomma.
“I know I’m not that good at cutting fruits and that sort of thing,” Appa says sheepishly, and I can hear his voice splinter off slightly. He smiles a little. It looks awkward.
“I don’t think it’s apple season yet. They’re sour.” I drag my fork across the plate, scraping the glass raw. It’s strange to see something so permanent in Appa’s house when, before Eomma died, it had always been paper and plastic. I remember the way the grease of takeout pizza stuck to the paper plates, like bruises on thin skin that never really left, just rotted.
“Ah, okay. I’ll get something else next time, okay?”
“It’s fine.” I scrape around the apples some more, even if the noise shells me. I wonder where he even got these apples, these stupid out-of-season apples. He never used to go grocery shopping, not even in those two-sevenths of a week I was there.
I look outside the window, and the sun is glaring. It screams that it is still only summer. When I count in weeks, I can only put down three fingers to show the last time Eomma looked at me, and I could only look at her fingers, the most slender and starved they’d ever been, but suddenly all the plates here are glass and breakable.
“Eomma, I don’t want to go to Appa’s house,” I protested. “All we eat is takeout and we never talk. Don’t you want me to stay?”
“You’re all he has. Don’t you understand?” she says sharply, as if the words are like toothpicks in her cheeks. “You’re all he has.”
When I go down to the parking lot, where Appa’s shabby car is stalling, I hear him shout my name, as if he’ll lose me if he doesn’t. He smiles, and I can see where his teeth overlap, an incisor over a cuspid. But his round cheeks push up his eyes, his sad eyes, and for once, I think I can see my Appa happy.
“Appa,” I say, and his eyes snap back. The kitchen light carves Appa’s face in a hollow way. Appa resembles himself most when he is sad, the same way I can’t remember Eomma being anything but sick.
“Yes?” he asks. His fingers drum on the kitchen table nervously, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or pity him, this man whose hands I have, this man I’ve known for sixteen years and twice a week of forty-three and three more, whole weeks.
“We’ll be okay.”
Outside the window, the sky is the color of premature apples, ripening at the tug of hopeful fingers. You can almost mistake the dusk for dawn.