Read Online Drifting House by Krys Lee - Free Book Online

after, pull out strands of his own hair and butt his head against the walls until he bled, angry at his sins. So I walked away from him only a little afraid, because I was no longer the boy who confused his father with God.
    It was past one before we sat as a family for lunch. We could see the feet of passersby through a barred window. New Mother had upgraded this subterranean life of ours with a lace tablecloth and silver candlesticks arranged over the piano bench; she had insisted on a grand piano, which meant in this space, there was no diningtable or even a low
saang
. All the while my real mother gazed down at the new us.
    I blessed the food, my sisters overseas. Before I finished, my father uttered “Amen,” then slurped kelp soup from one of New Mother’s flowery china bowls. With his chopsticks halfway to his mouth, he fell asleep, dropping a cube of steaming tofu into his lap.
    New Mother poked her finger deep into his ear. “That’s what you get for drinking the night long!” she said, as if he hadn’t done the same thing throughout their short marriage.
    She wiped his mouth with a napkin. One hundred percent linen, she proudly informed us. New Mother had brought these things, and more, into the marriage. Most of all, she had brought with her a faith in new beginnings. While we ate, her feet tapped staccato notes, her fingers waltzed across the table, her head danced left and right as she tried to convince ­us—even Mother’s portrait, it ­seemed—that all was well. She turned her heavy breasts in my direction. There were too many teeth in her smile and her green pantsuit was a size too small, so I saw more than I wanted to. God, my father liked to say, had punished New Mother with her face.
    She said, “Jingyu, did you make nice friends yet?”
    “School’s one long vocabulary lesson,” I said. I missed America, the two dark, ­chain-smoking, antisocial friends I’d make in every city we moved to when my father grew restless, the anonymity.
    “You should set yourself to memorizing a hundred new words a day.” She clapped her hands, straining to be helpful. “I’ll make you memory cards! In my student days, our
hakwon
teachers beat us unless we learned three hundred each day.”
    “I don’t want to learn.” I picked the black beans out of my rice, which she frowned at. “I want to go home.”
    “Home, home….” my father said. “Even Odysseus longed for home.” He hacked up a globule of phlegm, spit it into the linen napkin, and folded it up.
    New Mother blinked. Her pointy nose flared, but she focused on me as if nothing had happened. “Jingyu, women like men who have good posture; it makes you look taller. And you should smile more ­often—we’ll get that tooth fixed one of these days.”
    My father had knocked out that tooth when I was eleven, but that was a family secret.
    “Leave my son alone,” my father said. His voice rattled the chopsticks. “He’s not from your bloodline anyways. Old women like you get to a certain age and think too much. Only God knows what moves in the heart.”
    “He spends half his waking hours hiding in his room, sleeping and reading his mother’s old Bible. If you took interest in anyone but ­yourself—”
    “I am interested.” His voice was clipped, dangerous. “Just not interested in you.”
    She flashed a large, unnatural smile that made her look more wounded than cheerful. “It’s my money,” she said. “Don’t forget.”
    “Can’t we just eat like other families?” I said.
    “Is this a family?” He turned toward me, his hands gripping the bench by both sides. “Where is my family?”
    In the late afternoon at my father’s
hwanggap,
the guests parted like the Red Sea as he made his way down the hotel’s ballroom, aplayground for the rich that he had insisted on renting. He contemplated his guests with a studied pastor’s modesty. As the emcee lauded my father’s piety with limp anecdotes, my father timed his entrance from