Hot

Image courtesy of Pexels.

We do not have a soban, so we lay one of Sooyeon’s trays on the bright green grass, right next to the in-ground vase. The summer air, heavy and sticky on our shoulders, smells like mowed lawns and sprayed flowers. Behind us, I hear the shouts of a young family with chattering children out for a walk, laughing about the history of this place and the funny names they find of people long dead. They pause at the plot next to ours. 

“Marsha Worthington,” the boy reads, and wipes his fingers, sticky with jelly and maybe peanut butter, on his cheek right by his ear. He calls his sister over. “Marsha Worthington!” he repeats, and it becomes a chant, Marsha, as they begin to bounce around the headstone. A jogger’s sneakers crunch on the gravel by the side of the path in front of us.

I wonder what they would make of us. We don’t look like sisters, and not just in the way that siblings don’t think they look alike. Sooyeon has Dad’s nose while I have his chin. She has Samcheon’s eyebrows while mine take after Umma’s. Her face is wide and pointy, angular; mine is just long. She’s willowy all the way through but stands iron straight, immobile but strained, like a bodybuilder who’s just lifted their weight in heavy stones. I’m much shorter, and sometimes Sooyeon has to remind me not to slump. 

The tray is of black wire with a dark wood base but it holds light in my hands, flimsy and decorative and not meant for the outdoors. Its home is on the shelf in her office, where it holds the two houseplants Sooyeon mists with water every morning. Halmoni and Haraboji had a soban. I don’t know if it’s even called a soban. I had to Google it when I asked for Halmoni and Haraboji’s Korean tray and Sooyeon’s response was blank. We didn’t use a tray, she insisted, until I showed her photos from online. It must be in our parents’ new house now, even though Sooyeon lives the closest to their graves. I picture it collecting dust, piled under clothes in her closet, or perched by the fireplace, holding my glum school portrait from senior year. Sooyeon says the new house is nice, but I haven’t been. Mom and Dad moved in last year, just after college started. The doctors said there was nothing they could do for Mom in the winter except have her live in a place with more sun. I know that caused a fight. Sooyeon says that Dad almost said divorce. 

Sooyeon also says Mom is doing better now. There’s a psychiatrist in Albuquerque who recommended her for a new treatment, something with ketamine. It’s supposed to work for people who don’t react well to other medicines, I think. She’ll have to go to Phoenix to get it, but Sooyeon wrangled the insurance into paying for enough of it. 

From her reusable shopping bag, I pull out the only two shot glasses she owns—a dusty San Francisco souvenir and a novelty shot glass and place them on the tray. I’d found them while putting away my clothes in her guest room closet; among the beige wicker baskets and soft gray fabric cubes, she had a stout Tupperware plastic box with scattered mementos inside, colorful and childish compared to the rest of her apartment, a sprawling penthouse of floor-to-ceiling windows and long, thin lamps. I found old toys and forgotten souvenirs and Polaroids strewn about, but in a corner of the box sat a stack of her journals, still bound with a lock. They were just as they had always been: neatly labeled and color-coded by year, red for evens, blue for odds. As long as I could remember, she’d kick me out of her room to write in them and stash them in different places under her bed. 

Knees on a paper towel, Sooyeon carefully pours water into the in-ground vase and stirs in the flower food with the end of a chopstick. When she’s satisfied, she frees the flowers we bought—$20 for a wilted bundle of roses, peonies, and alstroemerias—from its crinkly plastic wrapping and eases them into the ground, spacing them out as best she can so the arrangement looks less crumpled, as if she can coax life and color back into them. A petal breaks off the battered orange rose and we both watch it drift to the grass. She sighs and rocks back on her heels.

This trip wasn’t planned; in all the months I’d been living in her apartment, we hadn’t mentioned Halmoni and Haraboji once. And then she texted me the other day and I just said yes. I hadn’t been in Buffalo since the funeral. If I close my eyes, I could be in the backyard at the home that is no longer ours, boiling in the heat, taking in the breeze.

“We should get a shrub,” I comment, pointing at the neighboring plot. There are four bushes surrounding the clean headstone, all in summer bloom, and whoever visits has placed yellow wind catchers and little American flags. There’s even a burnt-out sparkler tucked amongst the mulch. 

Typing on her phone, Sooyeon doesn’t even look up. For a second, I wonder if she’s even heard me over the sound of cicadas droning. “Who’s here to maintain it?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer and doesn’t tell me who she’s texting. “Hand me the soju.”

I know that we are supposed to visit more than we should. When Sooyeon lived with Halmoni, they went to Haraboji’s grave almost every day. Even when Alzheimer’s took away everything else, for some reason, the theater of the cemetery visit remained. Halmoni, Sooyeon said, would bow, pour soju, and cut fruit, mumbling at the photo of the husband whose face she could barely recall.

She accepts the green bottle without a thanks and sets to pouring two even shots. From behind, she could be Mom: the long dark hair clamped firmly into a ponytail, the way she bends over effortlessly, nimbly, like a heron just about to take flight. “Mom might call in a bit.” She always answers if Mom calls and always tells Mom when to call her next. Dad is easier to bat away: if we say we’re busy, he sends us a sweet and silly message about his hardworking girls. I imagine his shaky hands typing out the texts with thumbs too large for the screen. After he came back, Dad stopped making us do anything. He didn’t ask Sooyeon what we should eat and tell her how to cook it from afar, like he had been doing since she started high school; instead, he brought home takeout night after night: Wegmans, Boston Market, Marie Callender's frozen pot pies. He didn’t take our phones or tell us to go to bed at 10:30 P.M. He sat with Mom in front of the TV when he wasn’t at work and only got up to do the dishes. Sometimes they even held hands. He almost came to Sooyeon’s winter recital that year.

Mom doesn’t ever text back. I don’t know if she ever reads what we send. 

She leaves the bottle on the tray and stands up with a satisfied sigh. “I think we’re ready.”

“Wait,” I say, and pull out the pears from the bag. I pick the roundest Asian pear out of the box and remove its Styrofoam netting. “Where’s the knife?” 

She looks at me, really looks at me, for the first time since we left Toronto and frowns. “You cut the fruit after. Remember?” 

She knows I don’t. She knows the ritual better than I do: the soban, the drinks, the fruit, the talking. Her eyes bore into mine. They are brown, dark brown, Mom’s brown. 

She reaches for my hand. It hangs there in the air for a moment before I take it. Her grip is firm and cool. The last time we held hands, she was walking me across the street after our bus dropped us off. She picked up my bear from the floor of the car when it fell. We called Mom Umma then. We mixed Korean and English at the dinner table, which made Mom smile the tiniest bit and Dad clench his jaw. 

Haraboji died in his sleep when I was just over ten and Halmoni started to go not long after. She sometimes spoke English and sometimes Korean, but she never made any sense. There was no point in talking to her at all, so I didn’t. 

I don’t know why I expected Sooyeon to be anything less than distant, but I wasn’t thinking right then. When I called her back in March, I had woken up alone after the worst night of my life. I stared at the ceiling until the fogginess faded and dullness took over, the numbing apathy that I’ve always known. “I don’t think I can do college anymore,” I sobbed over the phone, and she ordered a moving service to pack up my messy dorm room, and booked a plane ticket for that night. Got me business class. She didn’t hug me in the airport when she picked me up. She looked at me, up and down, took in the messy bun and the sweatpants. Held up a hand while she finished her work call. “We can stop for a sandwich if you’re hungry,” she suggested while pocketing her phone, in lieu of hello. “I don’t keep much food at home.” In the car, she told me I could talk to her about what made me leave school but those words rolled flat off her tongue; it felt like we were strangers. The Sooyeon I thought I knew would have hugged me until I cried and held me until all the tears had leaked out of my eyes. She would have told me how to fix it. 

Halmoni and Haraboji’s headstone lies low to the ground, emblazoned with their pictures and their names, lit up by the midday sun. I haven’t seen the full headstone since the funeral, two years ago, when it had just been engraved. It was raining then, and spring; the cemetery looked gray and washed-out among the early April muck and mud. Or maybe that was just in my head. After I got the call from Sooyeon and learned that Halmoni had a heart attack, everything went hazy, coated in a fine sheen of gray. We’d known that she was in decline. She’d had dementia since I was ten, a creeping Alzheimer’s that started with her forgetting to make me a snack in the afternoons to the delirium of her last five years, where she lived in a space somewhere in between Korea and here, a world where blurry shapes and faces constantly swam in and out of her grasp in an undulating blend of the familiar and the strange. 

While I sat in my dorm room and held on to the pieces of Halmoni I remembered, Sooyeon made all of the arrangements. She was a whirlwind. She called the funeral home and Google Translated the invites into Korean for relatives who didn’t care enough to respond. She ordered the flowers, arranged for the service, and bought the casket. I flew in two nights before and stayed in our uncle’s house. He would let us hold the reception there too. “Anything for my little brother’s kids,” he said.

The morning before the funeral, we got a text from Dad. Mom won’t get out of bed. Sooyeon stared at her phone for thirty minutes, completely still. Then she called and yelled at Mom until the sun had gone down. She emerged red-eyed from the bedroom we were sharing and shook her head.

Our uncle sat her down on the couch. “When your grandma and grandpa died, back in the 90s,” he said, “your dad didn’t get out of bed for almost two weeks. Grief is hard on everyone.”

Sooyeon and I exchanged a glance that said, But it’s different for Mom. “I know, Uncle Thomas,” she murmured. There would be no use explaining. 

He clapped her on the back and stood up. “You’ll understand, one day,” he said, and left the room. That made Sooyeon’s shoulders slump in a way I hadn’t seen since.

Uncle Thomas was the one who brought Dad back; when Dad was gone, he insisted we come to Fourth of July, and took us on the family vacation to Lake Superior. Sometimes we would sleep over at his house when the air in our own felt too heavy to breathe. Sooyeon cried in front of him. She’s never in front of Dad. He won’t tell us what happened, but one day at the beginning of September, Uncle Thomas drove Dad’s car with Dad in it back to our house and gave Sooyeon the keys. 

I think here we are supposed to bow, but Sooyeon does not move. That I remember from when I stayed with Halmoni and visited Haraboji’s grave; we bowed, I think, right after we finished setting up. But Sooyeon and I could never master how to bow. Halmoni and Haraboji coached us every New Year and Chuseok, but we would rock unsteadily, unused to sitting on our shins. We never did it properly, anyway; we had to go all the way to the ground, maybe, or perhaps we were supposed to start on our knees. There are words we are supposed to say, respect we are supposed to give.

Sooyeon begins to talk. “Haraboji, Halmoni,” she begins, but her Korean is rusty with disuse. She cannot say the rieul right anymore, but I can’t, either; even after hours of Halmoni’s patient instruction, I could never quite twist my tongue to recreate the sound of the r and the l. “Yeogi wasseoyo.” She gives up. “It’s us. Sooyeon and Soojin.”

“Hello,” I say, “we are here.” Sooyeon squeezes my hand. 

“The drive was not very long. The trip was safe. We are eating well,” she promises. “We are doing well. We miss you.”

“Bogoshipeoyo,” I say. She squeezes my hand again.

“I got a promotion,” she continues. “I think I’m gonna keep living in Toronto. I got a job there. And Soojin’s with me until she goes back to school.”

I almost drop her hand. She grips my fingers tighter. Sooyeon’s only hinted at me returning to USC. She tells our parents on the phone that I’m just taking a gap semester, and I might finish out my last year abroad. In May, she told me that there are plenty of options for Economics majors in Ontario, that Toronto and Ottawa have plenty of options. Last week, she printed out the re-entry procedure and pinned it to my door and highlighted the time-sensitive steps in pink. But that’s how it’s always been. 

When I was just under five and Mom and Dad were at the worst of their fighting, Sooyeon would wipe away my tears, and I would pat at hers. “We’re the only ones who are there for each other,” she whispered. “Don’t worry. We’ll never be like Mom.” She was my world. She told me not to tell anyone else that Mom and Dad hated each other because that meant we would be split apart, so I told Halmoni and Haraboji I was afraid of the dark when they found me crying. She forged Mom’s signature if I failed a test, and I told our parents she was at soccer practice when she was out with her friends.

I search her face for an answer, but I don’t find one. Of course, we could never tell Halmoni and Haraboji the truth when they were alive. But they are not here. 

She releases my hand and motions to let me speak. “I miss you,” I say, and suddenly find myself at a loss. I haven’t done anything but sit on Sooyeon’s couch and watch shitty Canadian reality TV since March. Sooyeon has already said all that I would tell them. I am eating well. I am doing well. It is all fine.

And then an urge burbles inside my chest: I want to tell them the truth. I think of waking up in my dorm room alone. I had pictured them before I passed out, them and Sooyeon, their arms extended, encircling, enfolding me, warm and loving, unconditional in a way I had never experienced in life. 

Instead, I clear my throat. “I miss you,” I repeat. My voice catches. “I love you.” It wobbles.

“Sarangheyo,” Sooyeon says quietly.

“Sarangheyo,” I repeat.

I think we’re supposed to bow again. But instead we stand stiffly for a moment more, and then Sooyeon bends over the tray and picks up the two shot glasses. “For you,” she says, and pours them on the ground, in the space between the tray and the headstone. She places the shot glasses back on the tray and picks up the pear.

“Hand me the knife.” It’s not a question.

She cuts the pear expertly. She peels it in one long, neat curl, careful to keep the golden skin in between the blade and her thumb. She discards it by the shrubs that cordon off the graves. She cuts the pear in halves, quarters, eighths, and makes a notch in each slice to get rid of the core. It is an effortless display.

Two semesters ago one of my roommates went to H-mart to stock up on all the essentials she insisted I would have eaten in my childhood. “No way you won’t know anything,” she’d said, “they’re Korean staples.” I could find nothing I knew amongst the shelves. The only thing I recognized were the pears, nestled in their box of three, suspended in their white Styrofoam netting, so I bought it without looking at the price. She laughed at me when I tried to cut into it. “What kind of Korean are you?” she asked, feigning shock, and took the knife from me, cutting it up in the exact same way as Sooyeon does now. “It’s the right way,” she told me, and let me have the first slice: delicious, but it tasted no different from when I cut it myself. You can prepare fruit any way you want. Strawberries and oranges taste the same whole or sliced; the only thing that makes a difference in the presentation of an apple is if it has skin. But there is a way that feels right, that taps into a memory I’m supposed to have had. 

I let my roommate have the rest of the pears in the box.

“Here,” Sooyeon says, and pops a piece of cool and juicy fruit in my mouth. I bite into the crisp and sharp Asian pear. Sooyeon pulls out a speaker from the bag and connects her phone with a muted beep. She also spreads out a towel and perches on top. She doesn’t motion for me to join her. The song that starts playing is delicate: a piano sonata that she learned in high school. She would spend hours practicing the high part. Sometimes I would do my homework in the living room just to watch her play. I take another bite of the pear.

“Remember when we came here, for Fourth of July?” Sooyeon doesn’t say anything, but I see her fingers tense on the knife. I shouldn’t have said a word. The last summer we came to Dad’s family’s Fourth of July was the summer he left. Sooyeon was seventeen then and had just finished her junior year. Dad was always at work when we got up but one night in mid-June he didn’t come home. Mom just said “He’s gone” and it took Sooyeon two days of calling hospitals and morgues until she understood that Mom meant that he had packed his favorite clothes in the car and didn’t tell anyone where he was driving. Halmoni moved in with us two weeks later. She and Mom would sit in the living room, motionless like stones. 

Sooyeon sighs.  “Yeah.” She takes a piece of fruit. “I remember.”

“Should we go to their graves too?”

She puts down the knife and the half-cut pear on the tray and shakes her head. “That’s not an American thing.” She takes a piece of pear. “I don’t even think we’re doing jesa. That’s just what you do during Chuseok.”

“Then what is it?” This is the longest conversation we’ve had in weeks. In Toronto she’s gone when I wake up. She texts me at precisely 5:30 to ask if I want takeout from a restaurant she’s going to, or to tell me to order UberEats. She never comes home before nine. She even texted me about the grave-visiting plans and sent me a Google Calendar link when I liked the message. Grave cleaning Sooyeon/Soojin, the invite read. July 19, 2019. 9 AM – 5 PM. 

“I don’t know, Soojin,” she sighs. “Halmoni and Haraboji didn’t do a lot of things like Koreans.” She finishes the slice of pear. “Sometimes I told my Korean friends in grad school about the grave cleaning, and they said their parents never did that.”

I think of my friend and the pears. “Yeah. Me too.”

She looks at me quizzically. “Have you talked to your friends about going back? If you enroll in August, you’ll only graduate one semester late.” She tilts her head. “Maybe even next August, if you take summer classes.”

I gape at her. I haven’t talked to my friends since March. They asked me if I wanted to get dinner and I said no. They asked me where I was and I left them on read. Sometimes, they would send me Instagram posts and Tweets, but I never even liked the messages. The last time someone texted me was in May. 

I’m opening my mouth to respond when her phone goes off. She has international data and always writes it off as a business expense. She pulls it out of her pocket and scowls. “Mom,” she says, and answers anyway. “Hello.”

I haven’t heard Mom’s voice in weeks, and I can barely distinguish her mumbles from the static. When I came to Toronto, Sooyeon promised me that she’d deal with Mom, and, to a certain extent, Dad. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, and when she made her once-a-month call she would say that I was out, or I was showering, or I was somehow busy. 

“We’re visiting Halmoni and Haraboji today,” Sooyeon says. Her voice is clipped, practiced; like she’d read the instruction manual for how to sound casual. I imagine this is how she sounds when she’s giving presentations or pitches. If she still does that. She never talks about her job. I know she majored in Economics and works at the headquarters for some software company and they sometimes tell her she should move to Montreal, but I’ve never asked anything more, and she’s never offered anything else. 

Mom’s voice is softened to a warble over the phone, but Sooyeon seems to hear her well enough. “Yes, the drive was fine. The border traffic wasn’t even that bad for a weekend.”

Her first summer back, Sooyeon asked why I hadn’t come to see her but when I explained, she looked back at me with a smile. We were sitting outside in the backyard, by the playset we no longer used. “Go to California for school,” she told me, and passed me my first cigarette. “It’s much better than Canada.”

“If you didn’t want Mom and Dad to visit you, why didn’t you go farther away?”

She didn’t answer. I pressed harder. “Halmoni doesn’t remember when you visit anyways.”

She snatched the cigarette out of my hands and stood up. “Don’t smoke either. It’s bad for you.” In the late afternoon light, her eyes were flinty and black. “Tell Dad I’ll be home later.” That was how they communicated then: after Dad came back and until Sooyeon graduated, with honors, from Toronto, she told me what she wanted him to know. If he said anything to her she would look back at him with a face as blank as a wall. She left me in our backyard before I could get in another word and smelled like weed, just a little, when she came home the next morning.

Mom speaks and Sooyeon frowns. “Soojin’s in the bathroom, Mom. Yeah. She’s doing fine.” And then she does something I do not understand. She sits up straighter, uncrosses her legs. “Yeah, she’s really liking the internship at the firm. She’s going back in the fall.” Her voice is smooth, even, but the tiniest bit of flatness has crept in, and the corner of her mouth pulls down. 

“Soojin, what—” She waves a hand at me and, just with a hard look, I’m left gaping and silent.

“Oh, my boss is calling.” Sooyeon’s lies are just as fluid as her truths. “I’ll call you in the evening. Bye.” 

 The words tumble out of me before I can collect my thoughts. “What the fuck?”

Sooyeon picks up the pear and continues cutting. “What?”

“What the fuck?”

The knife makes a crunchy sound with each slice. “What the fuck, Sooyeon?” My voice is rising. “Why did you tell Mom I’m going back?”

“Well, you haven’t dropped out,” she says evenly, and places another pear slice on the tray.

“I said I couldn’t do college anymore.”

“I felt that too,” she says, and wipes the knife off on a paper towel. She takes another pear slice and pops it in her mouth. “I felt it every day my freshman year.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Then what is it?” I try to make my mouth form the words but it feels gummed shut. The stickiness of the Asian pear is sickly sweet and keeps me from talking. “What made you feel like you couldn’t do it anymore?” She stops speaking. The space where our words were swells with the sound of songbirds and cicadas. 

“You wouldn’t understand,” I tell her softly. I don’t meet her eyes.

“That sounds like what Mom would say, Soojin.” She meets my eyes and I gulp. This is Sooyeon on the attack. This is the Sooyeon that came back from college, the one who returned from her sophomore year even colder and hardened than before, who wore turtlenecks all through July and ignored Dad’s feeble jokes about the heat. 

He tried so hard for us to love him. He followed a wholesome meme page on Facebook and sent us photos of kittens holding emoji hearts. He bought us anything we asked for even if the price made him wince; the Christmases after he came back were full of $50 gift cards from places that Google told him teen girls liked, big-name brands that sometimes were too famous to ever be seen in a storefront in Buffalo. Even now, whenever Apple announces its new models he texts me to ask if I want a phone. Cool new chip and a great camera, he gushes over text, and I don’t reply. Those words don’t mean anything to him: he works in marketing. They mean even less to me.

The summer Sooyeon hardened like obsidian, dark and hard and glassy, I tried to open up her journals to find out what could have made her change, but she caught me with a paperclip wedged in the lock. She only said four words: “Get the fuck out.” We didn’t speak until her graduation two Mays later, when she hugged me tight and whispered, “I’ve missed you, you know?” She called me once every two weeks in my senior year in high school, but she didn’t text when I stopped answering the phone.

Sooyeon presses me again. “I thought you told me you’d never be like Mom.” 

I think of her on the phone the night before Halmoni’s funeral, brittle and defeated; a crumpled piece of paper desperately trying to flatten itself out and refold into something stronger. She’s continuing her tirade, something about how she thought I’d be different, but I don’t hear any of it.

“I tried to kill myself!” The words burst out of me fluidly and I gasp. The statement has always liquidated at the back of my mouth and came out of my lips diluted. It has always been something I have not quite been able to fully say, a clog that backs up my throat and threatens to choke me out.

 In May, I called the Canadian National Suicide Hotline every night and hung up when the counselor asked me for my name. In June I would say my name was Sam and pressed end call. When my friends asked what happened, I said that things were bad at home. Since it was over text, I didn’t have to look at their disbelieving faces. 

They’d been asking me what was wrong. In October when I started missing class on Tuesdays. In November when I sometimes didn’t brush my hair. In December and January when I stayed on campus over break and didn’t respond to happy holiday messages. In February when I stopped going to class at all. Sometimes they left me fruit outside the door. The good watermelon from the student center cafe. A banged-up apple. A banana with a note to call them back. 

“Is that it?”

I didn’t know what to expect. Anger. Sympathy. Acceptance. But Sooyeon’s face morphs into only indifference, and then blankness. She tilts her head to the side and it is winter and I am just under five. I am overheating in a car and we are stuck in a snowstorm and no one seems to care. 

“I know,” she says, and I stumble backwards. She pauses. “Was that all?”

“I—what?” Stunned. “Did you hear me?”

“Yeah,” she says. “You tried to kill yourself.”

“I tried to kill myself.”

“And that’s all?”

“And that’s all?”

She unfolds her arms. “Did you slit your wrists? Did your roommate find you in your own vomit and call campus police? Did you get sent to the hospital? Did you get court-ordered in? Did they lock you in solitary? Did they order you to outpatient?” She’s shouting now. “Or did you just wake up the next morning in your room and decide that was it?”

“What the fuck?” I say. “I tried to kill myself!” 

“And so did I!” she snaps. “But I didn’t give up!” She takes a deep breath. “We’re not like Mom. I’m not like Mom.”

Oh.

Her turtlenecks one summer. How she stopped answering my calls. She changed, hardened, froze. I think I understand why she chose Canada. Became the elegant woman with a penthouse in Toronto who walks with the same step that sometimes makes me think Mom is just around the corner. She doesn’t do anything on the weekends. Sometimes she tells me she’s going out, or she has a date, or it’s a coworker’s birthday. She puts on makeup and nice clothes but then I see her location as just wandering up and down the same streets around the apartment building until she thinks I’ve fallen asleep. I turn the lights off to respect her charade. And she respects all of mine. That’s how our world has gone, fiction teetering on fiction.. And looking at her now I see she’s tired of it all.

I wonder who she’s told. If she’s told anyone. Ever. 

“Sooyeon…”

“We’re not like Mom,” she repeats, and looks up. Her eyes are glassy with tears. “Okay?”

But I am not the little girl who held her hand when we walked home. I am not the little girl who called our mom Umma. I have not seen Ddalgi in years. I meet her dark brown eyes and fight to keep my mouth from trembling. Looking at her now is like looking at a mirror.

“We’re her daughters,” I say, and then there is nothing more I can add.

 * * *

It is too hot inside the car. I don’t know why Sooyeon insisted on a black interior; when I hold my hand above the seat, I can practically feel the heat radiating off of the leather. I dally outside the car for as long as I can, leaning against the hot side. The parking lot isn’t busy. It’s not Fourth of July, and most families don’t visit after late afternoon. Sooyeon slides into the driver’s seat and motions for me to sit down. I wince when I breathe in the baking air and place my hands under my thighs to keep them from sticking to the gummy leather, but I know it’s futile.

I lean back gingerly and wince when my shoulders touch the seat. Sooyeon drops her phone in my lap. It is already unlocked and opened to her maps app with the directions queued. I have not known her passcode since she was still using an iPod and let me watch YouTube when I begged. “Just hit go,” she tells me. “Pick the fastest route.” 

In the cemetery, we didn’t have any more words for each other. We mostly just cried. I hadn’t heard her cry since the night of Halmoni’s funeral, when her sniffles reverberated through the bed we were sharing. At one point she leaned her head on my shoulder and I wrapped an arm around her waist and ran my fingers through her hair and wondered how long it had been since someone had done that for her, if Mom or Dad had ever done that for her, if I had ever thought to snuggle her back, and I found I couldn’t remember. When my legs went stiff and her tears stopped, I watched a legion of ants nibble at the peel of the Asian pear until she sat up and gathered all our trash, wiped off the knife and shot glasses, and put it all back in the bag. We packed up without saying a word.

Sooyeon presses skip, and the next song begins to play. It is familiar and soothing, piano, something I didn’t think I could like again. I turn the volume up. She refuses to look at me for the rest of the ride, but when I sneak glances at the side of her face, I think I see a ghost of a smile that dances in between the space of her lips and her cheek.