“I started out as a setup guy at the Bronx store where my wife was working. The owner was a good man, hiring me when he could’ve gotten anyone much younger. It was a favor to my wife. She was an honest worker, and he knew that. In a few years, I was basically managing the store. A tiny store, just my wife and I, and a few Mexican kids. The work was hard, but we were happy. We were building something together, finally a new life in a new land. I wonder sometimes if that wasn’t the happiest time of my life. She and I, starting a life together for the second time, like newlyweds almost…” He pauses suddenly, as if struck by the image of the two together. An early morning, and the sun gloriously shining upon the stalls of fruit. The ripe yellow of plantains, the green hills of Hass avocados, the firm blush of McIntosh apples. Fruits were a sign of home then. A different kind of home from what he had known before, from what he knows now, not this studio apartment he crawls into for sleep.
All Suzy can do is listen. She is afraid of breaking his spell, although she cannot quite make sense of his story. Was that why his wife committed suicide? Because she could not conceive? But why thirteen years ago? The woman must have been in her late forties by then. What does this have to do with her parents?
“Sometimes I think maybe she was right. If we’d been able to have children, she might not have been so rash, or so heartless,” he mutters as if to himself, as if he’s reached the limit of his memory. He never talks this much. He never gets visitors. He is sucking on his Marlboro as though it is the only life left in him. He then says without looking up, “But that didn’t help your parents, did it, to have you and your sister.”
Suzy is startled by this sudden turn. She stares at him, although she cannot see his eyes. Finally, she asks, “What makes you say that?”
“Because you wouldn’t be here otherwise. You wouldn’t be so sure they’d wronged me.”
It only occurs to her now how odd it is for her to be here, to show up at the house of someone who might have had reasons to hurt her parents. Why did she come to him instead of notifying the police? Why was she so quick to believe Mr. Lee’s claim? Why didn’t she give her parents the benefit of the doubt? By showing up here, by asking this strange man for an explanation, she seems to have already made up her mind. Behind the murder, the guilt lay with her parents.
Whose side is she on?
The air feels stuck. Its lumpy clouds surround her, and she can barely breathe. She walks over to the sink. She takes two glasses from the shelf and fills them with water. She puts one glass in front of him before sitting down.
“Thank you,” he says, reaching for the glass. He looks exhausted. Aged, she thinks. It is clear that he is done talking. Almost three o’clock, long past his bedtime. Although, today, it does not seem likely that he would be able to fall asleep. The cigarette has burned itself out, the ashes drooping limp and long, still hanging on to the filter. The room has gotten much darker, as though the sun outside has given up. And the two mourners in their devastated corners.
Neither will speak. He won’t speak anymore. He is waiting for her to leave.
Why is she here?
She suddenly becomes aware of her parents gazing at her from all corners. She can almost hear them, feel their eyes on her. She rises abruptly, as if fleeing. With her right hand, she brushes back a strand of her hair falling in her face.
“I should’ve recognized you right away,” he says, walking her to the door. “You take after your mother, more than your sister does.”
Suzy pauses, turning to face him.
“Has Grace been here too?”
“Yes, several years ago, a few months before your parents’ deaths maybe. She wasn’t like you, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“She had only one question.” He smiles faintly, his hand around the doorknob. “She asked where my wife was buried. Montauk, I told her.”
13.
IT IS AFTER FOUR O’CLOCK when Suzy finds herself sitting on a bench at Bryant Park, on 42nd Street. The wind is cold against her skin, crisp, refreshing. Darkness sneaks in with a tinge of green, the way it does when autumn turns to winter overnight. The trees are drained of color. Suzy prefers the parks in winter. Their bareness comforts her.
It’s been a long day, from the morning bus ride to New Jersey to the trip to Queens. She would have been happy to go straight home. But while waiting for the R train at Rego Park Station, she noticed Mr. Lim on the opposite platform, their next-door neighbor when they lived in Flushing many years ago. He and his wife had shown up at her parents’ funeral, which surprised Suzy because she vaguely recalled a sort of falling-out between him and Dad. He did not exactly acknowledge her then. He seemed aware of the circumstances in which she had shamed her parents. Korean elders never look kindly at daughters whose filial piety is in question. His wife tried to meet her eyes a few times, but Suzy pretended not to notice, not feeling up to polite greetings.
Mr. Lim had also been a truck deliveryman. During his early years of delivery work, Dad used to call him for tips. The selection of fruits and vegetables depends on the neighborhood. Harlem stores needed more bananas than others. The ones in the Hispanic neighborhoods couldn’t do without yucca roots and plantains. And the Manhattan stores, the Upper East Side especially, carried the most expensive fruits, like mangoes and raspberries and papayas. The trick is to figure out which wholesalers carry the best grapes, and which ones to avoid for melons. It was Mr. Lim who showed Dad where to go for half-priced bananas on Friday mornings, and whom to enlist for extra help during Thanksgiving seasons. But then, at some point, Mr. Lim bought a store on Lexington Avenue. Manhattan, Dad exclaimed, where rents are steep and employees cost a fortune! After visiting his store, Dad couldn’t stop talking about his impeccable salad bar. From grape leaves to California rolls to vegetable tempura to kimchi, imagine charging as much as $4.99 per pound! Whoever knew Americans would develop such continental taste buds? You’d think they had never lived without salmon maki or chicken tandoori! Koreans are responsible for that, you know, the craze over world cuisine at your fingertips, it all started with our salad bars! But then, soon afterward, Dad stopped calling Mr. Lim. In fact, the mere mention of his name made Dad twitch in anger. Something to do with money. Dad needed a loan, and Mr. Lim seemed to have refused.
Suzy was about to wave at him across the track when she noticed something strange. A group of boys and girls were straggling around him, as though a nearby school had just let out for the day. Amidst the giddy teenagers in oversized parkas and baggy jeans, he cut a lonely figure, huddled in a dark overcoat, facing the black tunnel from which a train might come hurtling any minute. He hadn’t seen her yet, or if he had, he was pretending not to have. She had been only nine or ten when she last saw him in Flushing, and at the funeral she barely paid him any attention. But now, in the dimness of the underground, she noticed something oddly familiar about the way he stood with his head cocked to one side, about thirty degrees to his right. What was he doing here anyway, on a subway platform in the middle of the day? Why wasn’t he at work? Has he moved to this part of Queens now? At that very moment, the R train flew down the track with a roar, landing at her feet. She jumped in automatically, quickly turning to the window to find him still on the other platform. She thought she saw him turn to stare directly at her as the train gained speed. And it was not until a few stops later—between Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, where the train got stuck for fifteen minutes—that it dawned on her that Mr. Lim’s peculiar posture had reminded her of the man who’d stood by the Montauk lighthouse in the rain.