Drifting House by Krys Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

with you.”
    “I felt him, my brother!” his father said. “For just a little while, I felt him there. I won’t pretend our lives didn’t ­happen—”
    His mother blasted through his words.
    “You think too much,” she said, louder now. “He’s dead. They’re all dead. Just don’t think!”
    She was crying. It was the first time Mark had ever seen her cry. She said she was not going to let her son be infected by his inability to live in the present. There was more.
    “Appa,” Mark finally said, “you said that Omma was your translator for the world.
    “And, Omma, you said Appa was the gentlest man you know. You said Appa knew what mattered.”
    In this way, he tried to remind them of their obligations.
    “Don’t protect him,” his mother said. “He’s not even your biological father.”
    His father’s hands went up, as if he’d been hit.
    “He’s my son, too. That’s what we agreed,” he said. “We made this family together….”
    But Mark didn’t have a real father. He had emerged from his mother’s life in China as mysteriously as the idea of immaculate conception. There was only this man who could study a single tweedy sparrow for hours and make a protruding monkey jaw face that made the real monkey look fake. A man who spoke in sharp Mandarin sentences learned from years living in hiding in China, a man who told stories about his life as if they had happened to someone else. This was his father.
    For a time his parents only spoke to each other through Mark. He didn’t like these people anymore as his father became more depressed, and his mother became angrier. They conspired to make his life miserable by filling the house with his father’s growing gloom and his mother’s continual diatribes; they were being so unreasonable. As if they didn’t have a growing child on their hands. As if he didn’t matter to them anymore.
    He was feeling rebellious. At dinner he tapped his glass and announced his engagement to Chanhee Roh.
    “That’s illegal at your age,” his mother said. “You won’t remember the girl’s name by sixteen.”
    He told her that was impossible. She said he should make some ­forward-looking friends.
    “From now on,” she said, “you’re not allowed to see Chanhee at all.”
    She lit up with relief at the prospect of Chanhee’s banishment. When Mark looked at his father for help, his father spooned vegetable curry into his mouth and chewed, his mouth moving in a circle like a cow. He felt betrayed. He couldn’t eat; he was heroic with worry. Romeo and Juliet. Chunyang and Mongryeong. He wasn’t the first to experience families conspiring to keep love apart. The next day he malingered in bed. He refused food.
    His mother sighed. “We didn’t have food, and he’s choosing to starve for a girl whose name he won’t remember in two months.”
    His father said, “Don’t forget you’re angry at me, not Myeongseok.”
    Mark crossed his arms across his chest. “I’m a person of principles.”
    She slapped him, her hand as light as a young palm leaf on his cheek so it wasn’t much of a slap, and told him to apologize.
    He straightened up in bed. “Did you know that even George ­Washington—”
    “I don’t know anyone like that,” his mother said.
    “—that even America’s first president was scared of his mother?”
    On Sunday his mother locked him in the car after he threatened to tell the pastor that she stole rolls of toilet paper from the church bathroom. He no longer made an effort to entertain and educate his parents. Sometimes he missed the toilet when peeing, there was still nothing for him to shave, and he had only ayellow belt in tae kwon do after two years of lessons, but someday, oh, some glorious day, he vowed, he would protect the one he loved.
    The calendar informed him that it had been one week since the world became different. It felt like a year. Around then his mother reserved a motel room near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim for a