Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin Read Free Book Online Page A

“Mother.” It was the first time you had called her “Mother.” “Mother, let’s go to Seoul today.” Your mom replied, “Let’s go up into the mountains.”
    “The mountains?”
    “Yeah, the mountains.”
    “Is there a hiking trail from here?”
    “I’ve made one myself.”
    “Let’s go to Seoul and go to the hospital there.”
    “Later.”
    “Later when?”
    “When your niece’s entrance exam is over.” She was referring to Hyong-chol’s daughter.
    “You can go to the hospital with me instead of with Hyong-chol.”
    “I’m fine. It’ll be fine. I’m going to the doctor of Chinese medicine for it. I’m getting physical therapy, too, because they said something’s wrong with my neck.”
    You couldn’t persuade Mom—she kept insisting that she would go later. Then she asked you what the world’s smallest country was.
    The smallest country? You stared at Mom, a stranger asking you a random question: What is the smallest country in the world? Mom asked you to get rose rosary beads for her if you ever went to that country.
    “Rose rosary beads?”
    “Prayer beads made of rosewood.” She looked at you listlessly.
    “Do you need prayer beads?”
    “No, I just want prayer beads from that country.” Mom stopped and let out a deep sigh. “If you ever go there, get me a set.”
    You were quiet.
    “Because you can go anywhere.”
    Your conversation with Mom stopped there. She didn’t say another word in the kitchen. After the breakfast of steamed octopus, you and your mom left the house. You went across afew paddies in the mountains that rimmed the back of the village and stepped onto a trail in the hills. Even though it wasn’t a path people used, the trail was clear. The thick layers of oak leaves on the ground cushioned your feet. Sometimes the branches that reached into the trail hit your face. Mom, who was ahead of you, pushed the branches back for you. She let go of them after you walked through. A bird flew away.
    “Do you come here often?”
    “Yes.”
    “With who?”
    “Nobody. There’s nobody who would come with me.”
    Mom walked this path by herself? You really couldn’t say you knew Mom. It was a dark path for anyone to walk alone. At some parts, the bamboos were so dense that you couldn’t see the sky.
    “Why do you walk here by yourself?”
    “I came here once after your aunt died, and I kept coming back.”
    After a while, Mom stopped on top of a hill. When you came up next to her and looked where she was looking, you shouted, “Oh, this path!” It was a path you had completely forgotten about, the shortcut to your mom’s mother’s house, which you used to take when you were young. Even after they built the big road that passed through the village, people often used this mountain trail. It was the path you had taken one day when your grandmother was busy preparing for her ancestral rites, a live chicken trailing behind you on a rope. You had dropped the rope and lost the chicken. Though you had looked for it everywhere, you weren’t able to find it. Where had that chicken gone? Had the trail changed so much? You used to be able to walk this path with your eyes closed, but now, if itweren’t for the hill, you wouldn’t have known it was the same path. Mom stood there, staring at the place where her mother’s house once stood. Nobody lived there anymore. The people from that village, which once must have numbered fifty households, had all moved away. A few empty houses hadn’t been torn down, but it was a village that people had stopped coming to. So Mom had come here by herself to look down at the empty village she was born in? You wrapped your arm around her waist, and suggested again that she come to Seoul with you. Mom didn’t reply, and instead brought up the dog. You had been curious when you first noticed that the dog wasn’t in the doghouse, but you hadn’t had a chance to ask.
       A year before, when you’d gone home in the summer, there was a