It is June summer fiction serial month at Koreanish. Here are parts 1, 2 and 3, for those just arriving. And yes, I’m writing this as the month goes along. Next week, the finale.
Katie’s boyfriend was soon sending his best friend to pick her up most of the time. At work the next day she was quiet and when I asked her about how her night was, she just shrugged. She never said much more about it than she did that first night, instead taking to it not only without complaint, but soon seeming to like it. Geoff didn’t drink much, while Derrick drank more and more. And the more Derrick drank, the more Geoff seemed to like being Derrick’s go-to guy. Katie, I think, felt special, like Derrick had sent a car for her. Even if it was Geoff’s pick-up. Soon it was nothing special to see Geoff’s truck in front of the CVS at closing time, waiting for her.
Later, when people thought it was maybe Geoff’s baby, she rolled her eyes when she heard. From me–we were at work. “They would,” Katie said. “They fucking would.” And then she looked at me for a minute. “Just because he let Geoff do the driving doesn’t mean he let him do the driving.” We laughed about that one pretty hard, until we hid behind the counter, as if that meant our laughter couldn’t be heard down the aisles.
I’d overheard this at school and decided to tell her. By then we were like old friends. I was four months into the job. My checks were tiny but I knew my mother felt better every time she watched me come in from work and put my blue and white CVS vest on the barstool in the kitchen, and I, I felt a different kind of pride for being on the inside of the biggest scandal at school, which was no longer me. Katie’s pregnancy was interesting to me, a scandal partly because she not only announced it, she had no apparent shame about it: “What,” she said, of her decision to share the news. “Like you weren’t gonna know?” And then she said, “I’m keeping it, too.” In her senior photo for yearbook, she fought for the right to show how far along she was. Derrick offered to marry her but she turned him down.
I thought it was wrong, I also thought it was beautiful. This confused me but also made it seem important. I was young, and it was my first time having that experience.
* * * *
Her brother that day didn’t seem to know much about this at all. At the bar we found near Whole Foods, we sat and talked amid several awkward silences. I worried that his sister was dead at one point, that I would find out in some way I couldn’t bear. But instead he pulled out his wallet, and he showed me the picture she’d sent recently of her and her son. Who was the spitting image of my dad when he was that age. Something he wasn’t likely to know.
I smiled as I felt my heart burn. It was me, then. All this time it had been me.
“He’s cute,” I said.
“Yeah. He is. He looks like he’s got some Indian blood, right?”
“Cherokee maybe,” I said.
“That’s what I was thinking! But she won’t say and honestly, my sister is like the Olympics.”
I said nothing, because out of something like scientific curiosity, I wanted to hear what he would say next.
“Open to countries from around the world,” he said, and then laughed like a maniac, until I punched him and sent him flying down off his stool. He shook is head, whipping blood from his nose around him, blinking in surprise. He had thought he was talking about Bob, her ex from before Derrick. He hadn’t thought it was me. But then no one, including me, had ever thought it was me. Except maybe Katie. And she had said nothing.
