Necessary Roughness (3 page)

“Not in front of the children,
” O-Ma murmured. She sounded broken.

Young turned her face away from me and hid it under her hair, but not before I saw a tear slide down her nose.

It’s weird how, when you’re a kid, you think your parents can do anything: they have an answer for all your questions, they always have everything under control.

Especially Abogee. He always seemed so sure, like if he said “Jump,” you’d say “How high?” But he doesn’t know everything. I never realized how bad his English is. Back in L.A., Abogee got the Korean suppliers to give us their best stuff for the lowest prices—and he didn’t take anyone’s crap. So why did he have to smile so much while that guy was chewing us out today?

“It’ll be okay,” I whispered to Young.

I tried to ignore the cold feeling creeping up my gut, that maybe O-Ma and Abogee did not have everything under control, that maybe they didn’t know what to do any more than Young and I did.

When the sun filtered through the ratty curtains, it took me a few seconds to remember where we were: the Hell Motel.

I got up, took another shower, and waited for everyone else. I always like getting up early; maybe it’s because everyone else is asleep and I feel like I rule the world.

While I waited, I flipped through the Iron River phone book. I checked
APARTMENTS.
The Irongate Apartments were followed by another listing, the Stover Houses. For a small town, this place had a lot of apartment houses.

“O-Ma, Abogee, there’s another apartment-house complex here,”
I said, before thinking that some people might like to sleep.

Abogee’s eyes were hooded with fatigue. He looked like a lizard waking up. He sighed, looked at his watch as if we had some important appointments to keep, and said,
“We might as well go see it.”

*  *  *

We found the Stover Houses in the middle of town, catty-corner to the public library.

“Look, Young,” I said. “We’ll be able to walk to the library.” Young is the one who likes books. I’m the one who can’t live without
Sports Illustrated.

“I like this,” she said, looking up at the brick building, which had an enormous porch with all sorts of plants on it.

Abogee went in by himself. I’m sure he’s convinced I did something to screw up or jinx that last visit. Last night I’d heard him murmuring to O-Ma something about how I’d spoken out of turn, how I don’t respect my elders, how I’m starting to turn wild. That’s me, Chan Kim, wild man.

Of course he didn’t say a thing about Bong, who’d gotten us into this mess in the first place. O-Ma didn’t argue with him too much. I think she was pretty tired.

Abogee came out.

“No places here,”
he said.

“How could that be?”
I said.
“The sign says ‘Rooms to let.’”

“She said it’s full.”
There was a warning note in his voice. I bit my tongue, although I had my suspicions that maybe our fat buddy had phoned up Mrs. Stover Houses and told her not to take us. Or maybe Mrs. Stover didn’t like Koreans.

The scaredy-gut feeling clawed at me again.

Where would we go? Would we end up in rags, driving Lou endlessly through town as we scrounged for our dinner in garbage cans? Might we become Iron River’s first homeless people?

“Abogee, what’ll we do?”
I blurted.

“Quiet! I’m trying to think.”
His forehead was slashed with creases.

We all stood. The silence in our conversation was punctuated only by the twittering of birds.

“We should try chamber of commerce,” O-Ma said finally, clearly and brightly in English.

“Huh! What that gonna do?” Abogee challenged her.

“They know where businesses are,” O-Ma reasoned. I was surprised to see her turn around and walk into the Stover Houses without even pretending to wait for Abogee’s approval.

She came back out and pointed in the direction of the library. “On Main Street; we can walk. Mrs. Stover said okay to keep car here.”

Abogee grumbled, but he led the way.

I noticed, as we passed the library, that it didn’t have one little streak of graffiti on it. Not a one. This town was like a movie set.

The chamber of commerce looked like an advertising hut. Banners for the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs adorned the desk, where a lady sat expectantly. A poster on
the wall touted a summer boat show up at some Whatchamagoober Lake. On another wall hung a framed etching of what looked like the Grand Canyon but was labeled
STEAM SHOVEL MINE, 1898
.

“Hello,” the lady said. “Can I help you?”

Abogee was about to say something, but O-Ma gracefully inserted herself.

“Hello, I am Ok-Hee Kim and this is my family. We are new here, and we need place to live for a while.”

The lady was wearing those glasses with the tiny lenses that made it seem like you needed tiny eyes to look through them. She smiled. Her smile seemed kind.

“Have you tried the Irongate Apartments or the Stover Houses?” she asked. “Both are very nice.”

“Oh yes, they very nice,” O-Ma said. “But we look for something little bit cheaper and maybe less like hotel, you know?”

“Oh, of course,” the lady said, opening up a small box of index cards. “Mrs. Evie Knutson has been looking for someone to rent the top floor of her house for some time since her husband died. Let me copy down the address for you.”

Mrs. Knutson’s house turned out to be exactly across the street from the library. Hers was a large, slightly dilapidated place. The lawn was overgrown with weeds that were choking the
ROOM FOR RENT
sign.

“You get car,” O-Ma said to us. “I go talk to Mrs. Knutson.”

We drove our bucket of bolts into an alley in order to reach the driveway in the back of the house. Through the screen door, O-Ma’s voice tinkled gently, like wind chimes.

We knocked, and a warbly voice told us to come in. O-Ma was sitting at a table talking to an elderly lady whose white hair was tucked in a neat bun. She looked like Grandma Moses.

“What a lovely family!” she gushed, extending her hand to Abogee. He looked bewildered and took her hand very gently, as if she were handing him a baby bird.

“You have a lovely daughter and a very handsome boy,” she said to O-Ma, who smiled. She gave Young and me each a butterscotch candy.

The next thing I knew, I was lugging the Buddha and our boxes up a flight of lopsided stairs. Upstairs there were two rooms, a big one and a small one. Abogee started throwing Young’s and my stuff in the small one, which smelled faintly of mothballs.

“There’s a room in the attic,”
he said.
“Mrs. Knutson said it’s drafty, but Chan, you can sleep up there, if you want.”

Young and I peered closer at the room before us. I could almost touch the opposite walls if I spread my arms. There were shelves already built on one wall. I
couldn’t help wondering if Mrs. Knutson used it as a closet. We looked at each other again and then went to search for the attic.

There was a rope hanging from the ceiling, and when I pulled on it, a door with stairs built into it emerged. It was like a reverse trapdoor.

“Cool,” said Young as I unfolded the stairs.

The attic was unfinished: on half of it, insulation covered the boards like a carpet of pink cotton candy. The other half was clear, but looked like it hadn’t been swept out since the Civil War. Shadows of miscellaneous junk lurked ominously in the corners.

“Don’t feel like you have to sleep up here,” Young said.

Actually, I was thinking that this place might be decent, relatively speaking. I had a sudden hunger for my own space.

“I’ll try my luck here, Sis.”

I would have made a good monk: I have very few possessions. I carried my stuff up in one trip, piled it on an old overstuffed chair, and swept out the floor with a broom and dustpan that Mrs. Knutson gave me. O-Ma came up later with some oil soap, saying she wanted to make sure it was really clean, since I’d be sleeping on it. We didn’t have beds. O-Ma and Abogee had decided that we would just bring all our quilts and sleep Korean style, maybe buy furniture later.

“This isn’t so bad, is it?”
she asked. She smoothed the hair falling into my eyes just the way she’d smoothed the bedding a few minutes ago.

I suddenly wanted to tell O-Ma how proud I was about how she had handled everything today. But as always, when I want to say something nice, something totally stupid and whiny comes out.

“I wish we had our own place.”

“So do I. But don’t you think this is a nice way to get started? Mrs. Knutson seems so kind.”

“But we don’t even have a kitchen.”

“Mrs. Knutson has a nice one, downstairs.”

“You’re going to share?”

“We’ll work something out,”
O-Ma said.

“You’re good at working things out,”
I said, relieved that I finally said something positive.

“I think I’ll try to learn to cook more American food,”
she said determinedly.
“Now, you be good and help your father, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. O-Ma crept down the stairs and pushed them back up. The springs snapped the door tightly back into place, and the room went black.

I lay in the warm blanket of darkness, smelling the faint scent of oil soap. Our future was outside, leaning black and heavy against the house. It scared me, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

The next day O-Ma took us to register for school. We went in Lou, because the school was on the edge of town. That was the problem with Iron River: since there was nothing other than prairie out here, it seemed the town thought it might as well spread out.

Iron River High School was actually in an imposing building. It had columns outside the front door like the Parthenon, and a huge lawn that some poor soul had obviously taken a good deal of care in mowing. There was also a track, a football field, and tennis courts.

The inside of the school was like something preserved for a museum: floors waxed and gleaming, rows of shiny lockers, not a single one bent or graffitied. At El Caldero High, such a sight would’ve been considered a miracle, like when the face of Jesus appeared in a tortilla this lady was frying.

“Much cleaner than your old school, don’t you think?” O-Ma asked us in English. I could tell she was
practicing up for meeting the principal. She looked calm, but the hand that clutched the folder with our school records was a hand with a mission. You couldn’t have pried that thing away from her.

We followed the trophy cases, which contained rows of gleaming trophies and framed pictures of sports teams, plaques in the shape of Minnesota. We found the door marked
PRINCIPAL
and bumped into the big man himself, Mr. Ripanen. His office was right there when you came in—you didn’t have to be admitted through several sets of doors like at our school.

“Hello, hello, the Kim family,” he boomed, extending his hands in welcome.

“Yes, I was the one who call earlier,” O-Ma said, almost shyly.

“Come in, come in,” he said, ushering us into the office. We let O-Ma sit closest to him. He had a poster that said rr
TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAISE A CHILD
over his desk. Sujin would love it, I was thinking.

Young’s school report caught his eye right away.

“Young has a great record,” he said, looking from me to her, as if he were trying to figure out which was which. I know we looked alike as babies—the same hair that stuck up like a mad scientist’s, the same black-comma eyes—but this was ridiculous.

“Let’s see, just about straight A’s, a few—just a few—math awards.” He leaned back in his chair, a
finger to his lips as if he were trying to keep a laugh or something inside.

“She was first runner-up in the state math contest,” O-Ma volunteered. “And she was just accepted into L.A. Young People’s Orchestra.”

He seemed slightly relieved, and wheeled his chair to face Young head-on. He asked her about her interests, and she said she’d like to find an orchestra as well as get in some higher-level math courses, since she had already taken trig.

“We have a very good marching band,” Mr. Ripanen said. “They’ve played all over the state.” Young smiled politely. I think for her the idea of playing her precious silver flute in some band was about as inviting as mud wrestling. “And we’ll see about those classes.”

“And you’re Chan,” he said to me. I wasn’t sure if that was a question, but I nodded my head to be on the safe side. He scanned my record. I’m pretty much a B/occasional-A student, but let me tell you, that still requires an effort.

“Very good,” he said diplomatically. He asked me what my interests were. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to sound like a moron next to Young.

“I like to read,” I said finally, even though both Young and O-Ma were looking at me in surprise. “I’m glad we live by the library.”

“Good, good,” Mr. Ripanen said heartily. “Good to
be a reader. My son’s a reader, absolutely
loves
books.”

I was thinking about mentioning soccer, but after he said that, I decided that his kid was probably a geek, so I shouldn’t risk upsetting him. For a guy that big to have a geeky kid, that must be a drag. Besides, O-Ma and Abogee—especially Abogee—have never counted sports as a legit school activity.

“Anyone can build muscle,”
Abogee would say, pointing to his arm. Then he’d point to his head.
“But building brain, that’s much tougher.”

“And what about school bus?” O-Ma asked.

Mr. Ripanen looked puzzled.

“What about it?”

“Where do children pick it up?”

Mr. Ripanen still looked puzzled. “You live on Howard Street, by the library, right?”

O-Ma nodded.

“There isn’t a bus.” Mr. Ripanen looked amused.

“But it’s so far,” O-Ma protested.

“The only kids who get bus service are the ones in Neeshawatin, which is almost an hour away. You should see what a headache it is getting them here when it snows.”

So Young and I were going to walk to school every day, rain, shine—or snow. Argh. I know most people think Californians jump in their car to visit their next-door neighbors, but that’s an exaggeration. We
were a mile from school.
Definitely
driving distance.