The guard motioned to another and together they tried to drag him away, to pry his fingers from the grate, the fingers that once used to entwine themselves in my hair, the fingers that now, without restraint, would have wound themselves around my throat. “Don’t come back here ever again!” he screamed as they dragged him away. “Never, never, come back…”
I never did.
9.
Back In The Closet Lays
There was nothing mysterious about the way Mr. Sung came into our lives. He came just as all the others had come. On a day in summer, about four years after Luca had gone to prison, with Rennie soon to celebrate—if that word could apply and it didn’t—her ninth birthday, he just walked up nice as you please, a little Oriental man in ragged clothes, who barely came up to my shoulder. When he smiled, his slanted eyes completely disappeared. Rennie hid behind my skirt in a fit of shyness.
“You rent room?” he asked.
An old reflex made me snap, “No, I don’t rent room. Who sent you here?”
“Men on train,” he answered.
Those old goats had never quite gotten it through their heads that Jewel was dead, I thought irritably, and that the inn hadn’t taken boarders in years. “Well, those train men are a pack of senile old liars,” I told him, pushing a clothespin over the line. “There’s no room at the inn.” I laughed bitterly at my unintended joke. “So you just go on up the road the way you came and get back on the train. They don’t like strangers around here, especially Chinese strangers.”
“I not Chinese,” he corrected me, smiling. “Korean.”
“It’s all the same. Whatever you are, I have no rooms to let.”
He started to turn away, when some memory of Jewel made me add, “Look, I’m sorry. I’d like to help you. But we’re women alone.”
He nodded, as if to show me he understood and did not think worse of me for it, and I went back to my laundry. When I turned around again, he was gone.
Rennie stood before me, a little storm cloud. “How could you send him away like that? I don’t think he had any place to go.”
“Don’t be like that,” I warned her. “We don’t know anything about that Chinaman. He could cut our throats during the night while we slept.”
“He could not.” She rolled her eyes at me. She was growing up and getting fresh, the way children without fathers often do. “The way you make us sleep together behind a bolted door, Jesus Christ couldn’t get to us.”
“My, my, what language from a little girl. What would your daddy say if he heard you?”
“He’ll never hear me,” she said morosely. “He’s never coming back. You said so yourself. He’s never coming back because you won’t write him and ask him to come back.”
“It’s not that, and you know it.” My words were garbled because of the clothespin in my mouth.
“Then why don’t you write to him?”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “He doesn’t write to me, does he?”
“Well, then, why can’t I write to him?” she persisted.
“We’ve been over this before. I won’t have you begging him to come home when he doesn’t want to. He wants to go back to Italy. That’s where he came from and he wants to go home.”
“How do you know what he wants? You haven’t seen him in four years.”
“You know something, missy, you’ve had an awful lot to say ever since you turned eight. You were much sweeter when you were seven and if you want to see nine, you better get out of my way before I take a switch to you.”
“We don’t have a switch.”
“I’ll make one then.”
She rolled her blue eyes to show she wasn’t the least bit intimidated. “What about the Korean man?”
“Who?”
“The Chinaman. Can we keep him?”
“He’s not a puppy, and more’s the pity. A puppy I’d keep,” I said, thinking she was Jewel all over again.
“Well, if Papa’s never coming back, it’d be nice to have a guest around the inn again. It’s very lonely sometimes,” she finished wistfully, and the thought of her loneliness softened my resolve.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know.”
“Please. I just know he will be good for us. Did you see his eyes?”
“Yes. They were slanted and black.”
“They were shining.”
“I don’t know. He’s probably back on the train by now.”
“He’s got short legs,” she said. “I can catch up with him. I know I can.”
“I don’t know. Maybe—but only for a few days.” She was off before I could change my mind, her gangly legs a blur of motion. “He better have money to pay,” I called after her. “I’m not about to start supporting Chinamen in my old age.” But she was already too far to hear.
Later, it struck me odd when Rennie told of how she’d found Mr. Sung again. First, she had gone to the train stop, but he wasn’t there. Then she went into the town, thinking he’d be looking for other lodging, but he wasn’t there either. Finally, she found him, of all places, sitting on his pack at the bottom of our lane, as if he was waiting for her. And that was how it always was to be with the Chinaman. If you said a thing was red and he knew it was blue, he wouldn’t contradict you. Instead he’d just wait in complete faith for the moment he knew would come when you saw it was blue on your own.
I’d never been the curious sort, and other people’s peculiarities drew me not at all. But Mr. Sung could have made a stone curious. There was his history, for example—he had none. The little man had come to this
