In the center of the walkway between stores, Miguel was speaking to Alma, who was crying and blotting her eyes with a wad of tissue. Margot stashed the cash in her cross-body purse and joined them. Alma reached out her arms for a hug, and Margot fell into them.

She had known Alma for about twenty years, since after the LA riots—all that shattered glass and black smoke—that had destroyed her mother’s first store, a couple miles away in another, much tidier swap meet, where the individual shops each had proper walls and rollup steel gates. Alma had watched Margot grow up across the aisle between their stores—an aisle both narrow with the merchandise racks that overflowed, and immeasurably wide because of the different languages and cultures between them, oceanic in distance. Alma’s round face and plump skin hardly seemed to age as Margot went through each awkward stage of her own development—a shy only child with pigtails or a neat bob, a preteen who bleached and dyed her hair navy blue in the middle of the night and smoked cigarettes after school, and a much more conservative college student who understood that getting a degree might be the only way of escaping this life.

Tears spilled from Margot’s eyes. Alma pulled away and put her hands on Margot’s cheeks and said, “Pobrecita,” hugging her again.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Miguel asked in Spanish.

“The last time I saw her was . . . about two weeks ago,” Alma said as they parted. “Before Thanksgiving. Maybe the weekend before Thanksgiving.”

Wiping her eyes, Margot could understand most of the Spanish in a casual context, but as with her Korean, she struggled with putting words together on the spot. Her fear of sounding silly or being misunderstood acted as a sieve through which all language had to pass. Any speaking, even in English, often proved difficult for this reason, but foreign languages had a more gelatinous texture in her mind, flowing even more slowly to and from her mouth.

“She took the entire weekend off?” Margot asked in English to herself. “That doesn’t make sense.” Margot’s mother worked on every holiday, including Thanksgiving and Christmas, when she closed the store a few hours earlier than usual. On Thanksgiving Day, they’d sometimes order chicken from KFC—extra crispy drumsticks and thighs that they’d dip in hot sauce. And Wednesday was the only day that the entire swap meet closed on a regular basis. This meant that Alma must’ve seen her mother last on the Tuesday before the Saturday or Sunday when her mother died.

“Did you notice anything strange or different about her?” Miguel asked.

“She did seem sad these past couple months,” Alma said. “Very sad.”

“Do you know why?” Margot asked.

“At first, I thought maybe something happened to you, but when I asked her, she said you were fine, that you had a good job, you liked Seattle a lot.” She blew her nose. “Then I thought maybe . . . she was having some kind of emergency, like a family emergency or a death, in Korea, and that’s why she’s been gone so long.” She motioned for Margot and Miguel to wait as she grabbed a box of tissues from her store. “I thought she was in Korea this whole time. Maybe someone in her family had died, or someone was sick. I could tell that she was very sad about something or someone.”

The obituary that Margot had found last night: cancer, supermarket, wife, Calabasas, church. Seeing the photograph, tiny and black-and-white, was like staring at a ghost of herself. She could feel herself sinking under the waves, the salt of the seawater in her mouth. It was all too much—first, her mother’s death, an accident; then, a potential murder; and now, a possible father gone forever. Was her mother grieving him? Was he the same boyfriend, the visitor with the fancy car, the Mercedes that the landlord had mentioned to Margot? Why else would she have saved his obituary? He had to be important to her mother. But if he had died in October, at whom had her mother been yelling?

Was her mother’s death really an accident?

In the walkway made narrow by the amount of merchandise displayed by each store, a woman who sold champurrado from a wheeled cart squeezed behind Margot, Miguel, and Alma, leaving a trail of hot chocolate, cinnamon, and masa in the air.

“Did she have any visitors?” Miguel asked. “No, not that I know of.” Alma paused, reaching for Margot’s hand. “Do you want some water?”

“No, no, thank you.”

“She talked a lot with the Korean lady over there.” Alma gestured to a store somewhere behind hers. “Do you know her? The one with the sock shop?”

“The sock shop?”

“Yes, socks, underwear, pajamas, stuff like that.” She blew her nose again. “She’s kind of new, opened her store earlier this year. They became friends fast, or they seemed to be friends already, very close.”

Margot asked Alma if she could keep an eye on her mother’s unlocked store as they left to find the sock shop owner. Around the corner, in the maze of mostly makeshift stalls, each store blasted its own genre of Spanish-language music (pop, bachata, banda), punctuated by the distant cry of a caged pet-shop bird or a section of lullabies emitting from plastic toys. At the sight of tiered displays on wheels with stacks of white socks sold in bundles forming half of the perimeter of a store, Margot and Miguel paused.

“This must be the place,” she said.

Seductive lingerie hung above the entryways, lacy corsets and nightgowns filled with the breasts of wire-framed hangers shaped into the torsos of women. One pair of scarlet panties, which came with a matching teddy, had a cartoon elephant face and snout at the crotch.

Under the brash fluorescent light, the store owner stood leaning on a glass display case with rows of conservative, pastel cotton panties stacked inside. With her head bowed and a ballpoint pen in hand, she studied the classifieds of the Korean newspaper. She looked up as Margot and Miguel walked into her shop.

Margot couldn’t help but start at the sight of her face—elegant, long, out of place. Although perhaps in her sixties, she wore bright red lipstick, which seemed tacky and beautiful and defiant all at once. Her eyebrows were perfectly penciled crescents, like slivers of the moon. A midnight blue fleece peacoat with pills along the sleeves swaddled a slender dancer’s frame.

Margot bowed her head. “Uh, my Korean is really bad.”

“That’s okay,” the woman said in English with a Southern accent that surprised Margot. “Can I help you?”

“Did you know the owner of the women’s clothing store over there?”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” she said, voice shaking.

“We were just wondering when the last time you saw her was,” Miguel said.

“She—she’s been gone for a while.” She squinted, laying the pen down. “I’ve been worried about her. Why do you ask?”

“I’m her daughter,” Margot said. “This is my friend Miguel.”

The woman widened her eyes, then squinted, creasing the foundation on her face.

“Oh,” she said, as if she had just recognized Margot somehow.

But Margot didn’t find her familiar at all. She could tell that the sock lady, like Margot’s mother, might have been beautiful once. The theater of her face told a story, and a rich, sad one at that. Women like her and her mother were always struggling to stay above water, their faces floating on top while their legs treaded frantically underneath. They might wash up dead on the shore one day—like her mother on the carpet.

“You’ve changed so much,” the woman said, breathless.

“Excuse me?”

“I didn’t recognize you at first. Your hair. I guess you wouldn’t remember me.” The woman pointed to herself. “Mrs. Baek?”

“No.” Margot shook her head. “I don’t remember you at all.”

Mrs. Baek exhaled with a loud puff and smiled tenderly. “We all lived in the same house together until you were maybe three or four.” Her eyes softened, revealing a touch of sentimentality that surprised Margot, who had no recollection of that time before the riots, before the apartment that they lived in now. According to her mother, when she had first arrived in Los Angeles from Korea in 1987, she had rented a room in a house, gotten pregnant with Margot, and lived there for a few years until the landlady died in 1991. She had then purchased the landlady’s clothing store at a discount from the landlady’s adult children, the same shop that would be mostly destroyed one year later in the riots. At the time she had purchased that first store, her mother had moved herself and Margot to their apartment in Koreatown. She had never mentioned Mrs. Baek or any housemates.

“Your mother used to bring you to the restaurant that I worked at, Hanok House. Do you remember? It looked like an old traditional house, lots of wood everywhere.”

“I don’t remember that,” Margot said, a little embarrassed.

For a few seconds, Mrs. Baek’s face shattered as if the memory had smashed something open that she had been guarding inside. Her red lips hardened into a line. Margot could sense Mrs. Baek closing off somehow. She had to reel her back in. She needed answers.