“Some pasta. Spaghetti,” Margot said. “What about you?”

“Doenjang guk.” For years, Mina would wake up before sunrise to make her daughter a large pot of soup or stew for the day. She couldn’t bear her daughter coming home from school and not having anything nutritious to eat, so she filled her food with as many vegetables as she could afford—zucchini, carrots, peppers, and onions. Even though her daughter craved American meals, she wanted her daughter to always think of their home as, if not the most comfortable place, a shelter in which she’d never go without food. Wasn’t that the most heartbreaking thing for any parent in the world? To know their child was hungry. Sometimes she wondered if perhaps being separated from her own mother might’ve protected them from enduring the pain of watching each other whittle away until they became nothing—bones in the dirt that would be broken by bombs, by soldiers’ boots.

But no, nothing was worse than losing each other; nothing was worse than being lost. It was as if she and her parents were both half dead and half alive—haunting each other at once. It was almost worse than death. Purgatory.

“Everything okay?” Margot asked.

“Yes, everything okay. You?”

“Busy. A lot of work,” Margot said in Korean.

“That’s good. Being busy is good.”

“How’s the store?” Margot asked.

She didn’t want her daughter to worry, her daughter who, despite her upbringing and how little Mina could provide, managed to go to college and find a nice office job. She knew that her daughter had college loans to pay, her own rent and bills. And Mina was proud of her, too. At church or at the swap meet, she bragged about her, the one that got away, concealing the wound of abandonment beneath her pride.

“Business is slow, but it’s okay,” Mina said. “I get bored a lot. Not a lot of customers these days.”

“Why don’t you learn English? Do you want me to buy you some books so that you can learn?”

“It’s too hard for me now.”

“Why don’t you try? You can learn,” Margot said in English. “You have time.”

Her daughter would never understand why she couldn’t make the time to learn a language that would never accept her—especially at her age now. What would be the point? She was in her sixties and couldn’t find a job anywhere except at a swap meet or at a restaurant in Koreatown. She didn’t know a single English language speaker except for her daughter, who only visited once per year. What was the point of learning a language that brought you into the fold of a world that didn’t want you? Did this world want her? No. It didn’t like the sound of her voice.

“Why don’t you learn Korean?” Mina asked sharply.

“I’m not bored.” Margot paused, formulating her words in Korean. “There’s no time. I don’t have a use for it.”

Mrs. Baek laughing flashed in Mina’s mind: I have music. I don’t need a boyfriend. I’m busy. I’m not bored. I’m never bored.

Would Margot ever realize that when Mina said she was bored, she was trying to say that she was lonely? Bored was a much easier word to say, wasn’t it? She was tired of fighting with her daughter to move back to LA, to come back home. And she didn’t need her daughter to lecture her. She had been through enough already. What did her daughter, American-born, know about time, about survival, about usefulness? What did she know about boredom? About loneliness?

Mina had spent so many years dedicated to her business, growing and tending the inventory like her own garden, earning pride in something she owned. But now that there were fewer customers, she had little to distract herself anymore. She couldn’t afford to replace broken or old hangers anymore. The racks and rounders had grown bare of clothes. Now only the poorest of customers remained, the ones who haggled and walked away because they could sense her desperation, her fear that she, in her age, would have to again find another way to keep the roof over her head. For their essentials, the other customers drove to big-box stores where they knew they could always get the best deals, where they might become, in some ways, finally American, where the exchange of items—money for shampoo, a new dress for a first date, cough syrup, a sweater for Grandma—might come without any emotional response, familiarity, or bond.

She had felt the slow creep of sadness overwhelm her as she realized now that all she had built could not survive. Her business had become her child, hadn’t it? What would or could she do next in this life with so little money and so little time?

“Okay, well, take care of yourself. Get some rest soon,” Mina said before hanging up the phone.

She had diverted herself with work all these years. How could she tell her daughter, who had such a limited understanding of Korean, what she had been through, why she couldn’t learn English, why she had chosen this life, how much she loved Margot, how much she was both proud of and frightened by her daughter, who was sharp and quick and strong? Her daughter had to be, of course, because of how she had been raised. They had raised each other in a way. She loved her daughter. She would do anything for her.

But she would never, ever learn English. She didn’t care. She hated the way the language sounded in her mouth, out of her lips—stilted and childlike. And when she did attempt to speak to someone on the phone, or at the DMV, she often got dirty looks or harsh, condescending responses. She didn’t need a language that wasn’t big enough for her, didn’t want to make room for her.

She had been through enough, hadn’t she? She had church. She had God. She was fine. She didn’t need anyone at all. This was her language. This was the story she told herself to survive.

AFTER ANOTHER SLEEPLESS NIGHT, MINA RUSHED BACK to her shop from the restroom, washed coffee mug and dish soap in hand, and bumped into a small yet powerful figure. She appeared out of nowhere like a sudden earthquake.

Mina’s insides swayed like hanging lights. The mug smashed to the ground. “Mrs. Baek?”

Together they bent to recover the pieces scattered along the painted walkway where merchandise hung above or leaned on display carts in an explosion of goods from children’s toys to sneakers, diet green teas, herbal tinctures.

As she cradled the half-broken mug, filled with its shards, in one hand, Mina unconsciously grabbed Mrs. Baek’s arm with the other. It surprised her how tight her grip was on this now stranger, and Mrs. Baek didn’t even flinch. She was that strong.

“Do you work here?” Mrs. Baek asked, eyes wide.

“Yes.” Mina could feel herself slipping below the surface of the water. She had tried not to think about their past for so long—and here she was now.

“I opened a store around the corner,” Mrs. Baek said. “A sock shop.”

How many years had it been since they had last seen each other? Over twenty. Her voice—urgent and husky—had remained familiar but her face had ripened into a theater of surprising beauty with lips perfectly lined, a striking shade of red. They seemed to float in the sky toward Mina like an object of surrealism in a mind that had become so heavy and gray, thick as the smog in LA.

She must have used makeup to conceal the circles under her eyes, the dark circles that Mina had seemingly always had, even in her twenties. Or Mrs. Baek had been blessed with good genes, or the ability to sleep well at night, or maybe because she didn’t have children. How much, despite the years of Mrs. Baek’s intimate knowledge of Mina’s life, the care of Mina’s own baby, did she really know about Mrs. Baek? Where had she been since they last saw each other?

And what was she doing here now?

“You left Hanok House?” Mina asked, a pang of sorrow in her chest. She remembered her first date with Mr. Kim—the slabs of dark wood as tables, the Hahoetal masks that laughed, grains of ahl on her tongue—and how later, after Margot’s birth, Mrs. Baek would invite them there for a free meal, piping hot jjigaes and tangs, brothy and slow-cooked. How much Mrs. Baek had nourished them. It was a house after all, wasn’t it? It was a home that none of them could have, where food was safety, temporary shelter from the darkness of the world, the hours of mindless work, the fear that it could all be taken away, any day, at any moment.

“Yes, I left Hanok House. Earlier this year.”

Mina wanted to ask why but didn’t. There were many reasons why a woman fled—boredom, fear, frustration, a desire to get ahead. But it was hard to tell whether owning a sock shop was for Mrs. Baek an improvement in the quality of her life or a type of banishment. Surely she couldn’t make much more here than she had at Hanok House where at least she would always be fed.

“I’ve—I’ve wondered about you,” Mrs. Baek said, her eyes filling with tears.

Mina nodded. “It’s strange that we ended up under the same roof again.”