Lorraine answered when she felt like it. She’d talk about Shelby—Shelby’s pregnancy, Shelby’s new kitchen, Shelby’s kids, the funny thing Levi said at church.
I’d listen.
Sometimes I’d try to tell her about a project. We were reinforcing a 1920s theater in Silver Lake. Beautiful old bones, and I was proud of the solution we’d found for the unreinforced masonry.
That’s nice, honey, she’d say.
The same way you say that’s nice to a child showing you a crayon drawing.
Then: oh, Shelby’s calling on the other line. Talk soon.
My father and I did not talk. We had not talked, really talked, since the day he stood at the door and told me not to come back asking for money.
Occasionally he’d pick up when I called, and we’d exchange weather reports like two strangers waiting for the same bus.
Hot out there?
Yep.
Hot here too.
Then Lorraine would take the phone, and the Shelby report would begin.
Three years of this. Building in Los Angeles. Hauling into a void in Oklahoma.
Structurally speaking, I was cantilevered, extended out over nothing, held up only by my own rigidity.
Then I met James.
October 2022. A documentary crew came to shoot at a construction site in Koreatown where we were doing a seismic evaluation on a mixed-use building. I was on the third floor checking rebar spacing when a man with a camera on his shoulder asked me to explain what I was doing in a way that his editor would understand.
I make sure buildings don’t fall down, I said.
That’s the shortest interview I’ve ever done, he said.
He was smiling.
He had the kind of face that looked like it was always about to smile. Mouth ready. Eyes already there.
His name was James Park. He was a cinematographer. Freelance. Korean-American. Raised in Torrance. He was 30.
He was warm in a way that I didn’t fully understand, because warmth in my experience was always conditional. Always the thing that came before someone told you they only had four tickets.
We talked for 40 minutes.
He asked me what I loved about engineering.
I said, the certainty.
He asked what I meant.
I said, a weld is either strong enough or it isn’t. Nobody gets to decide afterward that it was supposed to be a different weld.
He looked at me for a long time after that. Not the way men usually looked at me. Not sizing up. Not calculating. Just looking.
Like he was reading a blueprint and finding it interesting.
First date. A pho restaurant in Little Saigon. Small, loud, plastic chairs.
I told him about the Disney trip.
I don’t know why I told him. I hadn’t told anyone in L.A. Not my roommates in college. Not my co-workers. Nobody.
But James asked about my family, and instead of the usual, they’re fine, they’re in Oklahoma, I opened my mouth. And the Disney trip came out like a splinter that had been working its way to the surface for 17 years.
He didn’t say that’s terrible. He didn’t say I’m sorry.
He was quiet for a moment, chopsticks still, broth cooling.
Then he said, so you never got the photo album.
Five words.
And I knew he understood.
Not the anger. Anyone can understand anger.
He understood the specific shape of the absence. The empty page where the photos should have been.
Six months into dating, I met his mother. Eunice Park. Sixty-two. Retired dry cleaner. Small woman. Sharp eyes. Hands that looked like they’d pressed 10,000 shirts and still had the grip strength to prove it.
She served me jjigae and watched me eat, and asked questions that had edges wrapped in politeness.
Where is your family, Harper? Why don’t they visit?
I said they were busy with the ranch.
Mrs. Park nodded in a way that meant she didn’t believe me, but wasn’t going to push. Not yet.
She taught me to roll kimbap. She corrected my rice-to-vinegar ratio three times without apology.
And at the end of that first dinner, she handed me a container of leftover banchan and said, come back Thursday.
Not a question. An instruction.
I came back Thursday. And the Thursday after that.
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