The Best American Short Stories 2018 Read online

  “Number 276,” Mo-Sae suddenly said, as if responding to something she had said aloud. His eyes remained closed.

  “Eh?”

  “That hymn on the radio. ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness.’ It’s number 276 in the hymnal.”

  And then sometimes he could do that: remember something so far-fetched that she would be forced to admit, as the song said, that there was still strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.

  It was in this mood that Young-Ja took the call from Elder Lim’s wife the next day.

  “Mrs. Han,” said Mrs. Lim, as if no time had passed. “Is Mr. Han aware that we have a new conductor at church?”

  It was not such a big church. Everyone was aware. They had also been aware when Mo-Sae quit the choir in a show of outrage over the incompetence of the previous conductor.

  So why was Mrs. Lim calling now?

  Young-Ja listened as Mrs. Lim complained. That the new conductor wanted to do the entire Messiah for Christmas, not just the “Hallelujah” chorus. That he wanted to do it in English. That he wanted to hire professional soloists. She waited for Mrs. Lim to reach the point of her conversation.

  “So-therefore,” said Mrs. Lim.

  There it was. That turn of phrase.

  “Would Mr. Han consider re-joining the choir? At least for the Christmas cantata?”

  Young-Ja had told no one at church about Mo-Sae’s condition. She had only considered it a blessing that Mo-Sae quit the choir when he did instead of blundering on, forgetting lyrics and missing cues, until the truth became all too apparent.

  And now he was being asked to return.

  “Please,” said Mrs. Lim. “We really could use some strength in the tenor section.”

  Young-Ja told Mrs. Lim that she would consult with Mo-Sae. But this was disingenuous. Even as she hung up the phone and approached him, she was almost certain that he would refuse, recalling past indignities.

  As a matter of fact, he did not. Instead, he seemed gratified by the phrase “strength in the tenor section,” savored it in a way that made her curious about his inner life.

  So she took on this new worry.

  Over the next few months, Young-Ja spent longer hours at church, waiting in the fellowship hall for Mo-Sae to finish rehearsals. Afterward, when the choir gathered to drink barley tea or Tang, she would watch Mo-Sae as he licked his lips and looked for conversation. When his conversations cycled back to certain themes, or grew incoherent, she would intervene, negotiating his annoyance as she set the listeners free.

  October, November. As the holidays approached, Jonathan brought to their home a child’s understanding of time. Pumpkins for Halloween. Turkeys for Thanksgiving. In the countdown to Christmas, rehearsals intensified and she had to take Mo-Sae to the church on certain weeknights. The days grew short and full. She rarely had time for her own errands now, busy as she was with the various tasks Mrs. Lim assigned her for the choir. She rescheduled her doctor’s follow-up, and then rescheduled again. She hardly saw Mr. Sorenson, although once, as she was unloading dozens of binders in boxes from the elevator, he emerged from his unit. He did not offer to help. In fact, he did not even seem to notice the boxes, or her struggle to move them. Instead, he waited for a moment in her attention to present her with another cutting in a plastic bag, its roots swaddled in a wet paper towel.

  The Christmas cactus, he began in his lecturing way, would bloom in late December with a biological sleight of hand. Every twelve hours, she was to take it out of a dark closet and give it full sun.

  She nodded. But what she realized was that Mr. Sorenson’s gifts were not free but finicky, and came with a burden of care. Indeed, when she remembered the cutting, days later, it had completely wilted.

  As for Mo-Sae, no one complained of his behavior in the choir. If anything, they said that his voice was as youthful as ever.

  Then it was December. The sanctuary was decorated for Christmas. The tree, the wreaths, the needlework banners of shepherds and trumpeting angels. The pulpit had been removed to make room for the risers, giving the sanctuary the look of a stage.

  Earlier, Young-Ja had dropped off Mo-Sae in the choir room. She had helped him with his robe and positioned him beside Elder Lim. Now, as she sat in her pew and looked around at the Christmas decorations, she thought that she would lay her worries down. She saw her son, Timothy, come up the aisle with his wife. With his glasses and slightly irritated look, he reminded her strongly of a young Mo-Sae. And yet Timothy was now a father with children old enough to be left at home alone.

  Then Christina entered the pew. Jonathan was at home with Sanjay, she said when Young-Ja asked.

  The choir members started to file in. Young-Ja quickly identified Mo-Sae, but he maintained his stage presence and looked straight ahead. Next came the soloists, distinct in tuxedos or dresses, taking their seats behind four music stands. Young-Ja felt her children settle into a humoring attitude.

  When the new conductor strode to his place, the audience didn’t know whether to clap. As a congregation, they only ever said “Amen” after the choir sang on Sundays. But the conductor settled the matter by immediately turning his back. He gestured and the choir stood. He opened his palms and the choir opened matching black binders. The music began.

  Young-Ja could not tell if the singing was good or bad, but she could see a new unison of attitude in the schooled faces, the binders that were kept open but hardly consulted. She noticed Christina and Timothy exchanging a glance but could not read its meaning. The music was long and wordy, with laughing scales—ha ha ha—sung soberly. Mo-Sae seemed to be keeping up. At times, she didn’t hear the music at all but found herself mesmerized by the flashing lights of the Christmas tree. At times, she recognized certain passages of scripture: Comfort, comfort ye my people. For unto us a child is born.

  At times she caught moments of tuneful beauty.

  She noticed a pattern. One of the soloists would stand to introduce a change in the music. The choir would take up a response. The same phrase would be passed around for some time among the various voice parts, altered and yet the same. She saw Mo-Sae in compliance, his mouth opening and shutting with the mouths around him.

  “He trusted in God . . .”

  “That he deliver him . . .”

  “Deliver him . . .”

  “Delight in him . . .”

  “Deli-ha-ha-ha-ight in him . . .”

  The tenor soloist stood up.

  “He looked for some to have pity on him,” the tenor sang, “but there was no man . . .”

  Then: movement in the risers.

  Young-Ja was suddenly alert to the worry that had been pacified through the long listening. She felt that worry, which had been vague and formless, grow distinct as Mo-Sae sidled out of position on the top riser, setting off a wave of shirking among the choir members that blocked his path. With great seriousness of purpose, he came to the front of the stage. He took his place beside the tenor soloist, who had just launched into the melodic part of his solo. He opened his binder. He opened his mouth. He too began to sing.

  Nothing could be read in the soloist’s expression. Perhaps that was what made him a professional: the ability to keep singing, keep pretending. And no interpretation could be made of the choir director’s turned back, from which a conducting arm continued to emerge and retreat in time. Or of the choir members who presented three rows of staunch faces.

  But Mo-Sae’s face was laid bare to scrutiny. The expression on it was high-minded and earnest, but also a little coy, as though he was struggling to disguise his basking pleasure.

  What was he possibly singing? In which language? To which tune? Or had he somehow learned the tenor solo on his own? He was not behind the microphone so no one could hear. But anyone could see from the childish look of surprise that came over Mo-Sae’s face that he was straining for the high notes that came forth in the soloist’s voice.

  So there it was. The spectacle.

  Young-Ja could do nothing bu
t watch, to feel that there in the spotlight that she had never once sought for herself, her private miseries had become manifest.

  Ultimately, it was Christina who made her way to the stage; who waited, hands folded, until the tenor solo had ended; who took her father gently by the arm and led him down through the pews with no sense of apology in her posture or pace. There then seemed to spread through the congregation a spontaneous kindness, a collective will to look away, to appear absorbed in the musical performance so that Young-Ja, Timothy, and his wife could cast about for their things and make their escape.

  Afterward, things were different. Better, almost. Now that the secret was out, the church members treated her like one of the New Testament widows. They saw her as devoted, praiseworthy. They never asked Mo-Sae to rejoin the choir or even take part in a real conversation. Thus she was free from the burden of his reputation.

  And yet, sometimes she took the opposite view. She was not really a widow so she was not really free. While Mo-Sae was alive, she could not pretend that he did not exist in some real, sometimes inconveniencing way. Others might pretend, but she had to look squarely into the question of Mo-Sae’s dignity. It was up to her to reclaim it from this point forward in a more complicated, arduous, thankless way.

  At the start of the new year, she ran into Mr. Sorenson. He was leaning on a footed cane.

  Just a fall, he told her. But his son (he had a son!) was convinced that he was too old to be living alone. Party time over. He was getting shipped out to a retirement community near Orlando. “You know Disney World? Mickey Mouse?”

  He asked her, with new formality, whether she had a moment to step inside his house. He had something for her there.

  Of course she did. Her life was once again full of such empty stretches, affordable moments.

  The apartment was clean but smelled faintly of cooked cabbage and bleach. Over the recliner was a crocheted blanket in a classic granny-square, telling of some bygone female presence in his life. A few open boxes where he had started packing.

  “Twenty medium-sized boxes,” he said in a false, hearty tone. “That’s what I get to take with me.”

  She noticed a handsome burnished instrument. It looked very much like an upright except it had two sets of keyboards and a variety of pedals. He caught her looking. “What you have there is a mint 1960s Hammond B3.”

  So it was true about the organ. She had only ever seen one in church, which had supplied her with an idea about pipe organs.

  “I ask you,” he said. “Can something like this be made to fit into twenty medium-sized boxes?”

  She heard the bitter note enter his tone. She sympathized with it. But she also gently refused it. There was nothing she could do for him, that they could do for each other. They belonged to whom they belonged.

  He seemed to understand this.

  “There she is,” he said, abruptly, drawing her attention to a large plant on a stand beside the organ. “Christmas cactus.”

  She dimly remembered he had given her a cutting of the same name. But it had never produced anything like this riotous display of flowers.

  “All yours,” he said. He wouldn’t be able to take living things with him on the move either.

  As he watched, she struggled to wrap her arms around the pot, the leaves coming right up to her face, into her nose, obscuring her vision. All the spiky, hot-pink, white-tongued flowers.

  Afterward, she would sometimes meet him coming and going from the garbage disposal down the hall. Divesting, he said. He offered her useless things. Baseball cards, cassettes, souvenir spoons. He gave her some more full-grown plants but never anything that had yet to put down roots. He didn’t give her a phone number or an address to reach him once he was gone, and she didn’t think to ask.

  One Sunday, shortly after the Christmas incident, her children had come to her. Something had to be done about Dad, they said, sternly, with loving intent.

  Yes, said Young-Ja with gentle amusement. Who was disagreeing? Something had to be done. But what?

  They had no solutions. They were all so smart and competent, so young in their conviction that they would not grow old. But who among them was prepared to take their father in? Or who would stand to see him in a home? Even so, who would pay?

  She gazed at them, loving them with a freedom she had not felt since they were small. She was glad, so glad, that they did not know about her own ailing health. She knew that she would get up every morning and muscle through, as she always had. She had in her body the proof. The cancer in her kidney when the children were young, impossibly young. The alarming growth on her left eye, spreading toward her pupil. The aches in her joints, the stiffness in her back, the headaches from the Perc fumes. Each time, she had rallied, had made a habit of exceeding doctors’ expectations.

  Even now, she felt in herself a steadying of purpose, a long view opening up. Of course, she would be the one to provide a solution to the problem of Mo-Sae. That was why her children had come to her. To ask her to relieve them of this burden. And hadn’t she known that this time would come? Hadn’t she known from the moment she had taken his torn sock in hand with an offer to mend it?

  She had offered other things as well: a way out from his hated degree program, a way to make a living. It had been her idea to purchase the dry cleaners from her old employer—the business through which they had bought their home, put their kids through college. They had bought it through her savings. Even so, she had known that at certain rocky junctures of their marriage, Mo-Sae would find in this a convenient source of blame. Indeed, she had seen this plainly on his face that night when he had taken the stage: the still vibrant longing for attention and applause.

  Be that as it may.

  She had borne him his children and set his tables. She had served him red ginseng in autumn, deer antlers in spring, marrow soup in winter, and medicinal chicken stuffed with licorice root in the summer seasons of his life. As things got worse, she had taken in his smell, coaxed him to bathe, clipped his thick yellow toenails, and boiled stains from his sheets. She had not neglected to bring him the plenteous pills—the regulators, inhibitors, uppers, and downers—that would perhaps prolong his life, with a glass of water set on a saucer.

  And after all was said and done, after he had been laid to rest, she knew that she would not rest. She would put up his stern framed photo in the living room. Exhort the children and grandchildren. Make regular visits to the cemetery, where she would upkeep his memory with ammonia, an old toothbrush, and a handful of flowers.

  Watch the boy, Young-Ja had said.

  Now she is gone, swept out of the house on one of her errands. Well, good. When she is around, she is always watching him, testing him, bringing as evidence the dry toothbrush or the empty candy wrapper.

  The phone rings.

  What! he shouts in Korean, then remembers to pick up the receiver. “Hello!” he shouts in English.

  It is his daughter, his Christina. Young-Ja apparently isn’t answering her cell.

  Christina seems surprised, almost irritated, to hear that her mother is not home. She asks him where exactly Jonathan is, what exactly he is doing. She tells him to get a pen and write down precisely what she says: “Mom call Christina as soon as you get home.”

  He writes nothing. As soon as he hangs up the phone, he heads to the pantry, where he lords it over the products on the shelves. His good privilege. His bad choices.

  He notices the boy watching him. “Come here, little one,” he says, wooing.

  They assess their choices. Beans, grains, glass noodles. Dark viscous liquids decanted into unlabeled glass jars. The faint smell of dried anchovies and sesame oil. Ingredients, not food.

  Through the open window, they hear a distant mechanical melody. The boy identifies it. Ice cream truck.

  “Grandpa has no money,” says Mo-Sae, patting his pockets. “Nothing.”

  But the boy has a solution, bringing an old coffee can full of change. Mo-Sae picks up some coins
, which have complicated pictures. Then he remembers that these are American coins. He returns them to the can, which is surprisingly heavy. “Aren’t you rich!” he jokes to the boy. But what really stirs in him is sadness. This is his wife. This is the evidence of her life. A handful of small saving actions.

  The boy tugs him toward the front door. He wants to go out. But Mo-Sae is deeply reluctant. He thinks that if he crosses this threshold without his wife, if he walks through the hallway with all its identical doors and goes out into the open world, he will lose all orientation. He will never find his way back. Still, when the child puts a hand in his, Mo-Sae is filled with belligerent affection. The belligerence briefly flares against Young-Ja, wherever she is, as though he will prove something to her.

  He tells himself not to forget, not to forget, but by the time they reach the ground floor, he has forgotten why they are there. He looks out at the world beyond the lobby, the parked rows of cars and adjacent apartment buildings. What do they want from him? But the belligerent spirit warns him not to disappoint the boy. He notices a pool, gated and empty, and he tells his grandson in a rousing voice that when he is just a little older, Grandpa will teach him how to swim. They walk in that direction. At the gate, he fiddles with the fork latch. Surprisingly, the latch obliges and the gate swings open.

  Mo-Sae and his grandson kneel beside the deep end of the pool. They lean over the water, which moves in dangerous fascination with sunlight. The boy has brought with him a can of coins. He drops a few into the water and watches them sink. As Mo-Sae takes in the boy—his absorbed, attentive attitude—he thinks it will be a pleasure to watch him grow. To teach him to swim or ride a bike; to eat spicy foods; to pour an older man’s soju with both hands. For a moment he truly believes that he, Mo-Sae, will do this. That he will be permitted such responsibilities.

  He does not stop the boy from tipping the entire can of coins into the pool, wondering himself what interesting consequence might result. It is only afterward, as he and the boy look down on the sunken heap, that he realizes that he has misjudged. He grows aware of the music of an ice cream truck, which had been making its rounds, and realizes that the simple act of buying a child ice cream has become absurdly complicated. The boy himself seems to realize this, setting off a howling show of disappointment. The sound puts Mo-Sae on high alert. He feels that if he cannot get that noise, that resistance, that blame to stop, he is in danger of losing all sense of judgment. He tries to seize the boy by the arm but the boy takes off, running through the parking lot, into the lobby. Mo-Sae spots him just as he enters the elevator, reaches him just as the doors slide shut on them.