I know.
She sat on the edge of the table and looked at me the way she looks at a structural drawing that doesn’t add up.
Tell me.
I told her.
She was quiet for a while. Then she said: my parents didn’t come to my naturalization ceremony. Federal courthouse in downtown L.A. My mother said: that’s American nonsense. You are Igbo. A piece of paper does not change your blood.
She uncrossed her arms.
I cried for a week. I almost didn’t go. But I went anyway. And the judge who swore me in shook my hand and said, welcome home.
She looked at me.
Sometimes home is where you’re welcome, Harper. Not where you’re from.
It didn’t fix anything. A sentence doesn’t fix a structural failure. You need actual reinforcement, actual labor, actual time.
But it was the first thing in nine days that landed somewhere solid.
On a Saturday morning, there was a knock at the door at eleven. I was on the couch in James’s sweatshirt, which I’d been wearing for two days because it smelled like him and required no decisions.
Mrs. Eunice Park stood in the hallway. Sixty-two years old, retired dry cleaner, hands that had pressed ten thousand shirts and still had the grip strength to prove it. She was holding a large ceramic pot with both hands and a bag of banchan containers hanging from her elbow and an expression that made it clear she had not come to ask how I was feeling.
Have you eaten today?
No. Not yet.
She walked past me into the kitchen.
She set the pot on the stove, turned the burner to medium, and laid out the banchan with the efficiency of a woman who has fed people through every kind of crisis and does not require a conversation to begin doing so. Kimchi. Pickled radish. Seasoned spinach. Tiny dried anchovies.
Sit.
I sat.
She served the jjigae in a bowl she’d brought from her own kitchen. Set it in front of me with a spoon and two napkins and a look that said eat more clearly than the word.
I ate. The broth was hot and red and burned my tongue slightly, and that small pain was the first sensation in three days that wasn’t grief.
