The tea was barley, served in a chipped white cup, and Aoife held it with both hands because the shop was cold and because she did not entirely trust her hands.
Junho had pulled up a low wooden stool for her near the workbench, the kind of stool that had clearly been sat on by a great many people across a great many decades. He went back to the chair he had been working on as if her arrival were a perfectly normal Saturday event — picked up his small chisel, bent his head, and resumed scraping a thin curl of old varnish from the underside of an armrest.
For a long minute, neither of them spoke.
It should have been awkward. In any other room, with any other person, Aoife would have been filling the silence with the kind of nervous chatter that left her exhausted by lunchtime. But the shop had a quality she didn't have a word for — the way the light fell, the way the wood smelled, the small tick of the chisel against grain — and she found, to her own astonishment, that she could just sit.
She watched his hands.
They were not large hands. They were careful hands. There was a thin pale scar across the back of the left one that she wanted, immediately and inappropriately, to know the story of.
He looked up and caught her watching, and she snapped her eyes down to her tea like a teenager.
"Old," he said, tapping the chair. "Nineteen — sixties? Maybe."
"It's beautiful."
"Mm. Was. Will be." He searched for a word, didn't find it, made a small flat gesture with his palm — again. "Will be again."
"Will be again," she echoed. She liked the shape of it.
He set the chisel down. He looked at the small clock on the shelf above the kettle, and then he looked at her, and then he did something with his face that she would later realize was Junho making a decision.
"Hungry?" he said.
"What?"
"Eat. With me. Halmoni." He pointed vaguely past her, toward the alley. "Two streets. Kalguksu. Soup. Noodles. Yes?"
"Oh, I — I don't want to —"
"Yes," he said, like it had not been a question.
Halmoni's restaurant did not have a sign in English, or, as far as Aoife could tell, much of a sign at all. It had a sliding glass door fogged from the inside, four small tables, a low counter, and a smell that made her stomach perform an entirely involuntary act of religious devotion. Behind the counter stood a woman in a flowered apron with a face like a carved apple — small, brown, deeply lined, and absolutely not to be argued with.
She looked at Junho. She looked at Aoife. She looked back at Junho, and her eyebrows rose a full centimeter, which on her face was the equivalent of a brass band.
A rapid sentence in Korean. Junho answered, calm. Another sentence, faster. Junho, calmer still.
Halmoni came around the counter.
She was a foot shorter than Aoife. She took both of Aoife's hands in her own — they were warm and dry and immensely strong — and she said something firm and rhythmic, the way you say a blessing or a verdict, and then she patted the back of Aoife's hand twice and pointed at a table by the window.
"What did she say?" Aoife whispered as she sat down.
Junho took the seat opposite. He considered for a moment. "She say… your hands are cold. Sit. Eat."
"That was a lot more than that."
"Mm."
"Junho."
"She say also —" he was fighting a smile now, openly, and it transformed his whole face "— Irish girl very tall. Eat more soup."
Aoife laughed, and a man at the next table glanced over and looked away again with the polite Seoul indifference she had come to love.
The soup arrived in a bowl the size of her face. Hand-cut noodles, clam broth pale as moonlight, a scatter of zucchini and dark seaweed, and a small dish of kimchi the colour of a sunset over Cobh harbor.
Halmoni did not give her chopsticks. Halmoni gave her a spoon, watched her take the first sip, and made a small approving sound that landed somewhere in Aoife's chest with the force of a hand on a shoulder.
"Oh my god," Aoife said, into the steam.
"Good?"
"Junho. Junho. I'm going to write a letter to the Irish ambassador about this soup."
He translated nothing of this to Halmoni, but Halmoni was watching Aoife's face and seemed entirely satisfied with whatever she found there. She returned to the counter and began aggressively chopping a daikon, which Aoife understood, somehow, to be a victory lap.
They ate.
Between mouthfuls, in the strange shorthand they were already inventing — half English, half phone, half pointing, half eyebrow — she learned things.
Junho had taken over the shop seven years ago when his father died. His grandmother had raised him from the age of nine, in the apartment above this restaurant. The clams in the broth came from a woman in Incheon his grandmother had been buying from for thirty-one years. He had a sister in Busan who taught primary school. He did not have a cat, but the alley had a cat, and the alley cat had decided he was the cat's human. The cat's name was Sajangnim, which, Junho explained with great seriousness, meant Mr. President of the Company.
"You named the alley cat Mr. CEO?"
"He named himself. I only listen."
She told him things, too, in the gaps. That her name meant radiance. That Cobh was a town built on a hill that fell into a harbor, and that the last ship the Titanic ever stopped at was her hometown, which was the kind of fact you led with at parties when you didn't want to talk about yourself. That she designed apps, sort of — she watched people use things and tried to figure out where they got confused, and then she told engineers, and the engineers got annoyed with her, and then six months later they thanked her. That she had a mother in Cork. She did not say more about her mother, and Junho, watching her face, did not ask.
Halfway through the bowl, Halmoni came back with a small dish of something Aoife didn't recognize and set it down between them. A sentence in Korean, directed at Junho, with a small jerk of her chin toward Aoife.
Junho looked at the dish. He looked at his grandmother. He looked at Aoife with the face of a man about to commit a crime.
"She say," he announced, "this is — traditional Korean food. Very famous. Eat with the soup. Will give you long life and many sons."
Aoife froze with her spoon halfway to her mouth. "Sons?"
"Many. Maybe seven."
"Junho."
Halmoni, behind the counter, was suspiciously not looking at them.
Aoife narrowed her eyes. "What did she actually say."
He held out for two more seconds. Then his face cracked, and he ducked his head, and his shoulders shook in a way she had not seen them do yet, and when he looked up again his eyes were bright.
"She say… 'this one is for the foreigner. Less spicy.'"
"You liar."
"A little liar."
"A huge liar."
"Mm." He picked up a piece with his chopsticks and held it across the table to her, very steady, very serious. "But maybe still — long life."
She opened her mouth and let him feed her the bite, because the part of her brain that usually managed her dignity had, at some point in the last twenty minutes, gone for a walk and not come back.
It was pickled radish. It was perfect.
They walked back to the shop in a silence that was no longer the awkward kind. Aoife had her hands in her coat pockets and her left hand was still holding, through habit she was pretending not to notice, the soft folded notebook page from the day before.
At the half-open metal door he paused.
"Aoife."
"Yeah."
He worked at the next sentence for a moment, the way he had worked at the chair — careful, scraping away at it until it was the shape he wanted.
"Tomorrow. Sunday. Shop closed. But —" he gestured vaguely at the alley, at the morning, at the whole improbable city "— Halmoni open. Lunch. If you — if — come. She will be happy."
"Halmoni will be happy."
"Mm."
"Just Halmoni?"
He looked at her. The millimeter thing again. Then a full, small, real smile, the first one she had seen all the way out to the edges of his face.
"Not just Halmoni."
She nodded. She didn't trust her voice for a second. Then she said, "Tell her I'll come. Tell her I'll bring an appetite."
"I tell her you bring seven sons."
"Kang Junho."
He laughed — actually laughed, a quiet rough sound — and ducked back under the metal door of his shop.
She walked to the subway with the folded map in one pocket and the smell of clam broth on her coat and a feeling in her chest she had not had in such a long time that she had forgotten the name for it.
On the train back to her apartment, she opened her phone and started a journal entry. For the first time in months, she finished it.
It was four lines long.
Today I ate noodles in a shop with no sign. A grandmother held my hands. A man lied about radishes to make me laugh. I don't know what I am doing here. I think, for the first time, that might be the point.
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