THREE MONTHS LATER

“Yes, I understand that you placed the order before October last year,” Jisoo said in her firmest customer service voice. The man on the other end of the line was shouting, and she was struggling to be heard over his yowling. 

“Yes, sir, I understand,” she said. “But that deal was for customers who ordered 2,000 pieces of the fluorescent bulb, and the invoice says that you ordered LED. What? No sir, they’re not the same, they’re— no, I’m not the manager. Well, actually—yes, sir, I’ll connect you right away.”

Jisoo muted the call and shouted for the manager to take the call in his office. Once the call had been properly patched through, she dropped the phone back down onto the receiver and sat back in her chair. After several minutes of massaging her temples, she sighed.

When she looked above her cubicle, she saw the rest of her coworkers hard at work, taking calls and punching numbers into their computers. The clock above their heads showed that it was still only eleven in the morning, and she had another hour left until her lunch break. She sighed and then answered the second call.

“Thank you for calling Hanguk Lighting customer service, this is Jisoo speaking, how can I help you today?”

The weather was starting to get cooler. Summer months back in her home town were notoriously hot and humid, but as she stuck her hand out the car window, Jisoo could feel a change in the air. The humidity hadn’t subsided, but the dampness of the air was colder than before. With the summer over, Jisoo knew that the time for harvest was coming soon. She wondered if her father was bringing the usual hands back this season. 

After work, she drove back down the road toward Kim’s Peaches and Plums. After three months back home, she starting to settle back into her old routine. Her high school routine. With the exception that geometry and history classes had been replaced by shifts at her new job answering phones at Hanguk Lighting, of course.

Other than that, it was back to late afternoon drives down the highway. Back to examining refrigerator contents and coming up with new ideas for dinner. Back to washing dishes while the nightly news played on the TV in the living room. Back to her childhood bedroom, complete with posters of idols on her pink walls. Back to square one.

Back to the same-old, same-old. 

Jisoo’s father walked in through the back door of the house around 7 pm and sat down to the dinner Jisoo prepared. Rice and stew and side dishes that she had picked up from the mart on the way home. They made small talk. Jisoo talked about some office gossip from Hanguk Lighting, and he talked about the upcoming harvest. He tried to get her to balance the books again, and Jisoo nagged him to cave in and digitize his records.

The usual things they talked about. Mr. Kim basked in the homely mundaneness of it all. It was small, non-moments like these that he treasured most. 

When their meal was over, he watched as Jisoo carried the dishes over to the sink and washed them. Meanwhile, he went into the bedroom to change out of his work clothes and into something more comfortable. Arrayed on his chest of drawers were small, ceramic picture frames holding photos of his late wife and Jisoo as a child. She had been a cute baby, and he always knew she would grow up to be an astoundingly beautiful young woman. But he was even more proud that she had grown up to be a good person.

When he went back out into the house’s main area and looked for Jisoo in the kitchen, he looked up, through the window, and saw her outside instead. Seated on a worn out couch cushion by the clothesline and the start of the orchard. 

It was a scene he was familiar with. It had been Jisoo’s favorite reading nook as a little girl, and his wife’s before that.  

He was happy to have her back. It was hard when she lived so far away. He missed her too much. He liked walking through the door after a long day at work and feeling content that his daughter was safe inside the house. He liked feeling her presence, liked falling asleep knowing that she was down the hall, tucked into her covers and breathing evenly and deeply through the night. He liked being sure of her. 

And Jisoo fell back into her old routine with such ease that it was as if she hadn’t ever left. Getting her that customer service job at Hanguk was easy. All he had to do was talk to some old friends around town and get them to pull some strings. Jisoo accepted the position without complaint, and from what he heard thus far, she was doing just fine there. 

But he could tell that she wasn’t happy.

Jisoo’s father slid the back door open and stuffed his feet into a pair of outdoor slippers. Then he jumped down from the concrete platform and crossed the distance to where Jisoo was sitting. When he was close enough, he saw that she was reading something. A notebook. An old diary.

“You’re reading?” he said. 

Jisoo looked up, surprised by his sudden appearance. She scooted over on the cushion to make room for hi to sit. Her father plopped down beside her. Jisoo closed the little pink notebook she’d been reading.

“I just randomly found them in my room,” Jisoo said, laughing. “I was reading them inside, but then I decided to come out here just because. I do all my big thinking here.”

“All your big thinking, huh?” her father said, nudging her arm with his elbow. “What sort of big thinking are you doing?”

Jisoo shrugged. Ahead, the sun had just disappeared beyond the horizon, leaving an indigo haze in its wake. She ran her thumb over the spine of the diary she had chosen to read. It was from her middle school days. She had picked it up to read mainly because she knew how much Jinyoung popped up in it. Granted, as a middle school kid, she had mostly written about how annoying or frustrating her was but… she missed him, and this was the best she could do without actually picking up her phone and calling him.

There were plenty of times when she almost did. She wanted to call him and go to him as soon as she was fired from Embrace. But she stopped herself from doing it because she convinced herself that she didn’t deserve him. That, and she wanted to prove to herself that she did the right thing because