“Alright, I’m calling it,” Chaerin exhaled in defeat.  She raised her wrist to check her watch.  “This party’s time of death: 2:35pm.”

“Would you be quiet?” Jiyong hissed.  The folded and torn remains of two or three cupcake wrappers lay on the plate in front of him.  He poked at them forlournly with a plastic fork.  “There’s still time for people to get here.”

“The invites said 1pm,” she said, dropping her sarcasm for a moment and laying a gentle hand on her friend’s arm.  “If they were gonna be here, they’d be here.”

Jiyong rose from the table with a huff to toss his paper plate in the trash.  He batted a few balloons out of his face and headed for the living room, where he leaned against his shoulder on the wall.  A rainbow of streamers radiated out from the ceiling fan like bicycle spokes, dipping and twisting before ending at various points along the walls. They had worked so hard on these decorations, and it didn’t look like anyone was going to see them.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have had it this early,” Chaerin said and followed after him.  “Kids’ parents are probably at work.”

“It’s Saturday.  They can’t all be working.”  Jiyong folded his arms, watching Eunjung coaxing her puppy with a chew toy in a corner of the room.  The plastic birthday tiara he had bought her lay discarded on the floor near shredded wrapping paper, half of it mangled with small bite marks.  “Most of the moms at her preschool don’t work anyway.”

Chaerin stuffed her hands in the pockets of her tight black jeans, her eyes darting around the room as if searching for comforting words.  “Maybe they had the date wrong?  Where’s one of those cards, I bet you just wrote—”

“I know why no one’s here, Chae,” Jiyong said flatly.  “And so do you.”  She had no response.

Dark, tired eyes seemed to haze over as Jiyong chewed his thumbnail, thinking about all the mothers who had asked about his wife, and the fathers he had mostly avoided.  It hadn’t taken long for their upfront questions to turn to whispers amongst each other; how a friend of a friend had known him way back when, and how someone else knew the type of neighborhood he worked in.  When other girls were being invited to sleepovers, Eunjung was home every night.  He had to fight just to make sure her teachers devoted half the attention they gave to other students to his daughter, as if she’d caught a contagious disease from him.  And it ended up this way every time, no matter how many preschools he had transferred her in and out of.

But as if the universe wanted to prove Jiyong wrong, a sudden knock on the door startled he and Chaerin both.  He exchanged a skeptical glance with her and went to answer it.

“Mr. Kwon, how are you today!” a cheerful middle-aged woman with curly hair and faux pearl earrings greeted him from the hall.  Jiyong bowed politely and stepped to the side to allow his neighbor entrance.

“I’m good, Mrs. Woo,” he lied.  “And you?”

“I’m wonderful honey.  Where is my little angel?”  Eunjung stood up from the floor and skipped around the couch, the frilly pink dress Jiyong had wrestled her into bouncing with each step.

“I’m right here!”

Mrs. Woo was part of a small network of grandmothers and empty-nesters that Jiyong relied on as short-notice sitters within his apartment complex.  He and Eunjung had assigned secret nicknames to each of them – Mrs. Woo was Candy Pockets.

“I hear it’s someone’s birthday today…”  She fished around in the pocket of her floral patterned dress, coming back with a rainbow-striped lollipop.  The little girl’s black eyes grew wide and she snatched it with a sing-song “thank you.”

Jiyong beckoned for the older woman to follow him into the kitchen, and she exchanged nods and polite smiles with Chaerin on the way.  The coffee wasn’t the freshest, but she took a cup, turning down a cupcake with a self-conscious hand on her midsection.

“I just came over to invite you to church tomorrow night,” Mrs. Woo revealed after a bit of lighter conversation.  “We’re having a guest choir from out of town, I thought you two—“ She quickly peeked at Chaerin over her glasses.  “Three would enjoy it!”

Drumming his fingers on the counter, Jiyong bit his bottom lip before declining, like he had a hundred times before.  “I’ve got to work the next few nights, ma’am, maybe another time.”  He mentally cursed himself for the last bit.  There would never be another time if he could help it.

“Ah, well, maybe the little one can come with me then?  You can pick her up when you get home.”

He hated this game they played, Mrs. Woo and a few of the other church ladies in the building.

“I’ve already got someone lined up, but thank you.”

Mrs. Woo’s crestfallen face almost made him change his mind, but not quite.  Jiyong assumed she had conceded defeat when the older woman played her last card.

“You know, Youngbae used to love coming to see choirs with me.” She sipped from the pale yellow mug in her hand, leaving a trace of mauve lipstick on the rim.  “And when he would join in?  What a voice!  It’s such a pity…”

The silence in the kitchen when she finished made the air feel thick and heavy.  Chaerin’s face was pale, eyes locked on the older woman.  Jiyong’s on the other hand were fixed on the wall in front of him.  He kept them aimed there, knowing that if he lifted them to his neighbor’s face, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from saying something he couldn’t take back.  Something he couldn’t explain to Eunjung were she listening around the corner.  Which she always was.

He unlocked his jaw, cold eyes unmoving.  “That’s true, he did,” was as much as he allowed himself to answer.

For too long a moment, no one said anything.  Chaerin volunteered herself by clearing .  “Well, Mrs. Woo, it was very nice to meet you!” she blurted out, ignoring the memory that came too late of having met the woman a year ago or longer.  Regardless, she ushered her quickly out of the apartment before Jiyong’s wrath fully boiled over.

As quickly as her heels had clicked across the floor leading Mrs. Woo out, they were slow to make their way back to the kitchen.  She turned the corner cautiously and found Jiyong exactly where she left him, glaring into space, his hands nervously fiddling with each other.

Her thin brows furrowed as she looked closer.  His right hand was moving while the left remained stationary.  It was twisting, twirling something on his ring finger.

His ring finger.  His wedding band.

Her heart dropped.

“Jiyong,” she started slowly, softly.  “How long have you been wearing that again.”

He blinked slowly, and the weariness in his face seemed to age him a decade.  “He should be here for this, Chae,” his voice hollow.

She had no words to comfort him, only rushed over to hold him around his broad shoulders that had heaved and shook with grieving sobs so many times before.  But today they only sagged in submission: three years had passed, and his tears were not as easily spilled these days as they once were.  

“I think we’ve had enough birthday party, Jiyong,” Chaerin said, and he agreed with a slow nod.

“Let’s get this place cleaned up and get out of here.”

~~~~~

“Fifty-two weekends in the year and we had to pick this one,” Minji griped, raising her voice over the bustling crowd growing rapidly at the zoo.  A balding man adjusting the lens on his camera elbowed past her in a mad rush, causing her to spill a bit of her iced coffee on the cobblestone path.  She glared at Seunghyun as if to assign blame.

“How the heck was I supposed to know?!”  He was lifting Minhee, ice cream cone and all, out of the way of danger and onto his shoulders.  “It’s not like I subscribe to their newsletter or something.”  Seunghyun took the cone from the little girl to keep it from dripping in his hair, sneaking a quick slurp of the melted base for himself.

“It’s been all over TV for like a week now though, where have you been?”  Minji shook her phone in Seunghyun’s face, the screen displaying an article about the new attraction: twin baby pandas, gifted to the zoo from a Chinese sanctuary.

He waved her arm away.  “I don’t need any of your sass today, okay?  Let’s just find a map and get out of here…”

Leading the way through the endless stream of visitors, Seunghyun found the nearest park map display.  The three of them had just finished lunch near the big cat exhibit, inadvertently landing them directly on the path between the entrance and the pandas.

“The Reptile House is all the way over… there!”  Minji raised her voice over the clamor and pointed towards the far corner of the map.  “It wont be so bad that way.”

Minhee’s small hands were clinging nervously to her father’s ears like handles.  She had never done well in crowds, of adults or children.  “We already saw the reptiles!” she reminded them.

“Okay well, how about the Bird House?” Seunghyun suggested.  He regretted it immediately as tiny nails dug into his temples on their way to grasp at his hair.

“No birds…” Minhee’s tiny voice implored.  “No monkeys either!”

“I’m with her on the monkeys.”  Minji’s fingers flew across her phone keyboard.  She had forgotten the map already.  Seunghyun sighed.

“Well if there’s nothing anyone wants to see, we might as well go home—“

“Seunghyun!  Choi Seunghyun?”

He didn’t recognize the voice before he turned in its direction, and the face it matched was just as unfamiliar.  A nondescript man in his early thirties pushing a stroller approached them.

“I’m sorry,” Seunghyun began, “I don’t think…”

“Oh come on, you know me!  We sat across from each other in Calculus?  It’s been years, hasn’t it?”

Mathematics classes from secondary school were the last memories he could have ever wished to hang on to, but Seunghyun doubted the guy could be mistaken, having called out his full name.  So he went with it.  “Oh yeah!  How have you been?”

They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries while Minji made herself scarce, popping in her earbuds and disappearing into swapped texts with a friend.  Minhee buried her face in her father’s hair up to her nose, peering over his crown at the baby in the bulky stroller below.  He was wearing little more than a diaper and a drool-stained shirt, a plush macaque she recognized from the gift shop trapped under his chubby arm.  “I hate monkeys,” she mumbled into Seunghyun’s brown hair, and wondered if he intended to force her to play with this kid.

“You look good!” the other man remarked.  “Lost a ton of weight since we were kids!”

“Yeah, well…  What are you doing these days?” Seunghyun shifted the focus from himself while swallowing a scowl.  “This is why I don’t talk to people from high school…” he thought.

His former schoolmate went on at no short length about his wife and kid, and his job at some company Seunghyun didn’t recognize doing something he didn’t understand.  Seunghyun fiddled with Minhee’s shoe and nodded along, watching with dismay as her ice cream continued to melt in his hand.  But the thought of eating in front of someone who knew him when he was “Big Boy” Seunghyun overpowered the allure of the treat.

“But tell me who this is!”  The man motioned towards Minhee, who further hid her face in Seunghyun’s scalp.

Her father tugged gently on her leg to encourage her to come out.  “Say hello, sweetheart.”  But she wouldn’t budge. 

“She’s a shy one, eh?”  The stranger craned his neck to make eye contact, but it was futile.  “Is the wife with you two today?”

Seunghyun had felt the question coming, an inevitable part of meeting new people, or in this case, reconnecting with old.  He would duck and dodge and change the topic as he always did, having become more adept as time went on.  But each time the subject of Minhee’s mother came up, he knew they were edging closer to the day when the little girl would be asking the questions herself.

Before he could craft an escape plan, his acquaintance’s own wife shouted to him across the way, waving her arms above the throngs of visitors.  “Ah, that’s my old lady right there.  Well, it was nice seeing you!  Here:”  He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket and handed it to Seunghyun.  “Get in touch sometime.  We’ll grab a beer and you can tell me the secret to that diet you’re on!”  And with that, he clumsily pushed the over-sized stroller past Seunghyun and company and went on his way.

He had stayed just long enough to waste Minhee’s ice cream.  Seunghyun looked around for a trash can, and became acutely aware of the dozens and dozens of families milling about the zoo that day.  It was enough to make him wish he could hide his face in someone’s hair too.

“Let’s just get out of here,” he said to Minji, realizing mid-sentence she was gone.

“Minhee, where did—“

“She said she was going to the car,” his daughter answered.  Her arms were crossed over the top of his cranium, resting her own head on his with a yawn.

Seunghyun found the garbage can at last and shook his sticky hand, slinging blue droplets of ice cream to the ground.  The business card went in with the melted cone.  “Sounds like a plan.”

It was nearing three in the afternoon by the time Seunghyun pulled out of the congested parking lot and back onto the highway.  Minhee had napped in her car seat while they inched along for nearly twenty minutes in the bumper to bumper traffic, but she awoke groggy and grumpy as the back wheels thudded into the drainage ditch separating the zoo exit and the road.

“I don’t think we should go home just yet,” Minji was saying.  “It’d be a shame to waste such a pretty afternoon.”

“You’re supposed to be at one of your cram-schools today then, aren’t you?”

Minji’s silence was telling.

“Fine,” Seunghyun relented.  “We need to get her out of the house anyway.  I’m starting to get worried about what her teacher has been telling me…”

Minhee returned her head to its slumped position and closed her eyes, listening intently.

“Like what?”

“Like that she doesn’t play well with other kids…”  Seunghyun’s voice was heavy with exasperation.  He had taken great care to place his daughter in a particularly progressive preschool, with a number of children from other “non-traditional” families as her classmates.  He had hoped it would help her make friends more easily, but so far it had been ineffective.  Miss Park regularly reported that Minhee spent most of playtime by herself, silent and inapproachable.  Invites to birthday parties and other get-togethers went ignored when the little girl would cry and mope until Seunghyun gave in and let her stay home.  He blamed himself: the two of them had little to no contact with relatives and family friends were few.  And he wasn’t the best role model for sociability himself.  He had been a shy kid too, but his daughter’s closed nature, even at her young age, troubled him.

“Well, let’s go find some kids,” Minji suggested.  “There’s a park near your house isn’t there?”

“Yeah, there is.”  Seunghyun glanced at a street sign and missed the turn up the hill to their home, heading towards the suggested spot.  “That’s not a bad idea.”

“That’s what you pay me for.  Which, by the way…”

“I know, I know, you’ll get it.”  He spied a jungle gym through a few leafless trees down the block.  “I would have paid you a few extra bucks to save me from that guy back at the zoo.”

Minji laughed. “The one with the ugly baby?”

“Such an ugly baby, wasn’t it?!”

She pocketed her phone as they arrived at the park.  “So exactly how much weight did you lose?”

Seunghyun cocked a threatening eyebrow at her. “Do you want your money, or not?”