“Mark, are you going to stay for dinner?” Jenni’s mother asked him.

            “Yes, he is,” Jenni replied for him. He was about to object, but something inside himself disagreed. He wanted to stay, it was as simple as that.

            She had always told him to call her Kyoko. It was an awkward thing at first. He would always stutter on, about to call her Mrs. Lim. She was always wearing that smile, that smile masking something behind.

            “So what’s for dinner?” Jenni asked casually.

            “I’m not quite sure, but it sure looks an awful lot like stew,” replied Kyoko playfully.

            “My mother,” Jenni dramatically directed her sentence toward Mark, “she’s so talented, she doesn’t even have to pay attention to what she’s cooking.” The three laughed.

            They said a prayer before the meal was started. It baffled Mark at the time, when, after seeing the tiny portion sitting in his bowl, Kyoko seized it and scooped two more spoonfuls right in. His own mother would have slapped his hand for even thinking of taking a second portion, calling him a glutton. But Jenni’s mother…she was so generous it almost seemed rude to be polite.

            The mother and daughter were painfully in sync. They switched from English to Korean to pure laughter with ease. The dinner table was characterized with chatter. There seemed to be not even a second of silence. It gave Mark a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, but it wasn’t the sickness of the many months before. No, it was a new feeling, well, maybe not entirely new. It was a feeling of warmth that had been long buried.

            Mark noticed it the second he met Kyoko. The mother and daughter were mirror images of each other. Maybe not in the way they looked or the way they spoke, but what lay underneath. He saw selflessness in the both of them.

            “Mark,” Jenni’s mother began, “Jenni tells me you’re going to be in America next week.”

            “Oh, yes. I’m going to Los Angeles to visit my family over the break,” Mark replied. At the time he was still quite uncomfortable with the subj