What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Author:Nancy Jooyoun Kim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

A young fuyu persimmon tree, gray and twiggy and wan, slumped in the back of the van.

Guilt had consumed John after his dinner with Priscilla yesterday. His desire for another, while his wife was missing. He needed to drown her out. Drown the words I think his death was a warning.

John didn’t care. He had wanted only to prove that RJ was flawed, like him.

At the nursery, he had found this tree, which he would plant, no matter its meek appearance, this weekend in Sunny’s honor. He would take care of it forever—at least until his wife came home, where she belonged, and took over.

His wife always loved the fruit in the fall and winter, savored its delicate and honeyish flavor, the charm of its glossy orange skin and its calyx toupee. She adored the tree itself because it dared to be beautiful in every season with its bright chartreuse foliage of spring and summer, its red flames of fall, and the elegance of its bare branches, which would hang with any fruit that remained like sweet lanterns in winter.

Two cats, a tortoiseshell and a tuxedo, lounged on the sidewalk in front of the driveway where his children had returned the Eldorado. John inched his car forward but they didn’t budge. A standoff.

“Fuck,” he yelled to himself before he shifted into park. He ran out of his van and waved his arms, stomping. The cats sauntered off to their next warm patch. John gritted his dentures as he pulled up his gray Dickies pants. He’d get those cats one day.

“You okay there?” Rodriguez asked.

“The cats,” John said. “They shit all over.”

“Like I said, you need a dog, man.”

Another mouth to feed. John wanted to snap, Maybe YOU need a dog. But instead he sat in his van, buckled his seat belt, pulled up the driveway, finally, and parked inches from the rear of his Eldorado.

“Did they find anything else?” Rodriguez asked. His hand rested on the low chain-link fence that separated their yards. He tossed a trowel to the ground. “About the dead guy?”

“No.” John heaved the sad, leafless tree out of the back. He would pretend with his children that he honored the anniversary of her death, but in reality, he knew she would return. Death was always easier to explain, and he would wait here for her and her letters forever, or at least until the end of this stupid world.

A paletero jingled the bells of his cart. In his straw hat, long-sleeve button-down shirt and jeans, he pushed his cart covered in colorful stickers for ice cream bars shaped like deformed ninja turtles or red, white, and blue rockets. Sunny had often treated the kids to one of the more natural flavors like coconut, strawberry, or mango. John had stopped eating sweets himself years ago to protect his few remaining teeth and his blood sugar, but he could feel the stickiness of their hands as they licked the bars that melted in the summer, his wife’s pink tongue that flitted in and out of her mouth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.