Are You Happy Now by Hanna Jameson

Author:Hanna Jameson [Jameson, Hanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241992647
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2022-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

20.

Like for so many thousands of other families, it was a tradition – as far back as Yun could remember – for their parents to drive them all down to Chula Vista’s Christmas Circle.

They crawled along in a line of cars, Kevin and Yun relegated to the back seats once again, their parents up front. Everyone’s windows were down and there was an endless rotation of Christmas songs on the radio. They could have walked, probably would have been less hassle, but they never had so they never would.

‘It’s so nice they still did it this year,’ his mother remarked in Korean as Kevin and Yun started jostling each other, craning to catch sight of the sign first.

CHRISTMAS CIRCLE: NEXT RIGHT.

‘Sign!’ Kevin yelled in English, making everyone in the car flinch. ‘Sign!’

When they were kids, Christmas Circle had turned into a game of family bingo, based on who could loudly announce the sighting of certain landmarks first. There were no prizes save for bragging rights, and the landmarks were the arbitrary choices of the kids they used to be.

‘You’re lying!’ Yun snapped, unclipping his seat belt to hang out of the window. It was balmy outside, and flying in from New York during the holidays always left him with a kind of temperate whiplash. ‘I can’t even see it from here.’

‘It’s right there.’

‘Well it’s there now.’

Their father grimaced. ‘Dan, get back in and put your seat belt on, do you want to lose your head?’

‘At three miles an hour?’ Yun slid back into the car and levered himself roughly into the middle seat alongside Kevin. ‘There’s no way you saw that, you get worse every year. And you know sitting on the right is an advantage so why would you lie?’

‘I’m not even lying, get back in your own seat.’ Kevin shoved him. ‘This is why we can’t play family games any more, you’re such a fascist.’

‘Can I swap places with Mom then? For fairness.’ Yun raised his eyebrows at his father in the overhead mirror, who adjudicated on such matters.

Yun Ji-hoon shook his head wearily. ‘You lost scissors rock paper, it was fair. Everyone stays in their seats.’

‘Why wouldn’t they do it this year?’ Kevin shrugged, returning to their mother’s original statement. ‘It’s not like everyone can just cancel Christmas.’

‘Maybe out of respect?’ Jeong Hui-sun reapplied her lipstick in the mirror as they came to a halt just before the turn-off to Whitney. ‘These are military families, they might have thought it was inappropriate.’

‘Are they still military around here? I thought that was just the people who started it.’

‘Most of them are still going to be military, aren’t they?’

‘People move.’

‘Dads are dads, whoever moves in they’ll do the light show no matter what.’ Kevin hung his hand out of the window, like he wished he was holding a cigarette between his fingers. ‘This whole thing is like a monument to the focused competitive energy of dads.’

Hui-sun frowned. ‘I could do better. The dinosaur house is lazy.’

‘You mean the Jurassic Park house?’ Yun gestured at the glowing sign.

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.