I met Peter when I was twenty-three. One night in February, Deven invited us all out to a bar after band practice. His childhood friend had just moved back to town after grad school in New York and was celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday at 12 Steps Down, a smoking bar in South Philly where you literally had to descend twelve steps to enter. At the time, we were a band of smokers and it was incentive enough to be able to smoke inside during the dead of winter. We all lit up before we’d even had the chance to order a beer.
It was karaoke night and Peter was up to sing as we filtered in. He’d picked a Billy Joel song called “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” I’d never heard the song, but I was impressed that among all the other hipsters who’d signed up for Weezer and Blink 182 standards, this guy decided to take on a mom-rock track with a forty-eight-bar instrumental break. He was wearing aviator eyeglasses with thin wire frames that took up practically half his face and a white T-shirt that plunged comically in a deep V, exposing an expansive tuft of curly brown plumage. He held the microphone as if it were the stem of a wineglass—daintily by his fingertips—and proceeded to move along bizarrely to the song, bobbing his head up and down atilt like it’d been partially lopped off and left to flap on a hinge, and tapping his corresponding foot on every quarter note like Mick Jagger at a square dance.
Having sung for a full six and a half minutes and sufficiently aroused the collective indignation of the karaoke waiting list that made up half the bar, Peter embraced Deven, who quipped something inaudible over the music. What I could hear was Peter’s laugh, a high-pitched, honking sound that was like a cross between a Muppet and a five-year-old girl. And that was it—I was in love.
It took Peter much longer to discover reciprocal feelings—or perhaps more accurately, for me to implant them. He was out of my league, objectively more attractive, his handsomeness even becoming a running joke among our dowdy friend group. He was a proficient guitar player but interested in more sophisticated endeavors—compiling redacted poetry, translating three-quarters of a novella. He had a master’s degree and was fluent in French and had read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time.
Still, I was determined and spent the next six months pursuing him, assiduous in my efforts to show up at all the same parties and eventually securing weekly face time when I got him a part-time job as a food runner at the Mexican-fusion restaurant where I worked. But even then, after nearly three months of food service camaraderie—cozying up at the service station with the crossword, polishing glasses and folding linens side by side, rushing after cash-outs to make last call—I remained deep in the friend zone.
By October we were gearing up for Restaurant Week, the busiest time of the year. Every fall a slew of suburban families pours into “upscale” Mexican restaurants like ours to dine on three courses for thirty-three bucks, while the chefs sweat and curse, pounding out ceviche after haphazard ceviche and hundreds of deconstructed tamales and miniature tres leches, struggling to fill what feels like a never-ending trough to feed the frugal hordes. That year Restaurant Week became Restaurant Weeks, much to the delight of participating restaurant owners eager to cash in, and equally to the chagrin of severely understaffed staffs such as ours, who were expected to work triple the headcount without a single day off.
Peter and I were scheduled to work the night of the kickoff together. I arrived at three thirty to set up for the night and was surprised to find Adam, our bald aggro manager, who frequently threatened to fine us for every glassware casualty, sitting unusually still at the bar, staring into his phone.
“Peter’s been in an accident,” he said.
An accident was an odd way to refer to it, though in the months that followed, I’d often find myself referring to it that way as well, as if subconsciously we didn’t want to acknowledge it for what it was. Peter had been attacked. Adam stood and showed me the photo. He was sitting upright in a hospital bed, his paper gown open in the front, a number of sticky circles adhered to his chest. His face was unrecognizably deformed, the upper left quadrant purple and lopsided.
The night before, Peter and his friend Sean had been walking home late from a party. They turned down the alley that led to Peter’s apartment and as they reached the front door someone called out from behind, asking to bum a cigarette. When they turned their heads to oblige, his accomplice swung a brick, knocking them both unconscious. By the time they came to, the attackers had fled. Sean’s teeth were missing and he began searching for them in the dark alley. Peter’s orbital bone, the socket that houses the eye, was crushed. Nothing had even been stolen. Peter’s roommate found them bloodied on the stairwell and took them to the hospital. They were keeping him at Hahnemann for a few days to monitor the bleeding in his brain from the impact.
That night, as I ran up and down serving both floors of the restaurant alone, I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter. What could have happened if that brick had been swung with a flick more force, if the bone had traveled half a fingernail further into his brain. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I really did love him. The next morning, I stuffed my backpack full of the most impressive books on my shelf, bought a bouquet of sunflowers and two miniature pumpkins, and rode my bike to the hospital.
Peter was there with his parents, whom I’d met once before at the restaurant. He looked even worse in person, groggy and full of drugs, but I was relieved that he still managed to laugh when the nurse brought out a catheter drainage bottle to hold my flowers.
When he got out of the hospital, Peter went back to his parents’ house in Bucks County for a few weeks to recover. When he finally came back to work, I figured things would be different, that he might be rattled and skittish, afraid to walk alone at night. I couldn’t imagine he’d want to come out to the bars with us after work. But it seemed that the only thing that had really changed about him were his feelings for me. From then on, the running joke was that I’d paid the two guys to knock some sense into him.
The prospect of the wedding worked its magic. With the exception of a minor feud with TSA over a heating pad, my mother’s medical evacuation went smoothly. The insurance company paid for us to fly business-class and our registered nurse even turned a blind eye to let my mom have a couple of sips of champagne to celebrate. After another week of recovery at Riverbend, my mother was finally able to return home.
It felt like we’d thrown open a shade and the room was filled with new light. My mother had something to fight for, and we used her desire as leverage to get her to move and eat. Suddenly she was in her reading glasses, scrolling through her phone, searching for an engagement ring she remembered seeing at Costco. She held up the screen for me to see. A simple silver band of small diamonds. “Tell Peter to buy you this one,” she said.
I sent Peter the link. On the phone we arranged travel plans around his work schedule. He’d fly in one weekend to propose and visit the rental outlet the wedding planner had suggested. Two weeks later he’d return with his family for the real thing.
“We can always get divorced if things go sour,” I said to him on the phone. “We can be, like, hip young divorced people.”
“We’re not going to get a divorce,” Peter said.
“I know but if we did, don’t you think ‘my first husband’ would make me sound so full of maturity and mystique?”
When the time came I picked him up from the Portland airport. It’d been nearly a month since we’d seen each other, and even though I had basically forced him to propose and even picked the ring, I felt giddy around him in a new way. We drove into the city and parked the car. On the walk to a restaurant, on a random street in the Pearl District, he got down on one knee.
The next day the two of us drove to the wedding outlet and took photos of various chairs and linens to send to my mother. We figured the easiest and most affordable option was to throw a small wedding in my parents’ backyard. We had space for a hundred people, and if my mother felt unwell, she could retire to her bedroom without difficulty.
Back on the East Coast, Peter drafted invitations and sent them out express. He made up place cards with all the guests’ names and imagined heraldic mottoes to add his own touch. “Kunst, Macht, Kunst,” “Art, Power, Art,” read one, below an emblem he’d made with our initials that resembled a coat of arms. “Cervus Non Servus,” “The Stag Is Not Enslaved,” read another.
I ordered the cake at a grocery store, bringing back samples first for my mother to try. I asked my friends in And And And if they’d be the house band and found a bartender, a photographer, an officiant. My mother and I lay in bed together and discussed the guest list and arranged the seating chart. I thought of how we could have run circles around our wedding planner if only my mom had been in the right state of mind, if we had the time, if she wasn’t squinting to see through the occlusions of OxyContin and Fentanyl.
There were other matters to attend to that weren’t so pleasant. My father scheduled a meeting with hospice. Assisted suicide was a legal option in Oregon, but the doctor insisted it was his job to ensure she wasn’t in any pain.
As soon as Peter left, Kye returned from Georgia and lobbied a group of Korean church women to gather in my mother’s bedroom and have her properly convert to Christianity. I peered shyly through the bedroom door. They were singing Korean hymns and fanning their Bibles while my mother vaguely participated, nodding in and out.
I knew my mom appreciated Kye’s generosity and was giving in to the charade to make her happy, but I’d always been proud of her resistance to spiritual conformity and I was sorry to see it surrendered. My mother had never practiced religion, even when it separated her from an already meager Korean community in a small town, even when her sister asked her to on her deathbed. I loved that she did not fear god. I loved that she believed in reincarnation, the idea that after all this she could start anew. When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.
“Did you accept Jesus into your heart?” I asked.
“Ya, I guess so,” she said.
I crossed the room and made my way toward her bedside, but before I crawled in beside her, she asked me to bring her jewelry box. It was a small cherrywood chest with two drawers that slid open from the bottom and a compartment with a mirror that opened from the top. Inside it was lined in dark blue velvet, each drawer divided into nine compartments. None of the jewelry was particularly old. My mother hadn’t inherited anything. The pieces were all bought within her lifetime, most of them gifts she’d given herself that were precious to her simply because of her ability to do so.
“I’m going to give away some of my jewelry this week,” she said. “But I want you to pick what you want first.”
This, more than anything, felt like an expression of my mother’s spirituality. For my mother, nothing was holier than a woman’s accessories. I traced my fingers over her necklaces and earrings, selfishly wanting to keep it all, even though I knew I’d never wear most of it.
I didn’t know anything about jewelry. I didn’t know what made one piece more valuable than another, how to distinguish silver from steel or diamond from glass, whether or not a pearl was real or plastic. The pieces that meant the most to me weren’t worth much. They were ones that recalled specific memories, more like Monopoly tokens than precious gems. A small pendant in the shape of a stick figure with my birthstone stuck in its belly, its arms and legs fake gold chains that hung from its sides. A cheap glass beaded bracelet she bought from a beach peddler on a vacation in Mexico. The Scottie dog brooch that was pinned to her lapel while we waited on the couch for Dad to finish in the bathroom and drive us to Uncle Ron’s for Thanksgiving. A gaudy butterfly ring I teased her about over a holiday dinner. Most important, Eunmi’s necklace that matched my own.
Every day leading up to the wedding, my mother and I would walk the circumference of the house. She’d set a goal to slow dance with her son-in-law and we were working on building up her stamina. It was late September and the pine needles were beginning to yellow and fall, the mornings becoming brisker. Arm in arm, we’d start from the sliding door off the living room and walk down the three wooden steps of the deck, pacing slowly across the lawn, hugging the bark mulch past the rhododendrons my mother had planted years before. Julia would follow close behind, desperate for my mother’s affection, which we had nervously discouraged for fear of germs. Occasionally she would stop to pull a weed before we rounded the concrete drive and retreated, victorious, back inside.