41 – Parents
“Yoo Seon-ah…! I bought a train ticket! Let’s go now!”
I saw the destination written on the train ticket. It is far.
“When I get here, I have to take a bus again, and then take a taxi. So it’s a long way to go. So Yoo Seon-ah, let’s go over there and buy something to drink.”
Jinah Lee points to the convenience store with her finger. She doesn’t really want to drink anything. Jinah Lee took my hand and entered her convenience store.
“I want to drink this!”
He grabbed a drink from the display and spoke to me. Drinks, to be honest, I didn’t really care about what Lee Jin-ah ate or not.
“I wish I could pick out a wired tooth!”
f*ck bother.
After taking out a bottle of barley tea, she counts the drink Jina Lee is holding.
“Ah. Yoo Seon-ah, I’ll drink well!”
The money I spent on drinks anyway. He gave me all of this too.
If I spend this money here, will I have to pay or owe more to Jinah Lee? She thought about that a lot in the past, but now she can’t do that.
It’s just tiring and annoying. I didn’t want to use her head with something like that.
Just let it happen.
“I think we can go over there!”
Point her finger at the entrance to the platform and walk towards it. After a while the train arrives. Jinah Lee and I boarded the train.
The sound of doors closing and the train starting to leave the station. She leaned against the window and looked out, and Lee Jin-ah leaned against the back of her chair and rested for a while.
We said nothing, and the train started to pick up speed. Tall building. And gray buildings. Get out of the black asphalt. Rice fields gradually turning green.
And high mountains. It was when I was passing through the countryside between cities.
“Yoo Seon-ah, if you go to the cafeteria over there, they sell lunch boxes. Would you like to go and have a bite?”
“Yes”
I was too hungry to turn this down. Because I was starving at home.
I get up from my seat and go to the dining car. There is an employee who manages the canteen, and the menu is hanging above his head.
Ramen, snacks, lunch boxes, things like that. It was more expensive than eating outside the train, but I had to take the train for more than 3 hours.
“Two lunchboxes worth 10,000 won, please!”
Lee Jin-ah calculates.
“It must be delicious. Yoo Seon-ah!”
Since meals can only be eaten in the dining car, I sit side by side with Lee Jin-ah in the window seat and unpack the lunch box.
It’s a chicken lunch box. There is also egg roll, and it’s warm because it’s microwaved once.
“Delicious!”
Beside her, Lee Jin-ah was eating a lunchbox first. I was very hungry, so I ate a boxed lunch next to me.
She is eating egg rolls while looking at the scenery by the window. Lee Jin-ah comes to talk to her.
“Yoo Seon-ah, this one is delicious, that one too…! Everything looks delicious!”
I didn’t ask.
You keep talking about this and that. I just look around her without thinking.
At school, when Lee Jin-ah did this, all the kids looked at me, but on the train, no one was interested.
She puts earphones in her ears and watches mu tube, or plays games, or reads novels, or is just interested in doing her own thing,
A boy and a girl, people don’t seem to care about the two of them forgetting to eat lunch together.
How do we look in the eyes of others..? Does it look like he’s just going on a picnic while forgetting his lunch box?
Excursion.
I look at Lee Jin-ah who is eating a boxed lunch with a sidelong glance. Until last time, it was pretty dead. He looked very happy today.
Every day, yes, every day, he screamed at me saying that he wanted to go around because it was an aquarium or a zoo. It feels good to be able to ride the train like today.
In a way, I think that this entire journey could feel like a picnic to Lee Jin-ah.
Her father is rice cakes.
Isn’t this the bait that Jinah Lee sprinkled to draw me out of bed?
I don’t have any big regrets about taking it and eating it.
Because I was so curious. What kind of life would she be living if she abandoned such a newborn baby who couldn’t even walk properly at an orphanage?
I’m curious. By any chance, does Lee Jin-ah know..?
“Do you know anything about my dad?”
“Ke..Black..”
Lee Jin-ah, who was eating a lunch box next to her, covers her mouth and coughs. Come to think of it, I haven’t talked to Lee Jin-ah first.
Whenever Lee Jin-ah asked, she only answered then.
Something caught while eating. Both cheeks turned red.
– Wrinkles.
Drink a drink once. Then Lee Jin-ah, who had calmed down, opened her mouth.
“Actually, I don’t know either… It’s just where it is. I can only tell what it’s doing. I just figured it out.”
Find out how to her bona mana to people near her self. She’s brushy, and she’ll start talking to me as soon as I start to notice it.
From Lee Jin-ah’s point of view, I’m still starving, but I guess I couldn’t afford to wait until I figured out what she does leisurely and where she lives.
“He works at a factory…And seems to be a surrogate driver. He also delivers, and seems to work at a gas station.”
“She seems to be the kind of person who can’t keep doing one thing.”
She almost fell asleep. She is a person who cannot work long and roams here and there like a migratory bird.
So, she must have lived such a miserable life that she couldn’t find a job and couldn’t even feed a child.
If I didn’t like working at the factory, I would quit after a few days and work as a substitute driver, but if I didn’t want to do that, I would do a part-time job like courier service or manual labor.
Well, she lives like that, and when she doesn’t want to work, she just spends her time lying in her closet. Hanryang, Baeksu.
“No, that’s not it. I work diligently every day, go to bed late and wake up early… But the house isn’t my own… I don’t have a car.
I don’t gamble or anything like that, I keep putting money in my bank account. Why are you raising so much money? I’m not sure. I guess I’ll need more time to figure that out.”
“…”
Unexpectedly, Lee Jin-ah knew a lot. …More useful information than you think.
I don’t buy a house, I don’t even have a car. The money is still being raised.
Why…? Surprisingly, I thought you would gamble or something like that, but you don’t..?
You sure weren’t a lousy guy..?
“…I live alone.. My name is…”
“Stop. I want to talk”
I cut off Lee Jin-ah. She finished her lunch and returned to her seat.
I was looking out the window again, but Lee Jin-ah didn’t talk to me. Are you tired?
I was a little tired.
I slept a lot in bed. I slept so much to death, why am I so tired..?
Close your eyes. When I opened my eyes again… The train was arriving at the station where we were supposed to get off. Look to the side Jinah Lee nodded too. She was sleeping
“Get up, we have to get down”
“..Uh..Yes.”
The train arrived at the station and got off.
“Yoo Seon-ah, we have to go to the bus terminal. It’s connected to the train station and bus terminal here…? I reserved a ticket there first.
Go to the bus terminal connected to the train station and board the bus. Windy… There are department stores around the station and large discount stores. I also had an apartment.
The more I rode the bus… The number of floors in the building gradually began to decrease.
Like we take the train to cross from city to city, we take the bus. Moved towards the edge.
From noble mtl dot com
Banwol Industrial Complex.
Get off the bus and look around.
Pure white smoke billows from countless chimneys. Gray building. Expressionless people.
“So where are you?”
“Hey, I heard it’s the villa”
She moves to the mansion Lee Jin-ah taught her. …How long has it been? We were able to arrive at a small villa.
The little villa with peeling paint and no elevator. Entering the villa, which is so pitiful and shabby that it cannot be called a good place with empty words, slowly climbs the stairs.
There were no guards, so no one cared what we did when we went in.
302
Arrived at the door.
“What smell is this..?”
Lee Jin-ah, who was next to her, frowned at her. .. Covering her nose and thinking for a moment, the nose-maeng-maeng makes a noise and speaks to her.
“The milk smells rancid”
…. Come to think of it, Jina Lee got hit a lot with rotten milk when she was in elementary school.
Certainly, it seems like that.
The weather is hot these days. If you put something like milk out, it will quickly rest.
“I’ll press…”
…There is no sense of reality. When I open this door, I feel that I can finally meet my dad, so it’s like I’m dreaming.
That… Was it so easy to meet?
I thought I would never see her. What should I say..? Can you recognize me by looking at me? What kind of expression would you make? What are you doing?
What are you talking about, and where is your mom? She would come up with something like that…If she knew this, she’d like to drive on a train.
Press the doorbell.
-Beep~
A bright bell sound that doesn’t match the gloomy exterior.
Wait a moment. Nothing happened.
“Maybe she went to work…? Yoo Seon-ah, we know where she lives. Let’s visit her next time. It’s too late now. It’s already… 10 O’clock. !”
“She still works at 10pm..? Wouldn’t she be resting at home at this time? She came all the way here. Let’s go back..?”
She said that she is a person who works hard every day according to common sense, so you might think that now is a busy time.
…But
“Every day, you work, and you don’t know whether the milk in your house is rotten or not..?”
That’s weird…! I opened the milk bag hanging on the doorknob in the front door.
I wonder if the milkman just added this and didn’t take it out. There were several days’ supply of milk in the bag.
Because of the heat, a lot of the taste went away, giving off a nasty smell.
Bang-Bang- I can see something sparkling between the milk cartons that are about to explode at any moment.
“It’s a key, I think it’s a house key”
“…Wait a minute… Yoo Seon-ah, if you open it carelessly…!”