Amends
- Oct 28, 2022
- 3 min read
by SJ Han
A father and his grown son have dinner together for the first time in years. They walk down main street, candied lights strung between the streetlamps for holiday season. The father insists that the son choose where to eat. The son lingers around an Italian restaurant halfway below ground level.
“Here?” the father asks. His son descends the steps without an answer. From behind, the father gazes at clumsily cropped hair.
A stripped-down piano melody runs through the restaurant. A silent film is projected onto a bare white wall, a fresh coat of paint unable to mask its grooves and blemishes.
“Have you been here before?” the father asks. He wonders whether he should’ve picked a restaurant instead, maybe making a reservation beforehand.
His son shrugs.
“Why here then?”
The son glances out the window, watching boots traverse snow-dusted pavement and kiss their own dim shadows. It’s for the novelty of being just halfway underground — though he can’t express it well.
The two share a Sicilian pizza with beer. The father does not press a conversation. He waits to see if his son has anything to say, though silence ripens by the second. Delicate chords flutter and retreat; speechless lovers emanate from the projector and dance.
His son’s shoulders are firmer, his jawline sharper. He’d worried that his son might’ve turned pale and scrawny over the past few years, and he half-expected his son to break down in tears at the sight of people chattering on main street, of Christmas lights and faded snow. His son’s composure is as startling as it is reassuring. Finally, the father speaks.
“Your mother wants me to pretend nothing happened. Would you like that too?”
His son nods.
The father says no more. He’d been prepared to provide his insight, how he thinks none of the evil inflicted by a man can take away from the good he’s done, and how none of the good done by a man can take away from the evil he’s inflicted. Almost reluctantly, he tucks away the words.
The walk home is quiet, though the son halts at one point to observe a pair of magpies in a tree. From a distance, he stands completely still and stares, as if the moment was a frail creature of its own.
When they arrive home, the mother holds her son tight. She’s prepared warm tea and fresh clothes for his return. She says they could watch television together, maybe rent a movie, though the son says not tonight.
The son’s childhood room is intact, every poster, book, and decoration just where he remembers — though it belies his parents’ fingerprints, smattered over every possession for a clue they must have missed.
“You can stay with us as long as you’d like.” The mother kisses her son on the forehead as if he was still a little boy, then leaves him be.
“It almost feels wrong to love him,”she later admits in bed.
“He’s still our boy.”
She hesitates. “Does he seem remorseful?”
“He’s changed, in his own way.” His mind is on wild magpies, the caution in his son’s posture.
He sighs. “We never visited him.”
Even in darkness, her dissatisfaction is palpable, like smoke in the air. “Maybe we should have him visit that poor boy and his family –”
“Enough.” The word does not echo. Silence is seamless.
The son sneaks out of bed and gets dressed. He returns to main street, the seasonal lights less lustrous on second sight. Winds blow; birds scatter. Nowhere better to go, he reenters the Italian restaurant. The young owner — around his age — recognizes him from earlier and lets him stay. Dinnertime is ending; the silent film stutters mid-credits, then plays itself from the beginning. Sitting closer to the half-submerged window, the son’s mind is on the events of that morning, on a flat-handed cellmate — around his father’s age — who slapped him on the back with a flat palm and wished him luck, on the surreal minute spent changing into his own clothes.
He is served a glass of water, with a lemon wedge and mint leaf. The waitress smiles. Like a dream, he can recognize himself in the moment without quite feeling in control. His parents’ alert eyes bring him unease; their absence brings him sorrow. And to his disappointment, his own eyes sting but remain painfully dry, fixed on the leather and fabric of anonymous shoes treading into the dark of the night.
SJ Han is a bilingual writer originally from Seoul. He is a graduate student at Georgetown University. His work is published in Smokelong Quarterly, AAWW’s The Margins, Hobart, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. He will one day write a novel.
