Rebuilding, Brick by Brick
After Chairwoman Yurim's last message, Yeoncheong found herself scanning the apartment for anything remotely embarrassing. It might have just been one of the woman's mischievous jokes, but there was no harm in being prepared.
Having confirmed that the place was spotless, she sat down on the bed and waited in an awkward sort of limbo.
Then the intercom rang, and Chairwoman Yurim waved up at the camera. The moment Yeoncheong buzzed open the lobby door, a commotion erupted outside.
For one thing, there was clearly more than one voice in the racket, so she had apparently brought someone along. Yeoncheong remained half in doubt until she could see for herself.
The commotion grew closer and closer, then stopped right outside her door. Yeoncheong rose from her seat to open it.
"Chairwoman..."
"Hey there, Yeoncheong. Been doing well?"
When Yeoncheong cracked the door open, Chairwoman Yurim waved a hand just as she had through the intercom, smiling warmly.
"I've been fine, but..."
Yurim asked after her as if it were nothing, but Yeoncheong's eyes drifted naturally to the father her chairwoman had dragged along in tow.
She knew from being on the receiving end herself, but whatever the man had been in his youth, he clearly hadn't just been all brawn and no skill.
The moment their eyes met, her father hastily looked away, and Yurim told Yeoncheong to step aside before hurling her unsightly junior inside like a heavy piece of cargo.
"Ha... Back in college, I mediated lovers' quarrels for junior couples. Now that I'm older, I'm wrangling parents and their kids. Is there any senior in this world as devoted as me? You'd agree, wouldn't you, Yeoncheong?"
Yeoncheong had sensed it from everything the woman did to help her, in both money and deeds. Judging by the lovers' quarrel comment, her parents and Chairwoman Yurim must have been extremely close.
She had just watched her father fly through the air, lightly as a feather. There was no reason to shake her head.
"Yes. Thank you, always."
"Mm~ That's right."
As if to say, learn from this respectful attitude, Chairwoman Yurim glanced down at the collapsed father.
Then, with a flick of her finger, she pointed at the delivered items and rattled off her instructions.
"Ah, and that guy? He's staying for three days and two nights, starting today. If he tries to run off, call me. I'll come drag him back. It's been almost a year since you two last saw each other, so catch up on how he's been and hash out whatever's been piling up."
"Yes. Um... get home safe."
"Will do. Call me if anything comes up."
Whether delivering Yeoncheong's father had truly been the sole purpose of her visit or not, Chairwoman Yurim turned on her heel with practiced cool and strode out of the one-room apartment.
And so the apartment was left with—
just the two of them: a father-daughter pair, once father and son, now suspended in exquisite awkwardness.
Had his own actions hurt her? Guilt kept her father's mouth firmly shut.
Yeoncheong, for her part, knew exactly why he had chosen the overseas dispatch, and found it equally hard to speak.
Even for a one-room apartment, a space occupied by just two people had no business feeling this stifling.
It wasn't as though the silence was unfamiliar—they had always been a quiet, father-son pair of few words. But now they were father and daughter. And a whole year had passed on top of that, leaving an awkwardness that defied description hanging in the air.
Still, they were parent and child, weren't they? They couldn't carry this strained relationship all the way to the grave.
Yeoncheong, who had at least learned a thing or two from jostling shoulders with girls her own age, did her best to break the tension...
"Have you been well?"
"Yeah."
"They said you couldn't come this time either. But here you are."
"...I'm sorry."
"It's fine. I wasn't really trying to hold it against you."
All that came back were stiff, conversation-killing replies, and her brave attempt fizzled into nothing.
In situations like this, it really should have been the adult—the father—who stepped up.
"Ahem... Well, anyway, it's good to see your face. You seem to be doing well, so that's a relief."
And the direction he took was off by quite a lot.
The flow of the conversation practically announced well, this is where I'll be going.
He hadn't even been there five minutes, and yet here he was showing signs of leaving. Yeoncheong's lips fluttered in desperation.
"Where are you sleeping? You got rid of the old house before you left, didn't you? Where are you planning to sleep?"
"I'll get a motel room. Surely there'll be at least one vacancy."
"Th-then what about food?"
"Don't worry about that. I'm not going to go around starving."
This was going nowhere. Whatever reason she offered, he would slip out of it like a loach and, in the end, walk right out the door.
Still, at this point Yeoncheong had done her best. So the sensible thing was to bow out gracefully and pin her hopes on the next opportunity, whenever it came.
Except—perhaps the sight of her mother's holiday visit had shoved something loose in him, because words she would normally have kept bottled up came spilling out on their own.
"Is it because I remind you of Mom?"
"What?"
"I look like her, so you can't stand to be around me. Is that why you still need time?"
The thorns were out in full force, and the polite register had vanished entirely.
Yeoncheong glared at her father with a scowl that read, to anyone watching, as unmistakably angry.
Frankly, she thought she did take quite a bit after her mother. She was her father's child, yes, but also her mother's—and resemblance, in a way, was only natural.
The friends who had quietly followed her to the anniversary visit had all said the same thing when they saw the portrait at the columbarium, so it wasn't just her own judgment either.
Which meant she could, to a point, understand why her father flinched away from the sight of her—a living echo of his dead wife.
And yet, at the same time...
it hurt.
True, they had never been great talkers—just a typical quiet father-and-son pair you'd find in any household.
But her father was the only family Yeoncheong had left. And Yeoncheong was the only family he had left. For years, they had lived together, each of them doing their best to patch the hollow the other could never fill.
And then her sex had changed.
And for that one reason—that she resembled her mother—he bent over backwards to avoid her.
She hadn't expected the kind of warm comfort her friends offered her now, but surely she'd been entitled to at least a simple are you okay. She couldn't help feeling hurt.
At first she'd been glaring at him out of pure frustration—angry that she seemed to be the only one trying to mend their relationship.
But as her thoughts drifted down that road, the resentment curdled into something closer to sorrow.
"Is... is my face really that wrong?"
Her voice had gone damp in an instant.
Was this the sex change at work too? Come to think of it, she'd grown so much more emotional lately, so quick to tears. Knowing that didn't make it any easier to manage, though.
Her emotions had slipped the reins of their owner before she noticed, and now she was sniffling and sobbing and blowing her nose into the bargain.
Caught off guard by this display of weakness—something he hadn't seen since right after his wife's death—her father was completely at a loss.
"No, wait... how is any of that your fault?"
With Yeoncheong hunting for blame nowhere but inside herself, the two of them were alike even where they didn't need to be.
She seemed to be holding on somehow, but a year's worth of pent-up hurt had reached the danger zone—a single poke and the whole thing would blow.
Yeongcheong's father had always been weak to a woman's tears. Back when he and his wife were still dating, he'd so often gone begging for advice from his senior Yurim whenever they fought.
And now here he was, agonizing over the tears of a child who had become his daughter. Just then, a message arrived from Chairwoman Yurim, as if she had predicted this exact situation.
At the words only family, Yeoncheong's father's mind snapped wide awake—and then the next message wrung a snort of laughter out of him.
For an unmarried senior to say something like that... he had no choice but to let the laugh escape on its own.
Except laughing at his phone in the middle of this particular scene left Yeoncheong, eyes brimming with tears, utterly dumbfounded.
"Are you... are you laughing right now? At a time like— waaah!"
When a single drop of absurdity fell into a full year of overflowing hurt, the dam she'd been straining to hold finally gave way.
Curling into a ball in the corner of her bed, Yeoncheong prayed that everything that had happened today would turn out to be a dream.
Ha... I want to disappear...
She had bawled her eyes out, thoroughly and completely. And very, very bitterly.
Just as her father treated Yurim and Yeoncheong differently, perhaps Yeoncheong had simply let herself go all the more because it was family in front of her.
That didn't change the fact that she was ashamed of having sobbed her heart out at her age.
"Um... Yeoncheong? Feeling a little calmer now?"
Yeoncheong gave no answer, but since he'd asked only after gauging that she had settled somewhat, her father laboriously opened his mouth.
"I never dreamed you were carrying all that inside you. I'm sorry."
After a moment's hesitation, he began, slowly and carefully, to unpack everything he had kept locked in his heart.
Yes, avoiding her because she reminded him of his dead wife was the truth—but only at the very beginning. Later, he said, it had simply been too painful: how he had fled overseas like a man running away, leaving his reeling child behind. How he'd had no face to show up brazenly afterward.
And how, when he learned last summer, around vacation time, that something ugly had happened, he had tried to come back to Korea.
"You knew about that?"
"Of course. However things stood, news that important would reach me eventually. Nothing came of it afterward anyway, and Senior Yurim told me not to come—that I'd only get in her way looking after you—so I didn't."
Yeoncheong, caught off guard by this first-time revelation, scratched her cheek.
Even between family, this kind of bare-hearted confession felt a little too raw.
But now that a proper conversation was finally taking place, and Yeoncheong had come to understand her father's heart at least somewhat, she shot upright.
"Let's stop there."
"Stop what, exactly?"
"Now that I know why you did it, we can stop airing our feelings. It's embarrassing for both of us."
Her father heartily agreed with his daughter's proposal.
No matter how old you got, this sort of talk never got any easier.
"Right. Let's just pretend none of it happened and go back to being a normal family."
"Hm? Well... even so, pretending it never happened might be a bit much, don't you think?"
He'd only meant that, having finally set down the weight on his heart—and with father-and-son now become father-and-daughter—it might be hard to go back to exactly how things were.
"Pre. tend. It. Never. Happened. Understood?"
When Yeoncheong said it with her eyes still red-rimmed from crying, glaring at him with all the fierceness she could muster, her father meekly bobbed his head.
He had no idea what his daughter was trying to get at, but in moments like these, the best move was simply to go along.
"Then... at least tell me how you've been? You know. The ordinary stuff."
They had exchanged messages all this time, but it had been nothing but dry, formal status reports—and those barely lasted three minutes.
"That sounds great, actually. I've got all this time and I was just wondering what to do with it."
For Yeoncheong, the change of subject was a welcome one.
He had left for his overseas dispatch so suddenly that he'd never even seen the apartment she lived in. Declaring that the house tour came first, Yeoncheong hopped up and showed him around the not-especially-large place.
"I worried, living all alone out here... but I suppose it was for nothing."
"Did you already forget? Even when there were two of us, I did almost all the housework."
If it had ended there, everything would have been fine.
But with the bathroom and kitchen sink spotless, and her father having confirmed she was eating properly, his remark was just the setup.
Despite his attempts to rein her in—clearly trying to respect the private life of his child who was now his daughter—she'd gotten carried away and proudly shown off her closet. That was where the trouble began.
Even having become a girl, Yeoncheong had never been much interested in clothes, so it was only natural that in the corner of her closet—still dominated by a wardrobe of grays, whites, and blacks—a pair of white puppy-ear headband and a red collar stood out unmistakably.
"Uh... um... er..."
His gaze nailed to the collar, Yeoncheong's father lost the power of speech entirely.
She had brought it home after the Hwaryeong Festival because he'd told her to keep it rather than throw it away—and then she'd gone and carelessly chucked it in a corner of the closet as some kind of keepsake. She had only herself to blame.
"Well. You're at that age, after all."
Faced with a father who had already interpreted the collar's purpose in a very particular direction, a scarlet-faced Yeoncheong let out a shriek of protest.
"It's not what you think! I'm telling you it's not! I wore it at the festival, that's aaaall!"
In any case...
This atmosphere would settle down some by tomorrow, but it had been a holiday stretch that showed real promise of a father-daughter relationship on the mend.