Prospective Son-in-Law
At last I succeeded in wringing a confession out of Kim Hyeonji that she knew about Harin. In the process, though, one extra scrap of information slipped free, and to my astonishment it turned out I already had a prospective son-in-law.
“Wh-what are you talking about!? Harin has a boyfriend?”
“Fuck...”
“...?”
Why the sudden string of curses? That wasn’t the end of it, either.
Kim Hyeonji’s face twisted into a scowl and she shot to her feet on the spot. Then—whoosh!—without another word she bolted at full tilt.
What the hell was this? All I’d done was ask whether what she’d just said was true, so why fly into a rage and vanish?
Wondering what was going on, I turned my head and—aha. A police officer with his cap pulled low was strolling over, hands clasped behind his back.
Well, no matter how hard the world had become, nobody was going to ignore a kid in school uniform openly cracking a can of beer. Some civic-minded soul had clearly dialed the cops.
“Hey, student. You shouldn’t be drinking that stuff this early, should you?”
The young officer addressed me in a stern tone. Unlike the actual high-school girl Kim Hyeonji, though, I had nothing to kneel for. I leaned back casually and answered.
“I’m not a student.”
“Calling you a student is just a figure of speech. Not going to school doesn’t mean you’re not a legal minor.”
“No, I mean I’m a real adult.”
“Then that’s even worse. I get wanting to flash your ID and feel grown-up, but adulthood comes with responsibilities, doesn’t it? If you’ve got a high-school girlfriend, shouldn’t you be protecting her instead?”
“...”
Put that way, I was the bigger bastard, wasn’t I? Would a judge really buy the noble excuse that I was only looking out for my daughter?
If I were a freshly graduated twenty-year-old like the officer assumed, it might still be salvageable. But a thirtysomething with a high-school daughter of his own, offering booze and sharing cigarettes with yet another high-school girl? What kind of disaster would that unleash?
“I-I’m so sorry! Please, could you not tell my parents or the school? If I get caught this time I’ll really be suspended!”
I sprang up, bent double at the waist, and begged for mercy. No matter how I sliced it, playing the clueless high-school boy was the smartest move here.
“Haa... You remind me of my own younger days, so I’ll let it slide just this once. Clean this place up and get home.”
“Yes, sir...”
Reduced to pleading for my life with a patrolman who looked five or six years younger than me. Of course I’d actually committed the crime, so I wiped the table spotless, sorted the recycling, and even escorted the patrol car a full ten meters down the road.
Whew...
I’d barely scraped through the crisis, yet my head was still a mess. The cigarette pack wasn’t the problem anymore. My daughter had a boyfriend?
Rumble...
Ten o’clock at night. Library reading-room closing time sent the patrons filing out in a long line. I sat on a bench holding my breath, watching every single one of them.
Clack, clack...
And there was Harin. I rose at once and began tailing her.
One traffic light across the main road, then into the alley. Truth be told I didn’t even need to follow; the destination was obvious.
The second she stepped inside the house, though, she’d vanish into her room, click the lock, and refuse to talk. I had to catch her before that. I closed the distance and fell into step beside her.
“Just getting back?”
“Y-you startled me!”
Harin froze solid from the shock. Once she recognized me, her expression hardened.
“What are you doing? I told you not to act like you know me when people can see.”
“There’s nobody here.”
“...”
I’d waited precisely until the empty alley home appeared, knowing she’d react like that. Harin checked the surroundings, relieved no one was watching, but her anger at me hadn’t cooled one bit.
“You said today wasn’t a work day.”
She seemed curious why I was out at this hour. I postponed the answer and instead scanned her from head to toe.
A boyfriend, was it? Then some trace had to remain somewhere.
A button undone, a skirt twisted around, or—though I really didn’t want to imagine it—marks on her neck...
“Wh-why are you looking at me like that?”
Harin’s face flushed and she spun away. Ah... Right. A father had just been eyeing his own daughter’s body far too openly.
“Day off. I just ducked into the convenience store for a few things.”
“What did you buy?”
“...”
She twisted only her head enough to check my hands. Empty—no bag, nothing. Of course she wondered what I was playing at.
“Ate it there. Got hungry and craved cup ramen. What about you? What’d you have for dinner?”
“Cup ramen.”
“Why cup ramen instead of a proper meal? Are you short on allowance?”
“It’s not that.”
“...”
Which version was true? That she’d shared cup ramen with her boyfriend, or that dating had left her so broke she had no choice but to settle for cup ramen?
“Forget that—what about the academy like I suggested? You’re studying this hard; I want to do something for you.”
“I’m not studying that hard.”
“You filled the reading room right up to closing at ten on the first week of term and that’s not hard work? If it’s about money, don’t worry. I’ve got some saved, and sending one kid to academy isn’t—”
“I can manage alone.”
“...”
A blatant lie. Because Harin hadn’t studied a single minute today.
I saw the whole thing. She came back at 9:57, grabbed her bag, and left. And she claimed she could manage alone?
No wonder the first page of logarithms had been open with not a single doodle on it. She’d probably never been there before I arrived.
I couldn’t take it anymore. Not only was she out fooling around, she could look her own father dead in the eye and lie without blinking?
This was the price of raising her too soft. Time to set the rules straight and discipline her properly—
“Can we just go inside? I want to shower.”
But the baby-kitten eyes she fixed on me full-force made me crumble. Making a scene out here would only embarrass us both.
So I’d hold back for now. Until I had a real plan, I’d simply watch and wait.
Jingle!
The next morning I waited for Aunt’s Pork Cutlet Restaurant to open and barged in without warning. Aunt, just starting the day’s business, poked her head out.
“What? You actually came to help?”
“...”
I’d been so eager to talk about yesterday that I’d forgotten this was the busiest hour. No choice but to spend free labor I never signed up for.
Only after the lunch crowd finally thinned did we get a moment. Aunt wiped down an entire table, then asked,
“So did you eat dinner with Harin last night?”
“No. But that’s not important right now. Harin lied to me. She pretends to go to the library every day, reserves a seat, then runs off to meet her boyfriend and only comes back for her stuff when everything’s over!”
Everything I’d bottled up exploded. Aunt, of course, dismissed it for lack of evidence.
“You weren’t sitting there the whole time, were you? Kids go to the library, grab food with friends, mess around, and lose track of time. Happens all the time.”
“I never did that. And I’m not just going on circumstantial evidence. I have a solid witness who told me straight.”
“What witness?”
“One of Harin’s school seniors.”
“Does that make sense? You keep complaining you can barely talk to Harin, so how’d you get chummy with her senior?”
“That’s... Look, that’s not the point right now. Harin has a boyfriend!”
Dig any deeper and it would come out that her nephew in his mid-thirties was cosplaying as a high-school boy, so I cut myself off. Aunt stayed firm.
“So what?”
“So what? Your great-niece whose blood hasn’t even dried yet has a boyfriend and you’re not worried?”
“Not even a little. You clearly don’t know, but these days a second-year high-school girl without a boyfriend is the weird one.”
“Easy to say when it’s not your own daughter. Is a father worrying about his daughter dating somehow strange?”
“If you were a real dad who’d changed her diapers since she was a newborn still on the breast, sure. I have no idea why you’re acting like this. You’ve only lived with Harin for about four months.”
“...”
Put that way, it did sound off. But the source of my worry wasn’t limited by the time we’d spent together. Then Uncle chimed in.
“Maybe it’s this: because your relationship with Harin isn’t solid, you’re overcompensating with all this fretting out of an inferiority complex. Same way money-obsessed kids always claim they don’t care about cash, or people who only buy Japanese brands suddenly start mouthing off about boycotts.”
“You stay out of it.”
One line from Aunt and Uncle immediately shut up. Still, just being misunderstood like that bruised my pride, so I decided to tell the truth.
“Aunt, do you really not get why I’m like this? Think about how Harin was born. Blood doesn’t lie. What guarantee is there she won’t lose her head like her mother and father and mess up at a young age!?”
Raaagh! That was the real problem. I was a young dad myself and had no desire to micromanage my daughter’s dating life.
But was she an ordinary kid? She was the complete package, born with a full dump of high-school-parent genes.
Oh no! What had she been doing with her boyfriend while I waited at the library yesterday? I’d already lost Yu Jiyeon—why was heaven trying to snatch Kang Harin away too—
Whack!
Instead of heaven, Aunt delivered a thunderbolt to the back of my skull. The searing pain made me bellow.
“Ow, that hurts, Aunt! How old do you think I am that you keep hitting me?”
“From where I’m standing, your brother-in-law dying early means you grew up without enough thrashings and this is the result. Do you even hear the garbage coming out of your mouth?”
“I’m simply saying that as someone who once dreamed of becoming a doctor, we can’t ignore the basic principles of genetics—”
“Is Harin that kind of girl!? Sure, you’re only a dad on paper so you know nothing about her. But the Harin we know isn’t some airheaded kid like that.”
“But just look at the news—kids these days are terrifying!”
“You’re the terrifying one for only being able to imagine that crap! And have you never thought of it this way? Exactly as you said, she was born to a pair of high-school parents who screwed up as kids. Because of that she never even met her mother, and the so-called father used work as an excuse to dump the kid and run around like some free spirit. What do you think Harin felt watching parents like that? ‘I will never become like them’—that’s the normal reaction, isn’t it? The last person she wants to turn into is her own parents!”
“...”
I hadn’t considered that far. Parents are the mirror that reflects a child. You can’t help resembling them, but when it goes too far it can drive you to the opposite extreme instead.
Think about why the industrialization generation and the 86 generation clash politically. Or why the young men raised under sweet middle-aged parents hate feminism so much.
“S-sorry, Aunt. I didn’t think that far. But as a dad I just can’t help worrying about my daughter, you know?”
“Are you sure she has a boyfriend? No matter how close that senior is, maybe she just misunderstood?”
“That’s...”
I didn’t know. The cops had shown up before I could ask properly and I’d lost Kim Hyeonji. Uncle jumped in again.
“Haha! Third parties always jump to conclusions the second a guy and a girl walk together, right? Take the lady who supplies our vegetables. I bought her coffee a few times and the delivery kid who works with her kept grilling me about whether something was going on between us.”
“Why were you buying that woman coffee?”
“...”
The atmosphere turned murderous in an instant. As usual, my mere presence was enough to start cracking this household. I quietly slipped out of the shop, abandoning any hope of free leftover cutlets.
In the end the only conclusion was that I had to get a firm grip on Harin’s social circle. But how?
Harin would never tell me. The part-timer who’d sold Kim Hyeonji booze and cigarettes had already been fired, so waiting there was out.
Only one method left. Time to go back to school.