Unable to Cry
She signed with hands gone pale, clutched a few sheets of paper, and stepped out into the hallway with me and Cassandra.
Her hair was a mess and black tears streaked her face — she looked like something out of a slapstick film — yet no one laughed at the sight of her.
People went back to their work as if they had heard nothing, carefully pretending not to notice. A few employees who had known her a long time could only offer pitying looks, unable to approach. Leaving all those eyes behind her, Cassandra headed for the restroom.
And inside it, she broke down sobbing.
A sound knotted from shame, humiliation, and injustice carried all the way into the office. She must have pressed a few paper towels over her face, because the sound itself was not loud — yet it resonated far more deeply than the raised voice she had used only minutes earlier, protesting at the top of her lungs. It was almost like the cry of a wounded animal. Some people let out long, heavy sighs. Others felt their eyes sting.
As Mark had said, there were no fools here. If they could feel the weight of Cassandra’s sobbing, it was only because they all knew they were standing in the same place.
The story of Cassandra being sent home the moment she arrived at work spread through the company by lunchtime. That afternoon, someone both familiar and out of place appeared at the office door.
“Excuse me — is this the office where Cassandra works?”
The woman with the freckled, youthful face was the part-timer from the convenience store across the street. She edged into the office, hesitant, carrying bags stuffed with chocolate and snacks in both hands.
She seemed fascinated by the office — a space she had never set foot in before. Even as she asked her question, her eyes kept roaming everywhere.
An employee who often stopped by the store greeted her. After a short exchange, the part-timer handed over two heavy bags and left.
“The store owner asked if we could pass these along to Cassandra. He said when times are hard, you need something sweet.”
The employee set the two heavy bags down on Cassandra’s desk.
During her years here, Cassandra had stopped by that convenience store for snacks almost every single day. Someone murmured,
“It doesn’t seem so strange for the store owner to send something like this.”
She might have been only one customer among many — but she was someone he had seen nearly every day for a full seventeen years.
“Should we just ship these to her?” the employee asked, looking around for opinions.
“No. I’ll deliver them. I happen to have some documents that need to go to her anyway.”
Every eye turned to Maria.
Like Mark, Maria was one of the longest-serving people in the company. She held the same rank as our department’s section chief, but she was treated more like a deputy director.
Ordinarily she was so gentle that no one kept their distance from her. But I had heard that over lunch she had marched into Mark’s office, given him a thorough dressing-down, and then gone upstairs with him. The result was that seventeen of Cassandra’s three-month “leave” had been converted into paid vacation — and when I heard that, I thought she was a truly impressive boss.
Seventeen days. Proportional to Cassandra’s years of service, maybe. Either way, even half a month’s salary would be some help to someone whose income had suddenly been cut off.
I hesitated a moment, then spoke to Maria.
“I’ll go with you. If I bake a cake or some cookies, her kid will love them.”
On the day of the volunteer event, I had watched Cassandra wrap her share of the cookies in a napkin instead of eating them. If a little happiness for her child could bring her even a little comfort, it would be worth it.
“I’m coming too. She taught me a lot when I first joined,” Greg said from the next desk. Rachel, our section chief, added with a sigh,
“Then the three of you can go Friday afternoon as representatives of our office. I’ll handle the higher-ups with some excuse.”
Friday afternoon.
“Buh…!”
Luca, tucked in my arms, beamed at Greg and Maria and met their eyes. Did he remember them?
“Oh my, you’ve grown so much already. Hello there!”
“Ehh…!”
Luca let out a delighted squeal and stomped his feet. That excited, was he? Greg laughed.
“Whoa, the energy on this kid is something else.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to feel it when I bathe him these days. The strength in him is unreal…”
“Haha, and if it’s already like this, you’re going to have a rough road ahead. Jun, you’d better brace yourself around the time he starts crawling and scooting.”
“You’re not joking, are you?”
“Not even a little.”
Thinking I might have to start jump-roping on the terrace tomorrow, I climbed into the car.
Luca and I took the back seat, Maria rode shotgun, and Greg took the wheel. Beside me sat the snacks from the convenience store owner, the cake and cookies I had baked, and the little gifts the other employees had put together — calming essential oils, scented candles, a small potted plant, all nestled in one box like a quiet offering of comfort.
About ten minutes after we pulled out,
“It’s nice, the three of us being together again like this,” Maria said with a light laugh.
“True. But it’s four of us. You can’t leave Luca out.”
I smiled as I answered, and Greg and Maria both chuckled.
“Kyaa…!”
As if he understood exactly what was going on, Luca let out a laugh that sounded almost like a dolphin. While I was at it, I asked something I had been wondering about for a while.
“Maria — a baby’s laugh. Is this kind of decibel level normal?”
“It only gets louder from here!”
“Ah…”
“Pffft.”
The reason we were going to see Cassandra was nothing to laugh about, but we made the trip in a warm, easy atmosphere. When the world around you seems to be coming apart in ways that make no sense, knowing there are people you can trust and lean on is a profound kind of comfort.
“Come in. Thank you so much for coming.”
And the look on Cassandra’s face as she welcomed us seemed just as genuine, which was an enormous relief.
“You didn’t have to bring all this.”
We gathered the bags from the car and crossed the muddy yard, still dotted here and there with leftover snow. Her house was about a forty-minute drive from the office, out in the suburbs — a neighborhood where patchy, wild-grown trees marked the boundaries between homes.
“It’s so quiet and nice around here.”
“It’s an old place. Only the people who’ve always lived here stay.”
“You must be close with the neighbors, then.”
“They know how many forks every household has. They already know all about the mess I made this time, too.”
While the adults sat across from each other at the table talking, childcare duty fell to Greg. He was in the living room playing cards with Charlie, Cassandra’s ten-year-old son. Luca, strapped into the Bumbo seat Greg had brought into the office that morning just for today, served as the audience.
“Mister, you lost again! Haha!”
“Kyaaaa…!”
The boy bounced with glee. Luca got swept up in the excitement too. Greg’s face, though, looked ready to cry. Had he been playing for real instead of just going easy on a kid…?
Watching the two of them play in the living room with a smile, Cassandra cut into the cake I had baked.
“Whoa, cake for me too!”
Charlie tossed the cards aside and ran toward the table. Greg shouted after him,
“Hey! Bring those over here and play while you eat!”
What was anyone supposed to do with a grown man this serious about a card game with a child?
Looking at her son with a mix of fondness and pity as he piled every kind of snack next to the cake and kept playing, Cassandra finally spoke.
“I haven’t told him yet.”
Maybe she didn’t wear makeup at home. Her bare face, which I was seeing for the first time, looked unfamiliar — a little older, a little more worn down.
“I just wanted a little time to think. Like Mark said, maybe it was time I took a break…”
Still, she looked better than she had a few days ago.
“I’m just glad you seem to be settling your heart a little,” Maria said, and you could feel how much she meant it. As a mother herself, she clearly shared more common ground with Cassandra than most.
“There’s no other way, really. I’ve been reflecting on what happened too, and…”
Cassandra answered with a faint smile. She looked deeply tired.
“When I still had dreams, when I still had strength, when I was younger… when I still believed another life was waiting for me… I would have gotten angrier…”
She talked for a long while about this and that, and Maria and I simply listened. She spoke without much order, as if she felt that a host owed her guests the courtesy of conversation.
“Hanging out freely with friends, eating good food, wearing pretty clothes… talking about boyfriends, daydreaming about a pink-tinted future… where we’d go next, what accessories to buy… like those teen dramas on TV, you know…”
At first she listed the things she had once wanted, almost murmuring them to herself.
“But when I came to my senses, my husband was gone, and I barely had any friends left. No — it’s not that I have no friends left. It’s that the friends I used to dream with are gone now.”
She spoke of a loneliness she had grown used to. She spoke of a happiness that had shattered.
“This house used to be my ex-husband’s. When our kid was two, he started having an affair. He handed me the house as alimony and moved into that woman’s place. The love of the century, right?”
As she laid out her life as if it belonged to someone else, all I could do was stare into the teacup in my hands. The rough cup she said she had made herself was uneven, with a small chip along the base.
“So I really wanted to leave this house too. This house, the company… there were so many times I just wanted to quit and walk away…”
Cassandra’s home sat on the outskirts of the city — a spacious house with a yard, but old enough that it needed renovation. Cracks ran through the painted walls, and cold drafts came through the worn window frames. The only thing that lit the place up was the innocence of a child.
The way her eyes moved over her own home made it seem as if she were saying the house was just like her life.
“Honestly, none of it matters anymore. What scares me is getting old and becoming a burden on my child someday…”
Cassandra stared at the half-month’s pay stub Maria had handed her and smiled weakly.
“I wanted to be a cooler mom. A cooler woman. A cooler person. I never thought that by the time I was looking at forty, I’d have so little to show for it.”
She folded the pay stub neatly and slipped it between the pages of a notebook sitting at the edge of the table. Beside it lay a stack of yellowed receipts and several household ledgers she must have filled out, head in hands, over the past dozen-plus years.
Noticing where my gaze had landed, Cassandra smiled again.
“Honestly, there were a lot of days when writing in a ledger felt pointless. No matter what I did, there just wasn’t any money.”
Maria took Cassandra’s hand and patted it. The two mothers met each other’s eyes and smiled.
“…Those days were really hard. When I filled the cart with only the cheapest things at the store, and then came home and fed Charlie with them — I felt so sorry.”