Because Old Pain Always Comes Back
"Great work today!"
"Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate it, every time."
"Come on, we help each other out. It's tonkatsu tonight, so it'll be ready by the time you're out of the shower. I already laid out your clothes!"
That was my hyung—a face handsome enough to stop traffic, and a heart to match.
"Thanks!"
Even on his way into the bathroom, he never forgot to say thank you. Except he wasn't really my hyung.
He was my older sister's husband.
In other words, my brother-in-law.
"Mm. Okay."
I'd already brought the oil up to temperature for when he got home. I checked the heat and dropped in the cutlets I'd breaded ahead of time.
The moment they hit the oil they started to sizzle, the pale breadcrumbs turning golden right before my eyes.
"Whew."
I skimmed off every stray crumb that floated free instead of clinging to the meat, repeating the motion until the cutlets rose to the surface. Using this much oil only to throw it out after one batch would have been a terrible waste.
No matter how much money hyung made, pointless spending still meant more money going out the door.
Say one person earned seven million won a month and another earned two. If the one making seven spent five and the one making two scraped and pinched down to fifty thousand… roughly speaking, the seven-million earner would have two left and the two-million earner one-fifty, so—eh.
Bad analogy. Making more money was obviously better, wasn't it?
Anyway. Waste was still out of the question.
You had to think about savings, about the money going into fixed deposits.
And, while I was at it, about setting aside my own pay.
I did this work out of a little guilt and a simple need for pocket money. It paid better than a convenience-store shift, honestly, which was exactly why I tried so hard to keep costs down for him.
I didn't know accounting in any real sense—just the ordinary person's rough grasp of it—and I was more like a live-in housekeeper who cooked and cleaned, mostly cooked. The cleaning was secondary, though I happened to like it.
"Ahh… that hits the spot."
"Eat while it's hot. It came out pretty well today."
Fresh from the shower, hyung sat down across from me.
His hair, blotted roughly with a towel and still damp, somehow suited him perfectly.
Why does this man look like he's shooting a magazine spread? I'd heard some women preferred guys with wet hair. Mm. That was the face doing all the work.
"Heh. Everything you make is good, Jiu. You know that."
He carved off a big piece of tonkatsu and bit straight into it. A crisp crunch sounded, and a smile spread across his face.
"Oh… this is solid."
He liked to dip his tonkatsu, so I'd poured sauce into a small dish beside his plate. The best part of tonkatsu was the crunch—I agreed with him there completely.
"Well? It's good, right?"
"Yeah. Really good."
This hyung genuinely loved tonkatsu.
When I'd first moved in with him, we'd been so short on time that I'd thrown frozen cutlets in the pan just to get something on the table—and he'd nearly cried.
How hard must things have been for him…
All of it was my sister's fault.
She never cleaned—she only made things filthier. She did no laundry, no dishes. Every won my brother-in-law brought home went straight to luxury brands. A house with a so-called housewife and yet no one doing any housework at all. A truly bizarre, insane bitch.
And then she'd run off with another man and vanished.
Three months. That was how long I'd been living with my brother-in-law.
Barely half a year. That was how long my sister had actually been married to him and living under the same roof.
In that half year, my brother-in-law had suffered enough that even his good looks had briefly lost their shine.
"Hm? You're not eating, Jiu?"
"Ah—I am. I just got lost in old memories for a second."
"Old memories?"
"You know. Back when your abs disappeared and your face went all hollow."
I'd only meant to glance back for a moment, but the past pulled at me like a swamp. I couldn't climb out. Like nesting dolls inside nesting dolls, even the smaller memories started surfacing one after another.
It had been a year ago.
"……"
"Ha. What are you doing here?"
My sister had come home. Come looking for us… was that the right way to put it?
I was in the middle of dinner, and so were hyung and Father; none of us could quite hide our shock. Even so, she forced her way inside.
For years there had been no calls, no messages, not a single scrap of news about how she was living. But we had gone on as if we'd forgotten her.
People say you can forget someone just by saying so, but in Korea you can never truly tear a name out of the family register. Our relationship with her had already hit rock bottom, and a house without her in it had actually been peaceful.
We had acted as though she had never existed, and we'd kept that atmosphere going.
"I'm getting married."
"…What?"
What the fuck?
Married?
Words that had no business coming out of that slut's mouth had just come out of it. I'd spent my whole school life being called the slut's little brother—and now that slut was marrying someone?
She'd dyed her blonde hair back to black, but the traces she couldn't erase were still plain to see all over her.
She must have been at least a little ashamed; she'd hidden her arms in long sleeves. But the tattoo still peeked past her wrist, and under the perfume she'd sprayed on so thick it made you dizzy before it smelled sweet, there was the reek of cigarettes.
A rag was still a rag, no matter how hard you washed it, disinfected it, or patched the holes.
"Ha… so."
"Wedding money. Just give me that."
And that empty head of hers hadn't changed either.
"Ha. Haha… fuck, there goes my appetite. Are you out of your mind?"
Jihyeok slammed his spoon down and spat a curse he never used in front of Father.
"Shut up. I wasn't talking to you."
"……"
The demand for money hadn't been aimed at Jihyeok. Obviously it hadn't been aimed at me either. Father quietly scooped up a spoonful of broth and slurped it.
He gave a small nod. The it's good kind of nod.
In a situation like this, he was still getting down the soybean-paste stew I'd made. It had turned out well, but still…
"Is that all you came to say."
"I heard it clear as day. Mom set money aside under my name. You've been hiding it. I want it."
Screeech—
The metal chair dragged a noisy path across the linoleum. Father stood up. He looked at my sister for a brief second, then walked straight into his room.
"…Crazy bitch."
"I said shut up."
Maybe the marriage talk was a lie. Was there really anyone in the world who could match someone like her?
Jihyeok scraped what was left of his rice into the food-waste bag, left the dishes soaking in the sink, and went to his room.
Then Father came back. In his hand was a bankbook worn pale by the years, the folded creases nearly dead.
"Take it. And never come back."
My sister tried to snatch the bankbook as if she were seizing it by force, but Father's thick hand didn't so much as twitch.
"Fine. I get it, just let go!"
"You said it yourself. You understand."
"Ha. I didn't even want to come here. Let go!"
Only then did the strength leave Father's hand. The bankbook settled into my sister's grip and disappeared straight into her designer bag.
Father must have hated her to death, and money must have meant a great deal to him. But I had no memory of Mother ever working.
Of course the money had come from Father.
My sister left again without so much as a goodbye, as if her business here were finished. She didn't even say thank you.
It was as if she had dragged my memories back up by force just to remind me that someone called my older sister had once existed. To the very end, that human scum, that Maljong, had been pure trash.
"Whew…"
Damn it. I was irritated for no good reason.
The dishes had already been finished while I was lost in thought. The clothes were all folded. There wasn't enough laundry to justify running a load.
"Jiu."
Again. There would be some other chore waiting. Maybe I could tidy the walk-in closet for once, or pull out the fall clothes early since autumn was coming, or maybe…
"Jiu!"
"Yes—yes!"
"Are you feeling sick? You've looked off since earlier…"
"Ah. I'm fine. I'm fine… nothing's wrong."
Where exactly had I left my brain? My benefactor was worried about me.
"Mmm… is it because of what we were talking about before? The old stuff?"
"…Honestly, yeah, that was part of it. I was the one who brought it up, so I don't know why I'm the one getting gloomy…"
Just thinking about my sister soured my mood. I'd been the one to open my mouth, and I'd been the one who got hurt.
Every time she showed up, the whole house fell apart. How was anyone supposed to be happy about that?
Even at school, even walking down the street—some stranger would come up and say they'd had a clean ride, or that she'd been a little loose, or that they'd left their wallet behind. Whenever someone started spouting nonsense I couldn't make sense of, it was almost always about my sister.
Shit. I wasn't even curious. Why tell me? Whether she wanted to brag or sneer, whether my sister was getting railed by random guys and moaning, getting hit, leaving things behind—what the hell did any of that have to do with me?
Thanks to that thing called family, I'd had a truly miserable school life.
"Want to… play a game together?"
"You have work tomorrow. What do you mean, a game?"
"It's fine. My little sibling's feeling down. Sleep can wait. If I duck into the break room in the morning and sip some coffee, I can tough out the first half of the day. By lunch I'm too busy to be sleepy anyway."
What kind of man had she gone looking for when she already had someone this kind and this handsome at home?
I wasn't gay, but I liked hyung. Anyone would have—me or anybody else. He was just that kind of person.
"Come on, come on~ Why nooot~ I want to ride the bus a little~"
"Eck. Ugh… fine. We'll play, okay?"
I'd said I didn't want to, but honestly I was grateful.
Of course, even hyung had a flaw… he was spectacularly bad at games.
"Eck."
"Ugh."
"Ah!"
If it had been matchmaking abuse I could have understood, but no—he just picked strange angles and couldn't aim, and lost every aim duel cold.
"Uu… damn it."
The strongest curses this hyung could manage were damn it, bloody hell, and crap. Peak bookworm vocabulary, right there.
He was the first person I'd ever heard use words like that in real life.
"Whew~ That felt good."
In the end I cleaned up the lobby myself, and we won.
"Whoa. That's our Jiu. You're insanely good."
"Don't you get sick of dying over and over?"
He'd been the one to suggest playing. He'd been the one to pick the game. And he was terrible at it. More deaths than kills—how was that supposed to be fun?
"Mmm… my goal was to help you blow off steam. You're good at this game. I get to live vicariously, so it works out for me too."
"Hyung…!"
For a second it looked as if a halo were shining behind my brother-in-law's head. There wasn't so much as a speck of malice in him.
I didn't believe in God, but a man like this would go to heaven even after he died.
"Heh heh heh. You've always had the best reactions, Jiu."
"If only a hyung like you were my real older brother. How great would that be?"
"Yeah? Jihyeok seemed like a decent guy too."
Jihyeok was… fine, I guess. When he dropped by the house he sometimes slipped me allowance and brought snacks, so he did the older-brother thing well enough. But this hyung was on another level entirely.
The kind of good that light still poured through even if you put sunglasses on it.
"Haaahwn… mmph…"
"Go to sleep. You're really not going to get up tomorrow."
"Mm. You're right. Night…"
"Good night."
I shut down the computer. I dimmed the night-light a little, lay down on the bed, and let the tiredness melt away.
Hyung must have been truly exhausted; he was out cold in seconds. He'd clearly overdone it.
"Haaah…"
Yawns kept rolling out of me too, and my eyelids grew heavy.
Tomorrow I'd work hard again.