How Babies Are Made
"Well, that's nice. I can brag a little, can't I? Dating a younger woman. For a man, that basically means you won."
She'd looked perfectly fine a moment ago. Drunk or not, she was thoroughly gone.
I let out a long sigh, pulled myself back together, and spoke to Jia in a steady voice.
"Jia. Even so, between a father and a daughter there are jokes you can make and jokes you can't."
"Is that so?"
"Don't 'is that so' me. You never used to act like this. Why all of a sudden?"
"I don't know. I guess I'm drunk. Hehe."
She said it and slipped her arm through mine. Once she claimed she was drunk, there wasn't much more I could say. Better to get her home quickly and talk there. By tomorrow she'd be mortified anyway, begging me to forget the whole thing.
"How's the beer, Jia?"
"Not as good as I thought. People say it's nothing like domestic beer, but all I'm getting is this heavy barley taste..."
"Say that around people who actually like beer and they'll hate you for it."
"So what? Food is all preference. Beer's just what you drink with chicken because cola's too sweet and you need something to cut the grease."
It sounded like the kind of remark that would pick a fight with half the people who heard it. Not that I enjoyed beer enough to argue. I wasn't even sure I understood what alcohol was supposed to taste like. I held my liquor so poorly that I was drunk before I ever had the chance to taste it.
As she talked, Jia tore into the beef jerky we'd bought to go with the drinks. Then, wanting something else, she dug through the convenience-store bag again.
"Look at our Jia. You eat more than I thought."
"I know, right? I don't usually eat like this. Must be the alcohol."
"You ought to be careful when you drink. Eat a bunch of stuff with your drinks and the weight comes on fast."
"Dad. Why would you say something that ruins my appetite?"
Still bickering lightly, Jia pulled the snacks out. Something that wasn't food came with them.
It was the package marked 0.01. The thing she'd bought at the convenience store earlier, just to tease me. A condom.
"Kind of a waste of money. Why did I even buy this? It's more expensive than I thought."
She grumbled as she said it. I felt my face grow a little warm.
"That's your fault, Jia."
"But I wanted to try it once. I wanted to see you get flustered."
"Even so... what must that clerk have thought, looking at us?"
"They probably didn't think much of anything. We're hardly the only man and woman buying condoms at this hour."
"Think about the age gap between you and me. A guy who obviously looks like somebody's uncle walks in with a girl who looks like a high schooler and buys that... my face was burning. How am I supposed to walk into that store again?"
"Oh, come on, Dad. I only call you ajusshi to tease you. You're not that far gone. Squint a little and you could even pass for your twenties."
"That's because you're always looking at my face. How would I look like I'm in my twenties?"
"Have a little confidence. Look at today. You had a movie date, just the two of you, with a woman more than ten years older than me."
"What are you talking about now? I told you earlier—she's just a junior of mine at work. She doesn't have friends her own age, so she had no choice but to go with me. I was bored, so I went along."
"You can think that. She might not. If she really wanted to see a movie, she'd go by herself. Same gender, maybe. Asking a boss of the opposite sex to see a movie alone together doesn't make any sense."
Talking any further would only wear my mouth out.
"Stop watching so many dramas, Jia."
"I'm not. It's a perfectly reasonable inference. You really don't understand how women think."
"How women think. You've never even had a boyfriend."
"Well, that's true. Hm? But that actually stings, you saying it out of nowhere."
"Did you want me to date a lot of guys in high school?"
"Not exactly."
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like something that would make me angry. The idea of Jia going around with a boyfriend. It was her life, so there was nothing I could do about it, but if I said it wouldn't bother me, I'd be lying. Of course, between high schoolers it would be innocent enough—holding hands, at most.
"As long as you don't forget you're a student and you date like one, I wouldn't mind."
"What does dating like a student even mean?"
"Walking together. Holding hands..."
"Then just say I can't, Dad. If you're going to be that strict about it."
"Come on. For students, that's plenty. You'll do the rest once you're an adult. How far are you trying to get?"
"You and Mom didn't exactly take it slow. That's how you ended up with me."
Not a single reply came to mind. She wasn't wrong. I was the last person who ought to lecture anyone—I'd married in high school on the back of a teenage pregnancy. Strictly speaking, I wasn't even the one who'd gotten her pregnant. And that, somehow, left me bleak.
Anger didn't rise anymore. Neither did rage. Even so, the daughter I had given my whole life to was someone else's daughter. Sadder still was that Jia knew it, and that I was the one handing her a family that had already fallen apart.
"That's... well. I guess that's true."
In the end I couldn't hold the feeling down, and I said something I should never have said in front of her. Jia wasn't ignorant of the fact either, so she only nodded, vaguely. Realizing I had slipped and feeling the air go cold happened in the same instant.
We both sipped our beer and pretended to pick at the snacks. Neither of us could find a word to start with, and for a little while the quiet settled in. I had to say something. I was turning it over, searching for another subject, when her voice came.
"Dad."
I looked at her. The mischief from a moment ago was gone. Her face was set, as if she had made up her mind.
"What is it, Jia?"
"How are babies made?"
Her voice was utterly serious. What came out of that mouth was still completely unhinged. The question dropped out of nowhere like a bomb, and I choked, coughing hard.
"...It's not like you don't know, Jia."
"I mean, I guess I do? I still wanted to hear it from you."
"And why would you want to hear that from me?"
"Because I want to mess with you?"
She wasn't even filtering herself anymore. Once Jia had a drink in her, she seemed to enjoy playing mean little tricks on me. A very particular kind of drunk. Then again, maybe this was closer to what she actually felt.
"Well... that was a joke. There's something serious I want to bring up. I just thought if I started straight in, the mood would get too heavy."
That guess was a little off, too. She was still speaking in that serious voice.
"Dad. Do you remember a friend named Jihye?"
What came out of her mouth wasn't what I had expected.
Jihye. I remembered her as a fairly close friend Jia had played with since they were little.
"Yeah, I remember. She went to the same middle school as you."
"She dropped out early this year... no, last year."
"What?"
What she said was a real shock. Dropping out. For a high school student, it was a risky thing to do. I'd heard of kids leaving in their first year to get a head start on the college exam. Dropping out in senior year, right in the middle of entrance-exam season, was something else entirely. In a way she was a stranger to me, but I remembered her always being close with my daughter, and that was enough to make me worry.
"What happened, that she dropped out?"
"The same reason as you and Mom. She got pregnant. Because of her boyfriend."
For a moment I didn't trust my own ears. I'd thought that sort of thing didn't happen in high schools anymore. Apparently it still did. My own high school years flashed through my head, one after another.
"Seeing it for real, it wasn't your ordinary kind of awful. Everyone around her acted terribly worried, then turned on her the moment her back was turned. The parents could barely stand each other, either. At first it was what do we do, what do we do—but she still wanted to raise the baby, and if she couldn't, she'd rather give it up for adoption. So she dropped out. And in the end, she had an abortion."
I understood that more than I wanted to. Unless you had lived it, you couldn't know how despairing that feeling was. If she had at least been twenty, she might have been able to do something. Being a student, a status that ought to have come packed with every privilege, was what bound her at every turn. Even if I went back to that time in the body I had now, I didn't know whether I could have held on. All kinds of things had piled up, and I had been lucky. That was the only reason I had been able to decide to have the child.
"That must have been hard."
"Yeah. I guess so. I was right there watching, and I didn't know what I was supposed to say to comfort her..."
Being close to someone didn't mean you could always help them.