Do You Still Like Mom?
"I don't even know how long it's been since I last got to sleep beside Dad like this."
Jia caught my eye and said it with a mischievous little grin. Inwardly, I had to agree. I genuinely couldn't remember the last time the two of us had fallen asleep under the same blanket. Thinking it over, the last time must have been when she was still in the lower grades of elementary school. She'd been a little kid back then, so the feeling of it had been nothing like this. Her mother had been out that night, and putting her to bed alone had felt awkward, so we'd simply ended up sleeping together. The upper grades might have been another story, but the lower grades were still basically a baby.
Honestly, for a daughter this old to have no hesitation at all about sleeping beside her father was, in a way, an extraordinary blessing. That didn't mean I could call it an unqualified good. If she'd been in the upper grades—no, even a middle schooler—she might have teased me about sleeping with Dad as a joke. Now, just as Jia herself had said, she was unmistakably an adult: old enough to be called a young lady wherever she went, old enough to be called a college student. Twenty, granted—mentally, you could still call her a child. Her body, though, left no room to argue she was anything but grown. She was already older than Yuna had been when she gave birth to her.
"It has been a long time. I think the last time was when you were still in elementary school."
"Oh my. You remember, Dad? That was ages ago."
"More or less."
Jia, it seemed, remembered it just as clearly.
"I'm glad I came to your place. I even get to sleep in the same bed as you."
"How is cramming into this cramped little bed a good idea? It's a hassle."
"Aww, Dad, you've got no romance in you. None at all. Love only starts to grow when skin is pressed against skin like this, you know."
For a second I didn't even register what she'd said. Then the wrong thought flashed through me, and a hot rush of embarrassment followed—until I saw her face, beaming as if nothing were the matter, and realized I'd misunderstood. Love didn't have to mean that. Of course it didn't. She was obviously talking about family: affection taking root when you share body heat. Pure familial love. There was no way any other meaning was hiding in it.
Had I lost my mind for a second? The fact that I'd briefly taken my own daughter's words for something sexual was so absurd I wanted to smack myself in the head. Living alone, it seemed, let every kind of thought creep in.
"Jia. From now on, call Dad before you come over. All right?"
Trying to press down even a little of the fluster inside me, I steered us onto an entirely different subject.
"Why?"
"Why do you think? If I know you're coming, I can get things ready ahead of time. Clean the place a little. Look at today—I got home late. It was lucky it ended early. If it'd been one of those long company dinners, you might have been waiting until late at night."
I'd meant to turn the talk toward something a little more serious, and once I started, it came out more naturally than I'd expected. It was something that needed saying anyway. Things had lined up by chance this time and nothing had gone wrong, but I still had my own privacy, my own schedule. From Jia's side, she'd come half as a joke, simply because she wanted to see my face. That might have been fine before. It couldn't stay that way now that she was an adult. At the very least, talking it through and working around each other's plans was the proper way to do it.
"But if I'd told you I was coming today, you would have canceled your plans because of me."
"Of course I would have. My daughter's coming."
"That's exactly why I shouldn't have. Today might have been the first stone of a fresh start for you. I'm not so oblivious that I'd get in the way of Dad's love life."
"Jia. I'm telling you again—it wasn't that kind of relationship, and it wasn't that kind of meeting. She's genuinely a junior at work. A couple of people who live alone decided to grab a meal together. That's all it was."
"Just the two of you? With a woman?"
"She just doesn't care about that sort of thing."
"Come on... You might think that, Dad, but I don't think she does."
"Don't talk nonsense. And I already told you—the age gap is closer to your side than mine. She's probably a full twelve years younger than me."
"Oh my. They say you don't even check compatibility when it's a twelve-year gap. Dad, you're a total thief. How did you manage to sweet-talk a woman twelve years younger than you?"
Wrong move. Jia clearly had no intention of listening. Something about the way she kept needling me—I knew it was a joke, and still I walked right into it.
"I'm telling you, it's really not like that..."
"I'm kidding. Hehe. I was just messing with you."
Fortunately, she didn't seem interested in teasing me any further. If the conversation had gone on, I had a feeling I would have blurted out something even more embarrassing. Once the back-and-forth died, an awkward silence settled in. Jia fiddled with her phone, and when she ran out of things to do she kept switching the screen off and on. I wasn't managing to think of anything worthwhile to do either. It was still too early to sleep, and I knew we ought to keep talking, but once a conversation breaks, it's hard to be the one who starts it again.
"Jia, aren't you hungry? Want something to eat?"
"Not really? I'm not that hungry."
"Still, you came all this way. I want to feed you something. Now that I think about it, you got here in the evening, so you probably haven't eaten a thing."
"Well, yeah, but... if I eat wrong at this hour, I'll get fat, Dad."
"You shouldn't be worrying about getting fat. You're still at an age where you've got plenty of growing left to do."
"Dad, I'm twenty. Grow how? I think I stopped growing about two years ago."
Jia looked at me as if the very idea appalled her. She wasn't wrong, but the moment it hit me that I hadn't fed her, I snapped fully awake. My daughter had shown up out of nowhere, and I hadn't even checked whether she'd eaten. In a country where you were never supposed to let a guest go hungry, no matter what, I hadn't given it a thought—and this wasn't even a guest. This was my own child.
What do I do? Order delivery even now? Judging by her reaction, maybe I shouldn't. Then again, if I actually ordered something, I had a feeling she'd eat it just fine.
"No... I'm sorry, Jia. I came home from dinner and didn't think about you at all."
"I said it's fine, really. Dad. I'm at the age where I have to treat dieting like my life depends on it. Missing one meal isn't going to do anything to me."
She said it with a look that was half exasperated, as if my reaction had caught her off guard too.
"More than that, Dad—if you're going to talk, at least bring up a different subject."
"What kind of subject?"
"For example, how Mom's been doing."
She dropped a topic like a nuclear bomb with a perfectly casual face.
"...Don't you think that's a little heavy?"
"But you must be curious too, Dad. You don't seem to keep in touch with Mom."
Unlike me—whose head had suddenly filled with every kind of thought and gone tangled—Jia wore the same playful expression, as if this were nothing at all. I didn't want to pick at old wounds by talking about it, but I also didn't want to chill the air between us, so I kept to something safe and general.
"Then... what's Mom been up to these days?"
"Pfft, that's all you're going to ask? Nothing special. On weekdays she goes to work, comes home, watches a little TV, and goes to sleep. Weekends aren't much different from before, either. She mostly meets her friends and goes out."
It wasn't far from what I'd imagined. Unlike me, a born homebody, my wife had never been wildly outgoing, but she'd always enjoyed being around other people. She'd been like that even when we were together. Now that she was living completely alone, she'd probably go out even more. For a moment, memories of the family trips she used to drag me on rose up one after another, and I shook them off at once. The question had only come up because I was talking with Jia. I wasn't particularly curious, and there was no need to think about it deeply.
"So that's your only question, Dad? Nothing else you're curious about?"
"Well... your mom seems to be doing fine, so that's enough."
"There must be more you want to know. For example... whether Mom's been going around meeting other men lately."
"...Even if you know, don't tell me things like that. Your mom's free to do what she wants."
But Jia seemed intent on continuing. Other men. We were divorced, so however Yuna chose to live wasn't my business. If nothing else, I had no memory of her straying while we were married. Even so, if she actually remarried some other man, I didn't think the feeling would be a pleasant one. I needed to stop letting thoughts like that surface. And yet every time Jia spoke as if it were nothing, the thoughts refused to stop.
Was this what she was aiming for? I wasn't entirely unable to understand why she was bringing it up. Dig any deeper into that, though, and we'd only end up wounding each other. I should have just gone to sleep. Bringing up dinner had left me feeling like I hadn't even broken even.