A Southern Girl Read Online Free

children, ages six and under, and when that call came in we hovered near fifty.
    I looked out the window to confirm what I felt in my bones; the unseasonably mild January day had deteriorated into something more typical of Seoul in winter. Darkening clouds promised snow. Wind blew newspapers along the sidewalk in front of the bank across the street. Pedestrians cinched up coats against the chill I was sure to feel the moment I stepped outside. Jongam is a fifteen minute walk, but Korean weather in its worst mood can make that mile feel like a marathon. I told my assistant to keep the lid on; that I would return within the hour and to make a space in the nursery.
    As I approached the station, habit and muscle memory carried me toward the old door, its green paint peeling now that a newer one on the opposite side of the building had been put into service. I retraced my steps and entered. The room has a perpetual smell of old vinyl and cheap aftershave. The receptionist motioned me through to an office in the back. As I expected, given the late afternoon hour, Captain Oh sipped tea with his deputy, Chan Wook Park. The captain was a jaundiced man with a massive head, thinning hair and sickly skin. I had spent enough time here to get to know something about him. Nearing retirement, he rarely strayed from his favorite topics of conversation, his vegetable garden and the unfair treatment Jongam received compared with other stations. When I entered, he motioned me toward a chair without breaking off the sentence he was then in the middle of.
    “… so Sinmun-No and Ulchi-Ro, those districts get what they want,” he said bitterly. “Extra manpower, new equipment, anything. But at Jongam, we get leftovers. Always leftovers.” This theme never lost its appeal to the captain, who seemed to me to take little notice of and no comfort from the virtual absence of crime in Jongam.
    Chan Wook Park, seated near me, said, “The door at least is new.”
    Captain Oh gave a dismissive groan. “If they could have found a used door, it would have ended up here.”
    Then I noticed a fourth person in the room. She sat in the corner, partly concealed by a filing cabinet. In her lap she held what could only have been an infant. On making eye contact, we both bowed our heads faintly as the captain described to his visibly bored deputy the layout of his garden.
    “The snow peas in the first two rows, the corn sowed in the last row, the westernmost row, so as not to put other plants in morning’s shadow when it eventually towers above them.”
    Chan Wook Park suggested the garden be oriented east and west, an idea the captain seemed to be pondering when a loud squawk from the woman’s lap reminded the men of the business at hand. Captain Oh looked at me.
    “This is Mi Cha. She found it by the old door.”
    Mi Cha looked to be about seventy, but with Korean women it can be hard to tell. “You should put up a sign,” she said with a hint of contempt in her craggy voice. “She would have died had I not come along. She may still die. She is hot with fever.”
    Captain Oh, unaccustomed to being scolded, particularly by a woman, seemed to take this advice in stride. I later learned that Mi Cha lived nearby, a fixture in the neighborhood for longer than most remembered. She knew all of the policemen who worked out of Jongam Precinct. She used its doorway as liberally as she used her own, venturing over one or two times a day as a cure for loneliness and to deliver food for the men. She had perfected her memorable kimchi on the palates of three sons and eleven grandchildren, and the massive clay jar in which she stored it must have been bottomless. She lived alone now, but continued turning out her specialty in quantities adequate for the three shifts at Jongam, with whom she shared it compulsively. She had just returned from a six week visit to the country home of her middle son. In her habit of the last ten years, she turned up the walkway toward the