I'll Be Right There Read Online Free Page B

preferred to stay with my mother, even if only for a short time before starting college, but she refused to let me. By then, she did not have a single strand of hair left.
    The next line in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge , “I’d have thought it more a place to die in,” was ringing in my head when I applied for a leave of absence, the first semester not yet over. I had no friends, so there was no one for me to say goodbye to before returning to my parents’ house in the countryside. When I moved out of my cousin’s apartment, she gave me a look of regret and asked if I really had to go.
    “Sorry,” I said. It was not the right way to answer her question.
    “Sorry? What are you sorry for?”
    “Everything.”
    I meant it. I felt especially sorry toward my cousin. Sorry for not smiling more, sorry for taping black paper over a window in a newlywed’s house, sorry for not being nicer, and sorry for forcing her to look after me because I had lost my mother. I had noticed the sympathy that flashed in her eyes whenever she looked at me. After all, we had lived together for over four years. She urged me to stay, telling me to thinkit over once more. I told her I had already made my decision. She asked me again if I would change my mind. I shook my head. With a sad look on her face, she gave me a long hug.
    “Come back anytime, if things get tough.”
    From my cousin’s body came the fresh scent of a newlywed woman. She smelled like strawberries, leaves, a peach. The moment I caught that sweet scent, I knew I had made the right decision. Though the space I had taken up was only one small room, it was still a newlywed’s home. To think that I had taped over the windows of that room and forced them to mind how they laughed or smiled around me. To think that, even then, my cousin had never once frowned at me. Once, her husband asked me, “Isn’t the room too dark?” I told him it was fine, and he never brought it up again.
    My year at home was dull and boring. Dahn had also left for college and was living in another city, and my father’s daily routine never varied, whether I was there or not. Seasons changed: new buds appeared, typhoons passed through, persimmons swelled, heavy snow fell. In the space of a year, my father’s back grew more stooped, and he turned into an old man. He had grown accustomed to taking care of himself during my mother’s long illness, so things were no harder for him than they were before she was gone. Nevertheless, he grew old quickly. My aging father grew even more taciturn. I wondered sometimes if my presence in the house made him uncomfortable. I would go to bed late and struggle to wake up the next day; meanwhile, the first thing he did every morning was visit my mother’s grave. He laid fresh sod over it and even dug up her favorite crepe-myrtle tree that grew in thecourtyard and replanted it close to her grave. I accompanied him a few times but otherwise avoided going with him. As I walked behind my father on the way to her headstone, he looked like a house that was caving in. So instead, I timed my visits for midday or when the sun was setting. That way, there was no chance I would run into him.
    My mother had not been afraid of dying. Rather, apologetic.
    I t rained continuously for several days and then stopped. When it did, two things happened.
    My father returned from town, took off his shirt, and tossed it up on the porch, and then, dressed only in a sleeveless undershirt, he grabbed a shovel and went back out the front gate. A pack of cigarettes had fallen out of the shirt he had tossed. I grabbed the cigarettes and found a lighter and went to the back of the house. The backyard was overgrown with pumpkin and taro leaves. I squatted down and looked at the green taro leaves that had unfurled after the rain. Then I took a cigarette from the pack, put it in my mouth, flicked the lighter, and raised it to the cigarette. I kept looking nervously in one direction, worried