He snorted, shaking his head. He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “And you do it with gold? Not just with glue?”
“Kintsugi isn’t just about repairing,” she said. She picked up the cotton swab and started to paint another edge, layering the gold liquid. “It is about the beauty in the flaws, and acknowledging a harsh history in the past.”
He was familiar with the cultural thought that tragedy was looked upon to be revered instead of avoiding thinking about it. He had nothing to say to this, but was drawn to watching her continue to fix the bowl.
After a few minutes, he wasn’t really watching her, just staring into space. His fingers absently traced the direction of the grain on the wooden table.
Sang was breaking. He was, too. He was a split second away from carrying her out of there. The group would thank him for it later.
It would be worth the lost favors. She’d be out. She’d be with them.
With him...
After a few moments of silence, she spoke. “If you’re tired from being out most of the night, you should call Owen and let him know.”
At the sound of his name, he groaned. “I don’t need his permission to be tired. He can’t help right now.”
“Did you ask him?”
“He isn’t as perfect as you think.”
“No, he isn’t,” she said quietly.
He paused, confused by the comment. “You’re always telling me to talk to him. To be like him. You just told me to call him.”
She placed another piece of the bowl against a golden seam, holding it together until it stuck in place. “Do you remember when you first met him? Every day you would come home and complain this boy thought he knew everything and nothing you said mattered.”
“He’s still like that.”
“While you were in your room one day, he came to the door.” She put down the bowl and used a swab to mix more gold and lacquer. “You two had a particularly bad fight, and you had told him not to contact you.”
Sean blinked. There was a time after they had been paired up within the Academy that they were trying to work out ways to earn more favors, yet they’d argued about how.
He couldn’t remember his argument at the time, but anything Sean would suggest was essentially too risky for two ten-year-olds to do. Owen wouldn’t come up with a solution on his own. They’d butted heads a lot back then about this. “I didn’t know he talked to you.”
“I never told you. Apparently, he didn’t either. Usually when you two fight, you’re not even listening to each other.”
“Mom...he’s not...”
“Are you fighting with him?”
She might have heard them the last couple of days. He sighed. “A little.”
“Then you aren’t understanding each other.”
“Yeah. He’s not listening to me. He’s wrong this time.”
She nodded and then picked up another piece of the bowl. The bowl was now looking more like it used to, just with golden veins. “But you haven’t found a solution you are both completely happy with. Otherwise he would have agreed to it.”
True. “It’s complicated. Too many variables. Too many questions.”
“Maybe you should stop asking so many questions and focus on something else.”
His lips twitched. He tapped a forefinger on the table’s surface. “Is that what you told him? Years ago?”
The corner of her mouth unwrinkled, and there formed the slightest of smiles. “He asked many questions. He wanted to understand how to convince you to listen to a complicated answer.”
“And you told him to stop asking?”
“I told him how, years ago, I found you at the hospital, abandoned.”
Sean tilted his head. “How was that important?”
She put the bowl down, attaching more gold and the last few pieces around the rim. “I wanted to keep you, but it wasn’t so simple. Your father and I disagreed then on how to handle the situation: find someone to adopt you or let the state system take you into their care.”
Sean sat up, eyebrows raised. “You told me you wanted to keep me when you saw me.”
“What I wanted wasn’t really possible for us at the time, or so we thought,” she said. “We were young, with a limited income, and we were here on work visas. We were very sure the system wouldn’t allow foreigners to adopt American children. We didn’t think it was possible...until we changed how we were thinking.”
“How?”
“We found a small church willing to prepare a baptismal record for you, claiming we were the parents. Back then, it was a little easier to convince a judge you were mine, rather than convince one to let us adopt you.”
The information sank in, and he stared at the table. “You didn’t tell me about that. You told him before you told me about it?”
“Does it change anything now? Does it change how I raised you? No. You are who you are now. We are where we are.”
When he did ask about when he was adopted, it was usually about clues as to how he had been found: abandoned in a hospital. He had asked about his real birth mother. He had given up years ago trying to figure it out, as he didn’t want her to be sad thinking that he wanted to replace her.
However, it made sense why Owen had suddenly changed. He’d come up with a solution because he’d stopped asking the same questions. Instead, he’d changed the results he wanted in the first place.
When Owen changed the goal, it changed how they approached it.
Sean stared at the table, and then at the bowl with the golden lines.
There were too many questions around Sang.
Let go of the questions...or maybe change the result they wanted.
Sean tapped at the table, letting the idea sink in. He wasn’t sure he had an answer.
But he knew someone would. Owen. He’d just have to convince him to give up his stubbornness, thinking his way was the only way.
Sean stood up, heading for the door. “I’ll be back later, Mom.”
“I know,” she said.
The Youngest Graduates
––––––––
Summerville had streaks of purple and pink clouds across the eastern sky. The temperature had dropped. A hard frost covered part of the road and crusted blades of grass. It made walking across Bob’s Diner’s parking lot hazardous.
A semi had pulled into the lot and parked in the grass near the tree line next to the ambulance.
There were few other cars. The neon lights from the diner’s sign cast various glowing colors across windshields.
Sean parked closer to the semi and turned off the car. He stared out the windshield, waiting to see if anyone would notice him. When it seemed the coast was clear, he got out of his car and headed toward the security trailer.
The trailer blended in with the diner. It was easy to picture it as an add-on annex for storage or security and not think twice.
The door was unlocked. He went inside.
The carpet was dull, utilitarian. The walls were wood panels. He’d barely noticed it all last night, but it certainly looked like a security trailer.
The desks had been pushed up against the walls better to create more space. A couple of cots were against the far side of the room.