Jung Yun - Shelter

Just past the veterans’ hospital, Kyung pulls over at an intersection where there’s a bar on each corner. One is closed, the metal window gates shuttered for the night. Two others appear to be topless bars. The fourth, MacLarens, has a long green sign above the entrance with faded shamrocks that anchor each end like quotation marks. FINE IRISH PUB, the sign says, although the cracked front window appears to be held together by nothing more than duct tape and hope. When he opens the door, he’s relieved to find it nearly deserted. The only other customers are two old men playing keno beside the jukebox, staring at numbers as they tumble across a screen. Their table is full of empty beer glasses and scraps of crumpled paper — litter from their previous games. Kyung sits down at the far end of the bar, keeping his head down as he orders a whiskey on the rocks.

“Kind?” a woman asks.

“Kind, what?”

“What kind of whiskey ?”

Her tone is impatient; her accent, crude and South Boston. Kyung looks up, momentarily stunned silent by the woman’s wrinkled appearance, badly camouflaged under layers of girlish frost. Frosted hair, frosted eyes, frosted lips.

“Cheapest you have.” He tries to unfold the embarrassing origami of his money before she has a chance to see. “How much is that, by the way?”

“Four-fifty.” She pours him the equivalent of a double from a plastic bottle of Black Velvet, forgetting the ice — a mistake he doesn’t bother to correct.

“You all right?”

Kyung drinks slowly, not certain why a stranger would ask. What about him makes her think he’s not?

“I’m just tired.” He rubs his eyes as proof.

“That oughta help,” she says, motioning toward the whiskey.

She looks at him as if she expects their conversation to continue, but Kyung can’t think of anything else to say. The standard questions— How’s business? How are you doing? — seem useless. The bar is nearly empty and she works there for a living, so he already knows the answers. Besides, he doesn’t have the energy for a stranger right now. He spent his entire day preparing for Jin’s arrival, hoping that his efforts might be appreciated, or even just acknowledged. Instead, his father talked down to him in his own house, in front of his own child, when all he was trying to do was be kind. Kyung knows he was pushing too hard, asking one question after the next when Jin clearly wanted to be left alone. But the role of doting Korean son doesn’t come naturally to him. He’s still figuring out how to try. They’ll never get through this if Jin doesn’t try too.

The woman walks away, scattering coasters across the length of the scratched wood bar, occasionally shuffling them like a deck of cards. When she reaches the opposite side of the room, she stops in front of the television set. The Red Sox are on again. The Red Sox are always on in this town.

“Jesus. He’s put on weight,” she says, staring at the dreadlocked Puerto Rican at bat. “For nine million a year, you’d think he’d go on a diet.” She turns around, seemingly eager for someone, anyone, to agree with her. Kyung looks down at his drink.

According to the coasters she left, MacLarens is Marlboro’s favorite bar, an unlikely claim trapped in the speech balloon of a grinning leprechaun. It seems more like Marlboro’s oldest bar. The place shows all the telltale signs of age: A wood floor that pitches and slopes as if the ground beneath it is sinking. A pair of rickety pool tables lined with threadbare green felt. On the wall nearest him, a dozen autographed photos of celebrities hang from a rail, but when Kyung scans their faces, he doesn’t know who they are, or who they were supposed to be when their pictures were snapped. He takes another drink, a longer one this time, closing his eyes as the whiskey warms his throat.

It’s been years since he went out to a bar like this. Although he likes alcohol, he’s never really enjoyed bars, not even in grad school when his roommates made the rounds every weekend. Occasionally, they dragged him along, but Kyung hated all the noise and shouting, the absence of anything resembling personal space. It’s strange that he and Gillian met at a bar, a detail about their past that still embarrasses him. She was working at a sports lounge back then, where her uniform was a tank top, jean shorts, and a push-up bra that squeezed everything north. Tits up to her neck, his roommates said, daring him to ask her out.

Gillian was supposed to be a fling, a pretty girl to help him get over a breakup, but Kyung didn’t like playing the field that way. He preferred something steadier, something that required less work, and Gillian actually suited him better than anyone he’d ever dated before. She was twenty-nine and working two jobs to finish her bachelor’s degree, so she wasn’t always around. She accepted the fact that he didn’t want to talk every hour of the day, and she never pressed him about the things he didn’t want to talk about. “Needy” wasn’t a word he’d ever use to describe her, which was exactly what he needed, someone who just let him be. He’d lost two girlfriends in a row because he refused to get married, as if he’d missed a deadline that no one ever bothered to tell him about. When Gillian started dropping hints after their first year together, he didn’t refuse again.

“I got seven on this card,” one of the old men shouts, holding up a slip of paper. He jumps out of his chair and brings his keno ticket to the bar. “What does seven pay out, Dee? That’s like, what, fifty bucks?”

The woman slides the ticket through a machine, and the cash register beneath it opens with a ping. She counts out a thin stack of wrinkled bills onto the old man’s eager palm. Kyung makes the mistake of watching this transaction, looking the man in the eye as he pockets his winnings.

“Hey, I know you,” the man says.

“Me? No, we’ve never met.”

“Sure we have. You came in here not even a week ago with your girlfriend.”

Up close, Kyung notices that the man’s eyes are bloodshot, his skin a bright, unhealthy shade of red. “You’re thinking of someone else.”

“No, don’t you remember? Your girl and me, we’re both from Rockport. You bought me a beer last time.” The man tries to lean on the bar, but his elbow skids across the surface and he stumbles toward Kyung’s chest.

“I told you”—he pushes him away, a little too roughly—“that wasn’t me.”

The man makes a whistling sound. “Sor-ry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. He shuffles back to his table, raising his voice as he tells his friend to avoid the asshole at the end of the bar.

Dee walks over and refills Kyung’s glass. “Just ignore Arnie. He’s a regular idiot. I’ll have that fifty bucks back in the till in a couple of hours.”

Kyung didn’t ask for a second drink; he’s not sure if he should have one. The first went down too quickly. He glances at his change on the bar, wondering if she’ll charge him for it.

“Don’t worry about that. This one’s on the house.”

“It is?” He doesn’t understand why she’s being nice to him; he’s certain he’s done nothing to deserve it. “Why?”

“Why? Hell, nobody ever asks that.” She laughs. “I guess you just looked like you could use it.”

“Yes, but why ?”

Dee shrugs and starts wiping down the bar with a dirty rag. “You don’t really seem like the type to drink on a Tuesday night without a reason.” She pauses, then adds: “That’s a compliment, by the way.”

He looks himself over, realizing that he’s still wearing his dress pants and button-down shirt, clothes that stand out in this part of town.

“So what do you do for a living?”