Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin Page A

kept picking out the beef in her soup and placing it in his bowl. Even though he said he couldn’t eat it all and that she should eat some, Mom kept transferring the meat from her bowl to his. And although it had been her idea to eat, not a single morsel reached her lips.
    “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked.
    “I’m eating, I am,” she said, but kept plopping the meat into his bowl. “But you … what are you going to do?” Mom put down her spoon, which was rimmed with soup. “It’s all my fault. I’m sorry, Hyong-chol.”
       As she stood in Seoul Station to board the train home, her rough hands with her short-clipped nails buried deep in her pockets, Mom’s eyes were ringed with tears. He thought then that her eyes looked like those of a cow, guileless and kind.

    He calls his sister, who’s still at Seoul Station. The day is fading. His sister stays silent when she hears his voice. It seems that she wants him to speak first. They listed everyone’s cell-phone numbers on the flyer, but his sister has gotten most of the calls. Most of them were false reports. One guy said, “The lady is with me right now.” He even gave a detailed explanation of where he was. His sister rushed by taxi to the footbridge the caller directed her to, and found a young drunk, aman, not even a woman, snoring away, so inebriated that he wouldn’t have noticed if someone had carted him away.
       “She isn’t here,” he tells his sister.
    His sister releases the breath she was holding.
    “Are you going to stay at the station?” he asks.
    “For a little while … I still have some flyers.”
    “I’ll come to you. Let’s get some dinner.”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “Then we’ll have a drink.”
    “A drink?” she asks, and falls silent for a moment. “I got a phone call,” she says, “from a pharmacist at Sobu Pharmacy, in front of Sobu Market, in Yokchon-dong. He said he’d seen a flyer his son had brought home. He thought he saw someone like Mom in Yokchon-dong two days ago … but he said that she was wearing blue plastic sandals. That she must have walked so much that the top of her foot had a gash, and that it was infected all the way to her toenails, and that he put some medicine on it.…”
    Blue sandals? His cell phone slides off his ear.
    “Brother!”
    He presses the phone back to his ear.
    “I’m going to go over there. Do you want to come?”
    “Yokchon-dong?” he asks. “Do you mean that Sobu Market we used to live near?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay.”
       He doesn’t want to go home. He doesn’t have anything particular to say when he meets his sister. When he called her,he was thinking only, I don’t want to go home. But Yokchon-dong? He raises his hand to flag a taxi. He doesn’t understand. Several people have called to say they saw someone like Mom wearing blue plastic sandals. Strangely, they all said they’d seen her in a neighborhood he’s lived in. Kaebong-dong, Taerim-dong, Oksu-dong, under the Naksan Apartments in Tongsung-dong, Suyu-dong, Singil-dong, Chongnung. If he stopped by, the callers would say they saw her three days ago, or sometimes a week ago. Someone even said he’d seen her a month before she went missing. Every time he received a tip, he went to that neighborhood, alone or with his siblings or with Father. Even though they all said they’d seen her, he couldn’t find anyone like Mom wearing blue plastic sandals. After hearing their stories, he could only post some flyers on the utility poles in the neighborhood, or on a tree in the park, or inside a telephone booth, just in case. When he passed the places he used to live, he would pause and peek in at these spaces where others were now living.
    No matter where he lived, Mom never came by herself to his house. A family member always went to greet Mom at Seoul Station or the Express Bus Terminal. And once in Seoul, Mom didn’t go anywhere until someone came to take her to her next destination. When she