A Mother's Love

by Jared Fembleaux


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    Each morning, Mary Anne snaked through the rows of red velvet seats with a disposable rag and wiped remnant semen and silicone lubricants from the cushioned chairs and armrests and cupholders. The air was thick and stagnant and on each step, her shoes peeled from the tiles with a tacky snap. Though she was alone in the viewing room—the businessmen and single fathers and university students wouldn’t arrive until the first showing at 10:00—a film played, and she worked beneath the clunky dialogue and theatrical moans.

​    She collected candy wrappers and unidentifiable pills, which she pocketed, and gathered condoms, unfurled and wrinkled, prayed that they would be empty, and thanked the god she no longer believed in when they were. She then mopped up the spilled, liquid party drugs the homosexuals brought with them, down on all fours until her vision doubled, then washed her hands with harsh, medical-grade antiseptic soap until they stung, and went about the rest of her shift eating the stale popcorn, refilling the soda machine, and vacuuming the stained carpeting.

    She was enamored by a man who came to the gay theater every Thursday afternoon. She knew him only from his finely manicured fingers and the top of his head; the ticket booth window was opaque for the customer’s privacy, but she was almost certain he was Korean, just by the color of his skin. Mary Anne hadn’t met many other Koreans in Oklahoma, had seen a handful from afar over the years she lived there, and as of late, following the death of her thirty-nine-year-old cockatoo, a wedding gift, she yearned for the connection.

    One Thursday, after his hand, smaller and with sparser hair than her own, slid a crisp twenty-dollar bill into the deal tray, she asked “How are you?” in Korean and counted his change slowly. His fingers were perfect, good enough to be a hand model in a catalog, Mary Anne thought. She was attracted by the length of his fingers and consciously studied the smooth curvature of his knuckles as she slid the change back into the slot. She was grateful he couldn’t see her, was ashamed of her own spotted and wrinkled hands. He mumbled an unnaturally deep, growly “Thank you” in English and fled into the theater to start his allotted four hours of viewing time.

    Beginning only a month earlier, Mary Anne had taken to watching families through the tall windows of their homes. She didn’t dare get too close, so she sat on park benches and at bus stops across the street, day or night, and watched them go about their lives. She had a mental record of each family—presumed ages and occupations, relationships to one another, when they arrived home, and at what time they turned their lights off. It was like watching a reality show, she told herself, or a research project about families and especially mothers, who held their children and brushed their bangs with their fingers and hand-fed them snacks, since she had
failed being one herself. She had ambitions to be a singer, to play on the radio and become a household name. She went to parties every night where the men couldn’t take their eyes off of her. But when she met her husband and fell wildly in love, she put her dream on hold. She then had her children in quick succession and, upon having her youngest placed in her arms directly after giving birth, she had felt like dying.

    She impulsively purchased high-end binoculars at a camping store but had been too
afraid to use them. Though she hated Oklahoma City, she refused to be deported back to South Korea over a silly habit. She imagined herself as these people, wondering what their bodies looked and felt like under their clothes, how they compared to her own: pillowy and tawny and dimpled, everything her estranged mother warned her about becoming.​
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    Whenever she stumbled upon the rare Korean family, like the one in the red brick
building along the canal, she watched them for as long as she could. Nothing, not even the cold, could rush her. She laughed to herself as the little boys wrestled each other in the living room, shook her head and whispered boys, boys, boys under her breath, then felt ashamed for laughing at something that was not meant for her. Mary Anne knew the mother from billboard advertisements, a realtor who only dealt with expensive houses. She was gorgeous and had fair skin, something Mary Anne envied her for. She then wondered if their father, a businessman who wore satin ties and coifed his fine, black hair with too much gel, was the repeat customer at the theater, who came home from his viewings to be with his wife and sons.

    Her own husband had left her a decade ago. All of her children had grown and had
families of their own, she assumed. She had no communication with all three for nearly half their lives, since they all left for college. She moved to the city over and lived alone in a studio apartment above a laundromat that she rented for $200 a month. It came with a fridge and a stove and a television. She bought a spring-filled mattress and a fake plant, and that was it. Within a week of her move, with newfound freedom and a lack of her husband’s income, she took a job at the gay porno theater in the seedy part of town. She got there by bus, on which she fell asleep every morning, and by foot, and it took way too long to get to. But nobody else would hire her as she had no resumé—thanks to her husband who forbade her to work—and only a high school diploma she earned when she first immigrated to the States. But for now she was grateful, she reminded herself, for the opportunity and the $7.25 each hour.
    
    Mary Anne refused to use the internet, but instead read the local newspaper in between tasks at work. It kept her informed about those in and around her community. She scoured the obituaries section every day for names she might recognize, hopeful that she would come across the write-up of her husband—CURTIS PARK, DISLOYAL JUNKIE HUSBAND WHO LEFT FAMILY FOR COUGAR SLUT, FOUND DEAD FROM OVERDOSE—or reluctant to find one of her three sons, eldest Roy (death by vehicle, she predicted), second Edward (cholesterol or heart attack, she guessed), or youngest Steven (whom she couldn’t imagine dying). She only missed him, Steven, the soft, careful boy he was, unlike his brothers, and often wondered about where he was and what kind of man he’d become. The one thing Mary Anne wanted was to be reunited with him again.​

    The movie theater wasn’t really a movie theater. The seats were padded and red, yes, but a kind of fold-out metal chair nonetheless, in shoddy rows, in a concrete cube of a room, the size of a small parking lot. A dying floor fan whipped fast in the corner at all times of the day, rusted and squeaking a marcato rhythm that Mary Anne liked. It tickled something in her mind and allowed her to forget her thoughts of money and death and sex and anything else a woman in her late sixties was prone to think of. She swept the sidewalk in front of the building, hoping to run into the man who came Thursday afternoons.​

    She rarely called out sick, her immune system was still quite impressive for a woman of her age, but when she did, only enough times that she could count on her fingers, she felt restless and couldn’t stop thinking about not being there for the man and his four-hour ticket. Sometimes the thought of abandoning him upset her to the point that she would sob into her pillow, the wails echoing off the bare walls, a type of cry that ached in the deepest parts of her chest, and so she stayed in bed and vowed to stay as healthy as she could, for him.

    Sometimes Mary Anne would accept the man’s $20 bill and wait, not counting his
change, to see what he would do. When he didn’t reply, she said things like, “The weather is good, finally,” or “The traffic was bad today, I hate when crashes make me late.” She wished to ask him more personal questions instead of about the new streetlights being erected around the corner, to know his age and his family name. When the sun hit him just right from behind, she studied his wiry shadow, the outline of his meager build on the window of the ticket booth, building a picture of him in her mind. She offered more Korean slowly, and soon, she began only offering pleasantries in her native tongue, a few words at a time, to which the man replied in
minimal grunts and huffs.

    One Thursday afternoon, while counting his change and printing his ticket, Mary Anne noticed a birthmark on the side of his middle finger, long and bluish-brown and shaped like Bukhansan, the greatest mountain in Seoul, the lungs of the city. A birthmark like the one she remembered on her youngest son, Steven. She hadn’t seen it in years, but was certain Steven’s birthmark looked like Bukhansan, or was it Insubong, Bukhansan’s neighboring peak? She thumbed over his fingers without thinking, inspecting the skin closely. He snatched his hands from the deal tray.

    “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” she whispered, pulling her own hands back, then throwing the change into the slot and retreating into the shadows of the booth.

    “Thank you, Miss,” the man said in choppy Korean. She gasped, covering her mouth to stifle the noise. She had finally gotten him to speak Korean. He then grabbed his change and entered the theater, the mountain disappearing from Mary Anne’s view. She smiled. It was clear to her that for a moment, he deliberately let her touch his fingers. She wondered if this was what it was like for a leopardess to recognize her cub after being apart for long periods of separation, just by their scent or a secret call only they two know.

    That night, she dreamed of grabbing the manicured hands tighter and saying, “I know it’s you. I’m so happy we’re together again,” then rounding the ticket booth to reveal the man’s face and hold it in her hands. Then, kissing his forehead and hugging him tightly, he forgives her for being a distant mother, for not understanding his lifestyle before the movie theater job, for locking him inside the dark garage for hours while he cried when all he needed was her sympathy that one night. She woke with a strong hunch the man was likely her son, and became
hopeful at the prospect they might be reunited soon.

    The following Wednesday she got an idea. Tomorrow, she would invite the young man
over for dinner, and when he said yes, she would exit the ticket booth holding a piece of paper with her address written onto it, and hand it to him, her son, whether he recognized her or not. She practiced over and over what she would say, “Would you come to my house for a traditional home-cooked meal?” yet when the time came and his perfectly pressed $20 bill slid into the tray, she couldn’t bring herself to ask him the question. She mumbled over her words and blushed like a schoolgirl, or maybe she was experiencing a hot flash, and quickly handed over his change. Something in her mind planted a seed of doubt. Even if this were her son, what did she have to
say to him?

    She pictured sitting next to him on her secondhand loveseat sofa, unspeaking and
wondering where to begin. She would bake them Swanson T.V. Turkey Dinners with white meat, mashed potatoes, and a serving of cherry cobbler to enjoy while they watched public access television. She could ask him about work and if he needed money, or about his father and if they had any more of a relationship than she and he did. She could ask him if he was healthy and when he didn’t answer right away, she could stand and yell at him, demanding answers a mother should already know. She could laugh and send him to his room that didn’t exist, then hold him and cry for how sorry she now felt for not finding him sooner.​

    The birthmarked finger slid the change and ticket out of the tray and in its place slid a folded up piece of notebook paper.

    “Thank you, Miss,” he mumbled in Korean before disappearing into the theater.
Scribbled in black ink was an email address, a combination of letters and numbers she couldn’t make sense of, [email protected]. Underneath was a note that read “You seem lonely. If you would like a pen pal, please write me.” Pen pal, she repeated to herself. Pen pal, pen pal, pen pal. The hair on her arms stood up, electrified. Tonight she would write to him and bring herself to ask the question she couldn’t before.

    After work, Mary Anne traveled to a nearby bank and withdrew all of her savings from her account, then treated herself to a taxi ride to the nearest RadioShack, where she purchased a modem and the various boxes and cables that would connect her to the internet. The oily boy behind the register explained to her the order of operations twice, which cables go into what and where, though it all went over her head, so she nodded nicely and told herself she could figure it out on her own. She paid a neighbor boy to install everything into her apartment and connect her new laptop to the web.

     After he left, she hunched in the blue light glow, signed up for a Yahoo email address of her own and composed an email to her new pen pal. Suddenly, her question from before seemed naive, and she thought she must say something more enticing.

    “I love when you come to the movie theater.”

    “Do you ever think of revealing to me your face?”

    “You may or may not believe me, but I think you could be my son.”
     
​    “You have beautiful hands.”

    “Do you have a family and a wife? I would not judge you.”

    “Can you meet me at my house to talk in person?” she considered writing, but decided it didn’t feel right. She didn’t want to scare him off, after all, and needed to find the perfect first email that would plant the seeds of friendship and ensure that he would keep emailing in return.

    For now she would send an email thanking him for his offer to electronically correspond and that she looked forward to their future discussions, and leave it at that. Tomorrow she could write him a more detailed letter about missing him at the theater and inviting him to stop by more than only once a week. But now, she decided, she must step away from the computer or she might risk sending an email that was too forward too soon. Instead, she thought, I will go watch families, bundled herself in her wool coat she bought at the Goodwill, and went out into the biting cold.

    Mary Anne attempted the mathematics in her mind to determine Steven’s current age and if the man at the theater could truly be him. She felt like an egregious failure, unsure if Steven was born in ‘85 or ‘86, a memory too distant to conjure with her fingers stinging against the wind. She rounded the street corner near the young Korean family’s house. She would allow herself to stand in front of it, pretending to steady herself on their gate, stretching or taking a break, and watch them for as long as she needed. Then she would go home and microwave herself dinner, ignoring her email for the night, and, heart full of joy, go to sleep. She stepped close to the iron fence, grabbed one of the low posts, and slipped backwards on a patch of ice.
Instantly, the young mother was standing over Mary Anne, helping her to her feet, inspecting her for anything broken or bruised. Her front door was open—she must have rushed outside.

    “Please come inside,” the young mother insisted. Her eyes were wide and full of tears, like a scared little doe. She was thin, her breasts and ribs easy to see through her shirt, and she was without a coat. She shivered.

    “I couldn’t,” Mary Anne started, brushing snow off of her jacket, but the young mother was already ushering her up the steps and into their warmly lit home. “I was going into town to the market and missed the bus, so I decided to walk,” she lied. Her back was already beginning to ache.

    The young mother put Mary Anne on a stool at the kitchen counter and began to boil water on the stove. The interior of the house was spacious and open and various shades of cream and tan. Very sleek, Mary Anne thought to herself. It didn’t look like rowdy, young boys lived there, nor any children at all for that matter. No color, no fun, just hard edges and beige.​

    “What were you going to make for dinner?” the young mother asked.

    “Yukhoe,” Mary Anne said, the first lavish dish she could think of to impress the woman. The young mother let out an “mmm,” then furrowed her brows and took short sniffs in, looking around the kitchen. Mary Anne sniffed as well, noticing for the first time an odd, sterile smell to the house, like a doctor’s office or a morgue. Then, she remembered how she had cleaned a puddle of dark yellow urine off the theater floor at the end of her shift, and how the smell had clung to her clothes. During a quick stop at the drug store, Mary Anne had sprayed herself with a perfume sampler to mask the odor that smelled cheap and strong and powdery. Mary Anne tucked her hands under her thighs, uncertain when she had last washed them. She then asked the first question she could think of. “Do you have children?” Of course she already
knew the answer.

    The young mother whipped her attention back to Mary Anne and simpered. “Yes,” she
answered, pouring Mary Anne a cup of tea. “They’ve just returned to boarding school in Nichols Hills, hence the mess. Please excuse it.” The house was spotless. “My youngest just joined his brothers away at school, and it’s been quite quiet around here.” Her eyes began to well.

    Mary Anne thought back to when her boys started school, her eyes dry as they walked away, a deep sigh of relief as she found a moment of peace for the first time in years. On account that sex with her husband had become boring lately, a few quick pulses and primitive groans and then it was over, Mary Anne had learned to masturbate to romance novels—escorts falling in love with their wealthy clients, an Italian villa with pool boys at the protagonist’s disposal—and she was determined to spend her first day alone in bed, doing exactly that. After, she lay there, exhausted, and dreamed of a life without children. That’s when she knew she wasn’t meant to be
a mother, compared to this woman who was nearly weeping at the thought of the child being down the road.

    The young mother began smoothing a strand of her dark hair, pinching it between two fingers tightly and running from the middle to the end of the strand, then back up again. Mary Anne watched her fingers caught in this cycle. It made her want to roll her eyes.

    “Does it get any easier?” the young mother asked Mary Anne hopefully, her fingers still running over the long strand of hair.

    Mary Anne scrunched her face and looked up to the right, mimicking thinking. She didn’t know. She didn’t care. She began to laugh in short bursts at the absurd situation she found herself in, deep in her throat, until they came out long and cackling. The young mother began to laugh along with her, anticipative and expectant.

    “No,” Mary Anne stated matter of factly. “It will never get easier and no one will thank you. You’ve ruined your life.” The women stared at each other. The young mother burst into sobs, crumbling to the floor.

    Mary Anne stared at her in disgust. Pitiful, she thought. A beautiful face but an ugly crier. The worst kind of woman. Mary Anne no longer felt interested in her. Her back ached and the smell of rubbing alcohol made her nauseous. She thanked the young mother and left.


    Mary Anne sat at a bench, thinking about what a son would like to hear most from the mother who abandoned him, absent-mindedly people watching. She stayed until she could no longer bear the numb feeling of her nose. To stave off her regrets, Mary Anne made her way to a nearby bowling alley that was filled with families and bachelorette parties, where the bartender supplied her with a cheap vodka soda, a basket of buffalo wings, and a fruit cup filled with sweet juice. The nearby shoe racks smelled of body odor and sweat and something slightly acidic. It
made her ravenous.

    She took the bus home.

    It took her more than two hours in front of her computer before she decided what she would email the man from the theater next. Wanting to know her son at the deepest core of his being, Mary Anne would send the most honest and provocative question she could come up with. She would write, “To be so lonely that you have to find pleasure from strangers, surrounded by other strangers who feel just as lonely, must be miserably upsetting. Did you imagine this is who you would become?”
    
    She reread her message a dozen times, deleted and rewrote, then smiled to herself, satisfied at the honest questions she was asking. She was showing a genuine interest in her son. She pressed send and the email whooshed off to his inbox.

    The next day was not a Thursday. The man would not show up. Mary Anne couldn’t stop wondering if a response would be waiting for her when she arrived home. She changed the theater’s poster marquees and played a porno that ended in a wonderfully tender embrace, her mind wandering off now and again to her email inbox. She forced herself to focus by alphabetizing their pornographic DVDs, placing orders for paper towels and condoms and cleaning supplies in bulk, and balancing the registers until the end of her shift.

    Mary Anne walked home. She needed to teach herself an ounce of self-discipline, she thought, and fresh air should do the trick. A group of drunk men ran past her, all dressed like Santa Claus, a vibrant blur of red and white swallowing her before spitting her out the other end. She thought they were wonderfully festive. Soft snow began to fall and a silence blanketed the streets. She crunched past drystone walls and small stoned mausoleums in the cemetery and across the road to the pharmacy where she bought tablets for acid reflux and a container of acetaminophen for her back and took a handful of each as she lay in bed and listened to the roar of the washing machines below her.

    She woke in the middle of the night to find a reply in her inbox.

    “I am often disappointed in who I’ve become. But I am glad to have met you. You remind me of someone I used to know. Thank you for writing.”

    Reading between the lines was a skill of Mary Anne’s. She thought herself to be
incredibly astute. As a child, she had always known when teachers were going through periods of sadness or anger and made them personalized cards, told them her best jokes, held their hands, and listened to their woes. It was exhausting. To the untrained eye, it might not be as obvious as it seemed to her, but she knew he was referring to her, hinting to the fact that she was likely his mother. She just hadn’t expected him to bring it up so quickly.

    “I think I know who you are,” she wrote. “Maybe I am someone you know. I would love to know your name.”

    She sent a follow-up email: “Do you know a Steven Park? I think I might be your
mother.”

    Mary Anne created a Facebook profile, and searched the site for Steven Park. She found a realtor and a photographer and a director at a shipping company and an endless scrolling supply of Steven Parks. She clicked through twenty profiles or so and examined their pictures, searching for her son. She clicked back to her inbox. What if this man wasn’t her son, but knew the realtor or photographer Steven Park, or one of the others? She began to second guess how confident she was. She had been too eager in her last email.

    “When I wrote I was your mother,” she wrote, “I meant I think I might be like a mother figure to you, if you would like that. Though I worry you would not like me and leave.” Send.

   She hadn’t explained herself clearly enough.

    “I think it would be best if we met face to face so we each know who we’re talking to. It could be beneficial to the both of us, don’t you think?” Send.

    Mary Anne had caused this one-sided email exchange to implode. She felt there was no chance he would reply now, he would be frightened of her. She had said too much. She would never see his face.

    “I have not spoken to my mother in many years,” he replied later. “I would like that.”

    This was better than she could have ever expected. She crafted, then discarded, drafts with such particularity to secure their meeting. But he sent another email before she could send hers.

    “Name the time and place and I will be there,” he wrote.

    Her heart fluttered, pushed the air out of her chest. “I don’t get out much,” she confessed. “I will let you choose instead and arrive when asked.”

    “Tomorrow night,” he answered. “Meet me at the bar in the National Hotel downtown. How will I recognize you?”

    “I will know you by your hands,” she sent. Mary Anne’s heart dropped into her stomach. A cold prickle spread through her hands and feet, then dulled back to normal. She walked to the mini-fridge that sat tucked in the corner of the kitchen, grabbed a long-necked beer, cracked it open, and took a swig. She disliked the taste but needed something instantly to relieve the pressure.

    She pictured their meeting. Steven’s birthmarked finger, his face, the soft glow from the hotel bar’s dimmed lighting. She would arrive early and sit at the far end of the bar so she could watch him enter and wait to approach him. When he saw her, he would recognize her instantly, his mother, and she would push through the crowd to tightly wrap him in an embrace. A real mother’s hug. Or maybe that would frighten him, a woman he barely knew anymore rushing at him like a speeding car. She would wait, drinking a dark liquored drink, something sour, and let him make his way to her. He would grab her hand and their heartbeats would sync together as one. With this they would be reunited.

    
    Mary Anne sat in the theater, hoping the man was a regular on the day she didn’t work. She took a chair in the far corner, tucked her knees under her chin, and watched the men come and go. When the audience dwindled, Mary Anne focused on the films that played, many of which she recognized from the DVD closet. She wanted to know what these men found attractive. She understood the allure of the muscles and sweat, the duration at which they could perform, but often the men met in locker rooms and alleyways and the dirt and grime didn’t seem appealing to her. But by the end, she wanted to be the man on top, penetrating, but also desperately wanted to be the man on the bottom, no longer caring about the location. She felt aroused and warm. Her heart fluttered, feeling closer to Steven.

    Two men wrestled for twenty minutes before the projector switched to black and then another film began. In this one, a man’s arm was inserted into another man’s anus, nearly halfway up his forearm. The screen made it look impossible—skin giving, muscle swallowing, the body insisting it could become a doorway. Mary Anne’s stomach clenched, and she hated that her mind went straight to Steven: Steven on all fours in a dance club bathroom, Steven laughing it off, Steven hurting. Or was it his arm that entered other men? She couldn’t understand the appeal to the act, only the way the room seemed to lean toward it. But she knew the men that came here sniffed drugs called poppers to feel euphoric, and she could see how anything could pass for exciting when high, even pain.
​
    She pictured Steven taking his hand back, out of a man, fishing for coins in his pocket before even washing his fingers, and dropping them into her coin slot. Whose insides had she touched through his coins? She swatted herself in the head, trying to knock the disgusting thoughts out of her mind. What mother would think of her son like that? What son would put himself through something so horrible?​

    As the next film began to play, Mary Anne noticed the man enter the theater, but the darkness shrouded his face. She couldn’t make out his facial features as she was hoping to do. He sat only a few rows ahead of her. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, unsure if this was actually the man who came back every Thursday afternoon, or someone else she might be mistaking. The screen’s light danced on his hair, which he pushed back. His fingers. She told herself it was Steven. She watched him discard his jacket, a pilled sweatshirt underneath. No need to dress up for this place, she thought to herself, though she hoped it wasn’t his only sweater. She would buy him a new one for the holidays.

    He watched the other moviegoers more than the screen, until he caught the eye of another man, plump and hairy and mean looking, an older Latino man in a rumpled collared shirt—some office-worker, maybe. The larger man stood from his seat at the front of the theater and walked slowly up the aisle. Mary Anne thought he might be leaving, but instead he walked down Steven’s row and sat right next to him.

    Both of them watched the screen. The larger man put his hand around Steven’s shoulder and kissed his neck. Steven stayed still, eyes forward. But Steven’s hands moved to his waist. There was a faint clinking, the sharp zip of his fly opening. The larger man laid his head on Steven’s lap, who threw his head back in pleasure. She couldn’t help but think that after witnessing this, the man in front of her couldn’t be her son. Her son whom she carried in her womb and cared for his entire childhood would never stoop so low, she thought. She grieved for him, her lonely and sad son.

    She suddenly felt little respect for the boy in front of her. It was one thing knowing he came here to do these things, but another to see it actually happening. Did she even want to know if it was him anymore? After all of this, she wasn’t even sure she knew how to love a child. Motherhood was not for the faint of heart, and she had been given a chance to escape that responsibility. Should she really force herself back into the role? Why should she? The man groaned and his body spasmed, shuddering as he grabbed onto the larger man’s head. She thought back to their emails. He was disappointed in himself, and she was too. Her mind reeled, searching for a way to delay their meeting, until she was sure she wanted to meet him. She
coughed and the man turned back, his face too dark to see against the bright screen. She froze. He quickly dressed and left.


    The young Korean family in the red brick building wasn’t home that day. She had little interest in them anymore, but she had unconsciously stumbled back to their home. Gone off on vacation for the holidays, a neighbor told her. She lied and said she knew, then told the neighbor she was watering their plants and had already lost the key. “Old lady memory,” she explained. The neighbor gave her their spare, and she let herself into the young family’s home. This time, it smelled of chestnut and sweet potato. An orange cat circled her legs as she entered and she kicked it away. It skittered under a chair.

    She found the husband’s closet and pressed her face into his shirts, fancy cologne covering lingering cigarette smoke. She sniffed out a pack of Sobranie cigarettes like a truffle pig. They were in his sock drawer along with a gold lighter, and she took them to the uncomfortable couch in the living room, and smoked one, letting the ashes fall onto her stomach. She turned on the television almost the entire size of the wall and ordered a pay-per-view movie, a new release. She drank an entire bottle of white wine by herself. The last few swigs dribbled down her chin and onto her clothes and the couch. They would think it was cat pee, she told herself. She left it and stumbled into the master bathroom, which was cold and tiled with marble. She worked her way into the claw-foot tub, fully clothed, and filled it to the brim with warm water. Mary Anne let her head fall beneath the water, holding her breath for as long as she could, then resurfacing for air until she felt sober once again.

   Mary Anne thought of Steven. Though in the moment she had been put off by her son’s actions, she admired his drive, his ability to seek out what he wanted. Mary Anne could never take her pants off in public, not unless she wanted to remove her shapewear and be shaved or waxed and had cleaned herself with Summer’s Eve, which burned her, no matter how lonely or sexually aroused she was. Mary Anne’s ideal sex took place in her bed, in the pitch black, by herself. But then she remembered something that had repulsed her at first, but now she wanted more than anything else.

    She found a cordless house phone and called a love hotline she had seen commercials for during her late night television watching. She dialed the repetitive number and listened to the monotonous ring. A man answered. His voice was gravelly and deep. His words slipped from one to the next, making it hard for Mary Anne to follow.

    “Who’s calling?” he asked.

    “Eun-Kyung,” she said. He repeated it back to her, struggling, but called it beautiful.

    “What does it mean?” he asked. She didn’t know. “Well, Eun-Kyung,” he continued,
“How can I help you tonight?” He cleared his throat and waited for her. “Do you want me to whisper in your ear? Or I can ask you questions about yourself. Whatever you want, I’ll do.” He sounded desperate for instruction.

    “Tell me you love me,” she finally answered. The operator chuckled to himself and
scratched what sounded like a beard. Mary Anne didn’t like facial hair, so she pictured this man clean shaven instead.​

​    “I love you,” he croaked. She didn’t believe him.

    “Again,” she commanded.

    “I love you,” he sighed. She felt nothing.

    “Am I hard to love?” she questioned.

    “Not in the least,” he reassured. “I love you, Eun-Kyung.”

    “I am afraid I cannot love. I am afraid you will hate me,” she said. The operator was silent. “Tell me you hate me. Call me Mom.” There was a lull. She waited, afraid he would tell her no.

    “Mom, I hate you,” he said. She smiled. Tears filled her eyes.

    “I know. But I love you,” she said, and hung up the phone. She sobbed into her chest and let her cries echo off the vaulted ceilings. She decided in that moment she would still try to love her son, no matter what he thought of her, even if he couldn’t forgive her.

    
    Mary Anne walked home through the cold, in a new outfit she borrowed from the young mother’s closet. She walked with her wet clothes in a shopping bag. She emailed Steven that she would be late, but to wait for her at the hotel bar. She took a hot shower, scrubbing roughly at her hands with a washcloth to rid herself of the smell of cigarette smoke. As she did only on the rarest occasions, she patted on blue eyeshadow and painted her lips red, teased her hair and sprayed herself in perfume. Around 8:30, she shuffled through the alleyways toward the hotel, taking each shortcut she could think of. She was sweaty despite the cold, hands clammy and
armpits warm. The river was filled with water taxis, ugly yellow things with blaring music that she vowed never to step foot on. The river was calm, but any rocking back and forth would make her puke—even just thinking about it now made her nauseated. On the other side, parents played in the snow with their children. Couples rushed indoors, into the heat, stripping off their coats and hugging their friends.

    She nervously trudged to the expensive hotel, peering in the bar window. Though it was dark, large chandeliers hung from the ceiling, illuminating the meticulously dressed bartenders in their white suits and matching gloves. Top shelf liquors lined the wall of the bar, most she didn’t recognize or had likely never tasted. And there, hunched at the end of the bar with his back to her, was her son. He twirled a straw in his fingers, his knee rocking softly. Seeing his full body in the warm light, he was smaller than she had pictured him. Thinner. His hair was more chocolate brown than the tar black she remembered. But nonetheless the light made him look handsome,
almost sturdy. She would be mindful to tell him that.

    She entered the hotel lobby, only thirty minutes late, nervously smoothing her coat and dress. She did not belong here. She padded into the bar area. Couples and groups chattered around tables, dressed in classier clothes than hers, clinking drinks and eating appetizers. She stalled near a water station, filled a glass cup with orange-infused water, and sipped it slowly. She didn’t think she could get her legs to walk anymore. She finally forced herself toward the end of the bar, steadying herself on the backs of the stools, until she reached the man.

​    Before she could tap his shoulders, she stole a glance at his hands. No birthmark on his fingers. Bukhansan had disappeared. Mary Anne retreated, took a seat at the opposite end of the bar, stealing glances at the man’s face. He eventually turned toward her, a Filipino man in his forties. She ordered a dry martini and waited, eyes locked on the entrance.

    Before she had left her apartment, she sent an email telling the man “If I get there before you, I will wait for you for two drinks’ time. I’m an old woman and don’t have time like I used to.” She hadn’t heard from him. She waited for two hours, drinking nearly five martinis, until the bartender called for last drinks.

    Mary Anne stumbled back through the alleyways and side streets toward her apartment. She stopped in a liquor store to buy a bottle of whiskey. At her computer, she drank and composed a resignation email to the gay porno theater. Her finger hovered over send.

    She didn’t send it.

    Instead she opened a new email to the man from Thursday afternoons. I’m sorry, she typed, for scaring you. She stared at the blinking cursor until her eyes watered, then forced the next words onto the screen: I love you. I won’t ask you to forgive me. I just want to see you again. Thursday.

    She signed her full name and hit send. The room didn’t soften. Nothing in her did. She washed the unmarked pills from the theater floor down with whiskey and lay back fully dressed. In the dark she dreamed of her son’s weight in her arms—warm, stubborn, alive—and for the first time in her life, being filled with a mother’s love.
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Jared Fembleaux is a Brooklyn-based literary fiction writer whose stories have appeared in Maudlin House and Flash Fiction Magazine, with one forthcoming in The Hopkins Review.

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​​​​​​​​​SHARE - Issue: 1.8 / April 2026