Read Re Jane for Free Online Page A

Sometimes I was the last of the family to scramble, and I’d be left to bear the brunt of his wrath.
    It was always just him and me. I was the oldest of the children, so after school Sang would pick me up and take me to work on the store, while the others stayed home. He climbed up a ladder to remove the drop-ceiling panels, and he’d pass them down to me. They were stained and moldy on the underside. When the ceilings were done, we put down new flooring. I remembered struggling with the math, trying to figure out how many tiles would fit across the length and width of the store (
“Report card say you good at math. Why you not show?
”), which only made the sums that much harder.
    Then it came time to mark the grids across the floor. We each grasped either end of a piece of string, and Sang ran the line on a solid block of chalk he held in his hands. (Later I would learn this was his cheap alternative to buying an actual chalk reel.) How my hands shook as I backed away from Sang! When he snapped the line, the string whipped my fingers and I let go. Sang was furious. We had to redo the line several times before it was perfectly straight. Whenever I stare down at the floor tiles of Food, I can still feel the sting of Sang’s words from that day. When all the construction was done, we cleaned the floors—Sang swept, I mopped. The mop was too big and unwieldy for my hands. When I was older and we’d learn about child-labor laws at school, I’d get angry at Sang.
That was against the law! You should go to jail!
Then he’d snap back—
Then who gonna buy your food? Who gonna pay your clothes?—
which would always shut me down.
    But through all that, one memory in particular emerged.
Jane-ah! Come here!
Sang had shouted. I hurried toward him, bracing myself for a scolding. Sang was crouched over a ceiling panel; something was stuck to its underside. I crouched next to him. He poked the thing with a Phillips-head screwdriver: it was a dead mouse, fused to the panel and fossilized. A few tufts of hair poked out from the bones. Empty shells that looked like the skin of popcorn kernels studded the mouse’s chest cavity. Fly larvae. “I wonder whether he getting eaten alive or he die first,” Sang said. He clucked his tongue. “Either way, I guess he not go to waste.”
    After we finished for the day, Sang took me to McDonald’s next to the public library. As he ate his Big Mac with gusto, I stared at my Chicken McNuggets and thought about the dead mouse picked clean. Nothing ever went to waste.
    * * *
    When I arrived at Food after meeting with the Mazer-Farleys, Sang asked me how my “bank” interview went. I told him they’d “be in touch.”
    Even my uncle understood what that meant. “Because you not try hard enough,” he said.
    â€œYes, Uncle. I’m sure that’s the reason.”
    â€œYou back-talk me?” His nostrils flared, the way they always flared with annoyance. I mumbled no.
    Sang ordered me to go change out of my suit. Because, as he’d lectured me many times, the customers might think you were showing off with their hard-earned money. That was one of the reasons he drove a
ddong-cha,
a poop car. Yet Pastor Bae drove a Mercedes-Benz S-class—apparently he wasn’t afraid of the congregation seeing what he did with the weekly collections. Hannah, who faithfully wore her darned sweaters and hole-ridden pants at the store, didn’t see why we also had to live in a
ddong
house, when other families at church—like the Ohs—had years ago left Flushing for Long Island.
    It was busy that day at Food, and the walk-in box was being particularly temperamental. I caught up with my uncle and told him the door was acting up again.
    Sang gave me a look—
And so?
—and said, “How long you work here?” Releasing his hand truck, he did the jiggle-slide-shuffle routine with an ease that never came