Day 78

It takes us seven hours from the diner to get to Meri's place, a hooking shot up a highway that bleeds into the rest of the traveling. My mind is usually taken in concentration but the closer we got to the house the more the land streams together out of the window. I don't talk to Hon for the rest of the trip and he seems okay with it, he looks over at me more, like he might at any moment interject with a joke to kill the tension, but he doesn't, and I'm glad. There's more to the story that I want to tell him, to let him know that there is plenty more, but I don't want him to think I'm a bad person, any more so than I could be.

I want to tell him that I let again, before they were settled. Our parents footed a lot of the bill and the bill was slowly being paid, but there was so much more going on. Meredith was still pregnant with the second child, Abel was six months old, and she was carrying another and all of us, Abel, Meredith, Sang-Ho and me were under the roof of my father and mother. I think it got to him first, Sang-ho, he was always quiet but he got worse, then left a lot. He went out on weekends, said he was "looking for a place to start a home". I always thought that was weird phrasing, not a family, just a home, seemed a bit selfish. He was gone for days, then sometimes weeks, and Meredith got more and more pregnant, and I got a job at a shipping warehouse loading trucks. There isn't much you can do with a G.E.D. and a few warrants in southern states that you have to list because they are "minor felonies", did you know spray-painting graffiti in Illinois is a felony? So is stealing cable. I have both of those on my record. So the warehouse work was all I had to get me out of the house where everybody was at one moment and nobody was at the second. And then one day, while I was out working, Meredith lost her new baby. I came home and there was blood in a trail to her bedroom, to the bathroom, a pool in the kitchen, back to the bedroom. I sat with her, in the blood on her bed for a while, and we talked. She said she didn't notice it until she woke up from a nap, and then didn't know what to do, but could just tell, she could just tell what had happened and she didn't know what to say or who to call, she locked up.

(I just realized this story should have a small sub-plot about Del fighting with the thought that he should be Meredith's keeper as her older brother and failing at it over and over again.)