Chapter 8

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: Harry Potta
Chapter: 8
Chapter Title: Excuse Me
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A middle-aged woman holding a basket of peppers from the garden next to the restaurant approached Taeseo.

“What’re you doin’ out here? Hurry up and come inside.”

She was too old to be called ‘ma’am’ but too young to be a ‘grandma.’

“I said, get in here, quick.”

At the owner’s urging, Taeseo reluctantly made his way inside.

Inside the restaurant, there were five worn-out tables. As he sat at one of them, the owner brought him a glass of chilled barley tea from the refrigerator.

“You here by yourself? The rice is just about done. I’ll whip you up a table full, just you wait.”

The owner went into the kitchen and began to clatter around, preparing the food. The smell of rice cooking in the shabby kitchen made his stomach churn. He must have been truly hungry.

To slightly exaggerate, the owner returned in the blink of an eye with a large aluminum tray bearing rice, soup, and six side dishes.

It was a modest meal compared to what he usually ate, but as they say, hunger is the best sauce. His hands moved toward the food on their own.

The owner watched with a pleased expression as Taeseo shoveled food into his mouth, but he was too preoccupied to notice, simply stuffing his face with rice.

The soybean paste soup, made with only dried radish greens, clams, and tofu, was surprisingly delicious. The rice wasn't too firm, but perfectly tender—so much so that he thought he would have regretted turning away at the door.

With a cook this skilled, he figured the other side dishes must be decent as well. He stopped exploring and moved his chopsticks toward the kimchi.

He lifted the topmost piece of the stacked kimchi and put it in his mouth. The perfectly ripened kimchi had a refreshing finish.

As he thought that this owner might be an even better cook than the housekeeper at his family home, he reached for another piece of kimchi. That’s when he noticed something whitish, bundled up like a wrap between the cabbage leaves.

It was a clump of rice.

“……?”

Tucked between the cabbage leaves were balls of rice, rolled up as if someone had been playing with their food.

In an instant, everything he had just wolfed down surged back up from his stomach.

“Ugh.”

Taeseo quickly covered his mouth and shot up from his seat.

The restaurant owner, who had been destemming peppers at an empty table, had been sneaking glances at the man who came to eat.

She was thinking that whoever’s son he was, he was handsome enough to be a celebrity. She stopped her work and stood up, following Taeseo.

“What is it? Need more water?”

The man shook his head, his hand still covering his mouth. His handsome face was crumpled in disgust.

“Not enough side dishes, then?”

Taeseo pulled a ten-thousand-won bill from his wallet, placed it on the table, and hastily left.

“Your change! You have to take your change!”

She didn't even have time to get change from the counter. She grabbed the bill and followed him out, but Taeseo had already jumped into his car and was speeding away as if fleeing for his life.

“Must’ve got a case of the runs… Anyway, he doesn’t look like he’s from around here.”

This was a neighborhood where everyone knew how many spoons their neighbors owned. The owner could tell at a glance that the young man’s car was from out of town.

Since there was only one road out of the village, she figured she’d find a way to give him his change eventually. With that thought, she placed the ten-thousand-won bill in the cash box at the counter.

Carrying the round aluminum tray, she went to the table where the man had sat and began placing the leftover dishes onto it one by one.

“Oh dear, he barely touched it. What a waste…”

Her hand froze as she was about to clear the kimchi dish.

“?”

Her eyes fell on the clumps of rice nestled between the pieces of kimchi.

“What in the world is this?”

Picking up a pair of chopsticks, she poked through the stacked kimchi. Grains of rice tumbled out from between the leaves.

“Oh, my heavens!”

Her heart sank. She’d told her husband, who spent his days mooching for drinks like a bum, to clear a table, and it seemed he had taken leftover side dishes and dumped them back into the container.

“That damn good-for-nothing. I told him so many times not to reuse side dishes, and he did it anyway, he reused them…”

It looked like someone had deliberately placed half a spoonful of rice between each layer of kimchi, as if playing a prank.

The owner clicked her tongue and moved the dishes from the table onto the aluminum tray.

“Seriously, what kind of sick bastards would wrap rice in kimchi? Oh, those wretched fools…”

Feeling sorry for the man who had run out of the restaurant, pale as a ghost, she glanced at the entrance several times.

* * *

A black sedan pulled into the empty lot in front of the convenience store. Taeseo jumped out of the car, which had stopped so abruptly it left skid marks.

He ran straight into the store, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and threw his card onto the counter.

“Just ring it up.”

“Sir, you have to pay before you can have that!”

He could hear the clerk muttering behind him about his card probably not working again, but Taeseo ignored her and ran back outside.

The image of the rice bundled in the kimchi flashed before his eyes, making his stomach turn.

Although he was the second son and was said to have had an easy upbringing, the Namgyeong family did not raise their children with a laissez-faire attitude.

They were raised under strict hygiene standards, and Taeseo, who was particularly fussy about cleanliness, would never use a cup someone else had used, even if it had been thoroughly washed.

And that same Taeseo, driven by hunger, had walked into a restaurant and eaten kimchi mixed with someone else's leftover rice.

He ran to the edge of the field next to the convenience store and rinsed his mouth with the mineral water. Every time he pictured the red-stained rice, marinated in kimchi seasoning, he dry-heaved.

He bent over and threw up what little he had eaten. Having starved all day, only water came out, but he felt compelled to vomit it all up.

“Excuse me, I brought your card…”

The woman from the store ran out behind him, holding his credit card. Taeseo waved a hand behind his back, signaling for her not to come any closer. The woman ran back to the convenience store, grabbed a few tissues, and came back out.

“Are you okay? You said you were going for a meal, why are you back so soon, throwing up…?”

Taeseo straightened up, took the tissues from the woman’s hand, and roughly wiped his mouth.

“You call that a restaurant? That’s what you recommended?”

“Huh?”

The woman looked up at him, her eyes wide as if she didn't understand what the problem was.

“They reuse their food.”

The woman, a full head shorter than him, was looking up at him with innocent eyes. He couldn't bring himself to unleash his temper on that face.

“Ugh, forget it.”

“The lady who runs that place would never do that…”

Taeseo took the card and headed for the building, leaving the woman to speak apologetically.

“It’s really not that kind of place. I wouldn’t recommend somewhere strange…”

The woman followed him, her voice trailing off, but Taeseo closed the glass door in her face as if he had no more business with her.

* * *

He lay down on the bed after a furious bout of brushing that left his gums raw. In the meantime, his secretary had procured some basic household items and filled the room with them.

The blanket his secretary had brought clung unpleasantly to his sun-drenched skin.

“This cheap crap.”

Not just the blanket, but everything his secretary had brought was incomparably cheap compared to what he used in Seoul, and naturally, none of it met Taeseo’s standards.

Taeseo picked up the remote and turned on the air conditioner. He set the temperature to its lowest setting, and a cool breeze washed over his skin. Still, the feeling of filthiness didn't go away.

“Ugh, this is fucking ridiculous.”

Everything his gaze fell upon in this small room was shabby and pathetic.

The room, which he had thought was decent enough with its white walls, now seemed like a stage for his loss, a reminder of all he had been deprived of.

His environment, degraded to the lowest possible level, seemed to reflect his own situation—one that his family could upend whenever they pleased.

If this was their ploy against the second son who failed to live up to the Namgyeong name, it had worked perfectly.

“Kwon Taejin, that son of a bitch.”

His nausea transformed into directionless rage.

“They’ve got some nerve, messing with me.”

Taeseo was glaring at the white ceiling so intensely that it seemed to shimmer when a knock on the door snapped him out of it.

-Excuse me. Excuse me.

The voice from outside the door belonged to the woman from the convenience store counter—the granddaughter of the building’s owner, and the one who had recommended the terrible restaurant that reused its food.

“What does she want now?”

He considered ignoring her, but the persistent knocking stopped him.

“What?”

When Taeseo opened the door, the woman held out a square bento box and a cup of instant noodles with water already added.

As if to explain her persistent knocking, she held up the cup noodles, slightly larger than a paper cup, and gave it a little shake.

“There were no bento boxes on the shelf earlier.”

If there had been, he never would have gone to that restaurant and put discarded food in his mouth.

“No, the delivery truck hasn't come yet today.”

“Then what’s this?”

Taeseo gestured with his eyes at the bento box the woman was holding. She answered with a calm expression.

“It’s a discard.”

A discard. In other words, trash.

“You… fucking…”

What did these people take him for?

The furrows on Taeseo’s brow deepened, but the woman paid him no mind and, with her slender frame, slipped past him into the room.

“Excuse me for a moment. If we had new bento boxes, I would have brought you a fresh one, but since we don’t, I brought one that’s 30 minutes past its expiration.”

She set the discarded bento box and cup noodles on the narrow island counter in front of the three-compartment sink, then took a can of tuna and a drink out of the plastic bag she was also carrying.

“I had the exact same thing for my meal earlier, and I was perfectly fine.”

“You eat it, then.”

“It’s only technically a discard. A lot of people want to take these. It won’t make you sick, so please have this for now. And if you add tuna to the sesame ramen, it’s really savory and delicious, so you should have them together.”

“I said I’m not eating it.”