I nodded and sat in my usual seat at the table, across from my mother. I always considered myself well versed in Korean food but I was beginning to question the breadth of my knowledge. I had never heard of kongguksu. My mother had never made it and I’d never seen it at a restaurant. Kye returned with a bowl for me and sat back down next to my mother. I took a bite. It was simple and clean with a nutty aftertaste. The noodles were chewy and the broth was light with small, coarse bits of blended soybean. The perfect dish for summer, and the perfect dish for my mother, who was easily nauseated by the scents and tastes she’d relished before her treatment.

My mother hovered over her big blue ceramic bowl and guided the rest of the thin noodles into her mouth. The patchy parts of her scalp had been shaved clean.

“You shaved your head,” I said.

“Yes. Kye unni did it for me,” my mother said. “Doesn’t it look so much better?”

“It looks so much better.”

I felt guilty for not having suggested we shave it earlier, and couldn’t help but feel a little left out that they’d done it without me.

“Gungmul masyeo,” Kye coaxed. Drink the broth.

My mother obeyed, tipping back the bowl and drinking the liquid. Since she had started chemo, it was the first time I’d seen her consume a dish in its entirety.

In the evening, Kye used our rice cooker to make homemade yaksik. She mixed rice with local honey, soy sauce, and sesame oil, adding pine nuts, pitted jujubes, raisins, and chestnuts. She rolled the mixture out on a cutting board and divided the flattened cake into smaller squares. Fresh out of the rice cooker it was steaming and gooey. The colors were golden and autumnal, the jujubes a rich, dark red, the light-beige chestnuts framed by the bronze, caramelized rice. She brought it to my mother in bed with a mug of barley tea.

At night Kye brought out the Korean face masks she’d left in the freezer and set out a tray of nuts and crackers, cheese and fruit. The three of us laid the cold white sheets onto our faces and let the viscous moisturizer soak into our pores. We took turns with the vape pen my father had gotten at the weed dispensary, puffing from it as if it were Holly Golightly’s glamorous cigarette holder.

Then Kye spread magazines out on my mother’s duvet and waved her arm over the collection of nail polish she’d brought from home, telling my mother to pick a color for her pedicure. I reproached myself for not thinking of these things sooner. Watching my mother take pleasure in small practices of vanity was soothing, especially after she’d lost her hair. I was grateful Kye was here, someone with the maturity to guide us.

* * *

—

THE NEXT MORNING, Kye was in the kitchen cooking jatjuk, a pine nut porridge my mother used to make for me when I was sick. I remembered her telling me that families make jatjuk for the ill because it’s easy to digest and full of nutrients, and that it was a rare treat because pine nuts were so expensive. I recalled its thick, creamy texture and comforting, nutty flavor as I watched the porridge thicken in the pot. Kye stirred slowly with a wooden spoon.

“Can you teach me to make this?” I asked. “My mom said you could help me learn how to cook for her. I want to be able to help so you can make sure you have time to take breaks for yourself too.”

“Don’t worry about this one,” Kye said. “Just let me take care of it and you can help me by cooking dinner for you and your daddy.”

I wondered if I should try to explain how important it was to me. That cooking my mother’s food had come to represent an absolute role reversal, a role I was meant to fill. That food was an unspoken language between us, that it had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground. But I was so grateful for Kye’s help that I didn’t want to bother her. I chalked these feelings up to the unwarranted self-involvement of an only child and decided if Kye wouldn’t teach me, I should commit myself to another role.

So I became the resident recorder. I wrote down all the medications my mother took, the times she took them, and the symptoms she complained of, learning how to combat them with the other drugs we were prescribed. I monitored the consistency and texture of her bowel movements, introducing laxatives when necessary as the doctor had suggested. In a green spiral notebook I kept by the phone in the kitchen, I began to obsessively notate everything she consumed, researching the nutritional value of every ingredient, calculating the calories in every meal, and adding them up at the end of the day to see how far we were from a normal two-thousand-calorie diet.

Two tomatoes made forty calories. With a tablespoon of honey clocking in at sixty-four, I figured we cleared a hundred calories after my mother drank her morning tomato juice.

She didn’t like nutritional supplement drinks like Ensure because they were chalky and shakelike, but one of the nurses at the oncology center suggested we try Ensure Clear, which tasted more like juice. These my mother found much more palatable, which was a glorious victory. My father bought cases of every flavor from Costco and piled them up in our garage, where my mother used to keep her cache of white wine. We tried to get her to drink two or three a day, compulsively refilling the wineglass from which she used to drink her chardonnay. That brought us to at least six or seven hundred.

Misutgaru became another staple. A fine, light-brown powder with a subtle, sweet taste we used to eat atop patbingsu in the summer. Once or twice a day I would mix it with water and a little honey. Two tablespoons would edge us close to a thousand.

For meals, Kye would prepare porridge, or nurungji. She’d spread freshly cooked rice in a thin layer on the bottom of a pot, toast it into a crispy sheet, then pour hot water over it and serve it like a watery, savory oatmeal.

For dessert, strawberry H?agen-Dazs provided a momentous win, clocking in at a whopping 240 calories for half a cup.

My mother developed sores on her lips and tongue that made eating nearly impossible. Anything with flavor stung the tiny cuts in her mouth, leaving us with few dietary options that weren’t tepid or bland or mostly liquid, making two thousand calories harder than ever to achieve. When her sores got so bad that she couldn’t swallow her painkillers, I crushed Vicodin with the back of a spoon and scattered the bright blue crumbs over scoops of ice cream like narcotic sprinkles. Our table, once beautiful and unique, became a battleground of protein powders and glorified gruel; dinnertime, a calculation and an argument to get anything down.

This obsession with my mother’s caloric intake killed my own appetite. Since I’d been in Eugene, I’d lost ten pounds. The little flap of belly my mother always pinched at had disappeared and my hair began to fall out in large chunks in the shower from the stress. In a perverse way I was glad for it. My own weight loss made me feel tied to her. I wanted to embody a physical warning—that if she began to disappear, I would disappear too.

* * *

—

THE SEEDS WE PLANTED began to sprout from the soil, effortlessly consuming the July sun with their own undaunted appetites. My mother went for her second chemotherapy. After the catastrophic response to the first treatment, our oncologist scaled back her dosage to nearly half of what we had started with, but the following week was still difficult.

Kye had been with us for two weeks, and my parents began to rely on her more and more. I started to worry we wouldn’t be able to care for my mother without her. My father was spending more time away from the house in town, and my mother naturally found it easier to ask for Kye’s help and assistance. I suspected it hurt her pride to rely on me. Even in the throes of chemo, she’d often ask how I was doing, or if my father and I had eaten.