This, more than anything, felt like an expression of my mother’s spirituality. For my mother, nothing was holier than a woman’s accessories. I traced my fingers over her necklaces and earrings, selfishly wanting to keep it all, even though I knew I’d never wear most of it.

I didn’t know anything about jewelry. I didn’t know what made one piece more valuable than another, how to distinguish silver from steel or diamond from glass, whether or not a pearl was real or plastic. The pieces that meant the most to me weren’t worth much. They were ones that recalled specific memories, more like Monopoly tokens than precious gems. A small pendant in the shape of a stick figure with my birthstone stuck in its belly, its arms and legs fake gold chains that hung from its sides. A cheap glass beaded bracelet she bought from a beach peddler on a vacation in Mexico. The Scottie dog brooch that was pinned to her lapel while we waited on the couch for Dad to finish in the bathroom and drive us to Uncle Ron’s for Thanksgiving. A gaudy butterfly ring I teased her about over a holiday dinner. Most important, Eunmi’s necklace that matched my own.

* * *

—

EVERY DAY leading up to the wedding, my mother and I would walk the circumference of the house. She’d set a goal to slow dance with her son-in-law and we were working on building up her stamina. It was late September and the pine needles were beginning to yellow and fall, the mornings becoming brisker. Arm in arm, we’d start from the sliding door off the living room and walk down the three wooden steps of the deck, pacing slowly across the lawn, hugging the bark mulch past the rhododendrons my mother had planted years before. Julia would follow close behind, desperate for my mother’s affection, which we had nervously discouraged for fear of germs. Occasionally she would stop to pull a weed before we rounded the concrete drive and retreated, victorious, back inside.

LA Kim flew in a week before the wedding, her hair neatly cropped, nails garishly adorned with many small crystals. She and my mother caught up in her bedroom while Kye presided over them like a disapproving nun. LA Kim was as warm and cheerful as Kye was cold and distant. I had always liked her and I was eager to have another person on my side, a Korean woman who could stand up to Kye and offer perspective. Also, my mother had always complimented her cooking.

LA Kim woke up early the next morning to prepare nurungji for my mother, just as Kye had done. She pressed the rice against the bottom of the pot, browning it to a golden hue, then added hot water to create a light porridge. She snuck in a bit of poached chicken, a little extra protein for my mother’s meal.

“Oh, this taste, it’s too strong,” my mother said.

“Why would you do that?” Kye snapped. She rolled her eyes and took the bowl away.

Booted from the cooking, LA Kim focused her energy elsewhere. She went through the kitchen cabinets, filling garbage bags with the expired cans my mother had accumulated in the pantries, and volunteered to prepare the galbi, my favorite celebratory Korean dish, for our wedding.

Once, when I was in college, my mother walked me through her recipe over the phone. She relayed the ingredients haphazardly, rattling off the brand of mulyeot, or sweet barley malt syrup, and describing the tin of sesame oil she had at home as I darted around H Mart, struggling to keep up. Back at home, I called again to have her walk me through the process, frustrated that her instructions were always so convoluted, even when it came to making rice.

“What do you mean put my hand on top of the rice and add water until it covers it?”

“Put water in until water covers your hand!”

“Covers my hand? Covers my hand until where?”

“Until it covers the top of your hand!”

I held the phone against my shoulder, my left hand submerged under water, laid flat on the surface of the white rice.

“How many cups is that?”

“Honey, I don’t know, Mommy doesn’t use cup!”

I watched LA Kim intently as she worked through her recipe. Instead of chopping the ingredients, she blitzed Asian pear with garlic and onion in the blender, making a thick marinade for the short rib to lie in. Her recipe relied on fruit as a natural sweetener, whereas my mother always used mulyeot and a can of 7Up. I brought the marinade to my mother to taste. She dipped her index finger into the liquid and licked it. “I think it needs more sesame oil,” she said.

* * *

—

PETER AND HIS PARENTS, Fran and Joe, and his younger brother, Steven, arrived two days before the wedding. I was worried they might be upset with me for pressuring their son into a slapdash wedding, but as soon as they walked through the door my concern melted away.

Fran was the ultimate Mommy-Mom, the type that scooped Peter up if he got hurt and told him “That’s beautiful!” when he got her a piece of crap for Christmas. She ran a day-care center out of their home when her boys were growing up and dressed as Frumpet the clown for their birthday parties. She made homemade trail mix and something called muddy buddies and chicken stock from scratch and sent you home with leftovers in repurposed cottage cheese containers. She exuded a motherly nurturing that made you feel like you weren’t any kind of bother at all.

“How ya doing, hon,” she said, enveloping me in a big hug. I could almost feel in the embrace that my concerns had been her concerns, my pain had been her pain.

“It’s so nice to meet you, Pran,” my mother said, Konglish morphing Fran’s F into a P.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you! What a beautiful home!” Fran said. The two of them hugged and it was like Peter and I were watching our worlds collide. We were really getting married.

* * *

—

FLOWERS ARRIVED the next day, for my mother, the most essential piece. There were peach-colored roses and white hydrangeas to decorate the tables, budding lilies, cream and chartreuse, to strew over the wooden arbor we’d pass under in the ceremony. In an old-fashioned wooden milk crate there were boutonnieres for the men, single roses wrapped in soft sagelike leaves, and bouquets bound by light-gray ribbon for me and my bridesmaids.

In the evening a large truck pulled into the driveway and a group of men set up a big white tent on the back lawn, filling it with the tables and chairs we’d chosen. I watched my parents walk out beside it, then stand for a few moments together, looking out beyond the steep hill. The sun was going down and the sky was an orange pink.

They were taking in their property, mulling over the many summers they’d labored on it, the lifetime they’d saved up to reach these years when they were supposed to be able to sit back and begin to really enjoy it together. I remembered watching them from the back seat when I was younger on a drive up to Portland, the two of them holding hands over the center console and just talking about nothing for two hours. I had thought that was what a marriage should be.

My father made no secret of the fact that my parents were rarely intimate. In spite of my secret knowledge, I had always believed that he truly loved her. That life was just like that sometimes.

When my father came back inside, he seemed boyish and giddy.

“What were you talking about?” I asked.

“Your mother just grabbed my penis,” he said with a laugh. “She just said I’ve still got it.”

* * *

—

THE MORNING OF THE WEDDING I was restless. By noon my friends arrived and helped me get ready upstairs. Taylor braided my hair into a neat crown and tucked it up loosely. Carly powdered my face. Corey and Nicole, my best friends and bridesmaids, zipped me into my dress.

“I can’t believe you’re actually getting married,” Corey said, gazing at me misty-eyed and in disbelief, as if just the other day we had been twelve, brainstorming names for our tennis balls.