UNMASKED || JIKOOK ✅

4.

After nine hours of work and three hours of class, I wanted
to go home and sleep.

But I couldn't.

I had one more stop to make.

The Busan Rest Home was
just three blocks from The
Little Bean, where my mother spent thirty years of her life.

She was the one who'd
bought the cafe back when
the tourists were just starting
to take over busan and
she was the one who had breathed life into it for
my entire childhood.

One of the best parts of
working Saturdays at the
coffee shop was watching
her hum to the radio while
she mixed drinks and
swung her hips to the beat.

She was alive in the coffee
shop in a way she wasn't
alive anywhere else.

All of that changed
three years ago.

The glass doors of the rest
home looked in on the
front desk where Polly sat.

She was a perky woman in
her fifties with aggressively yellow hair and a kind smile.

"Hello Jungkook." she
said as I walked inside.

Unfortunately, there was
a reason why she
remembered my name.

The visitor's log only had
one name repeated for
the last five days.

Jeon Jungkook.

Busan Rest Home was the
kind of place where people dropped off their parents
and forgot them.

Polly didn't need to show
me where to go.

I walked down the halls of
closed doors, holding my breath.

Like the scent of Sau in my
car, the scent of sadness
never left the rest home.

It reeked of cleaner and
cafeteria food at all hours
of the day and night.

I had wanted to put Mom
some place nicer after it
became unsafe for me to take care of her at home while
also running the coffee shop.

I'd asked my brother, Jiwoo,
to help pay for the facility in
a neighboring town that had more staff and bigger rooms
but he'd curtly told me it
was too expensive.

A few months later, he'd
bought a house with his
cushy dentist's salary.

But who was I to judge?

I was terrible at math and
I didn't have a fancy
college degree like he did.

As he was fond of telling me.

"Running a coffee shop
isn't that hard."

"A trained monkey could
do it."

At least this trained
monkey visited his mom
once in a while.

On the eighth door to the
right there was a big
chalkboard with the words.

"The Fabulous Jeon."

And in smaller lettering.

"AKA Barista Extraordinaire,
AKA The Sass with Class."

Joon had bought the chalk
board for her and had
decorated it with his fancy lettering the day she moved in.

When we were in high
school, Joon's parents
weren't cool with him being
gay, so he'd lived at our
house for a while.

My mom gave him a job
at the coffee shop and a
safe place to be himself.