My Seoul Man

Chapter 49

When I got back to the farm, AJ was just taking big hunks of beef from a massive brick grill out back of the cottage. Bopping around to "The Jam," a 70s funk joint by Grand Central Station that used to get all the Boomer dudes in the family up trying to out "good foot" each other.

Hae Won was doing a little wiggle of her own in the sunroom behind him, too. Waving a green soju bottle in one hand and thumb swiping her cell with the other. And wearing a skimpy little sun dress that only someone as tiny as she is could or probably should wear, too.

For shits and giggles I once took a shot of her to find out the designers who'd made all the stuff she was wearing and how much it cost just for the sticker shock. And the cheapest piece was the $500 tank top. Leather jacket: $8000. Skirt: $5000. Couldn't find the boots because they were apparently custom made by some famous dude in Italy or...I don't know.

Ticked me off a little bit, I'm not going to lie. I'll never get totally used to how that's just chump change to some people in the worlds she and AJ live in. But that day I just had too much on my mind to go all PC over it.

So, I headed over to bump hips with AJ just in time to "bap ba dap" along with Badu's "Back in the Day" when it came up next.

And he kind of froze in mid bump and said, "Okay, Aretha!"

"Church choir, son," I said. "That's where all those bad bitches got their chops."

He chuckled and said, "Well, I'm going to have to take you on tour, huh?" And then paused to ask, "How's Mr. America?" With sincere concern, too.

"He'll live. I'm just trying to make sure he doesn't start thinking about living here. Cause—"

We heard glass shatter inside just before Hae Won came flying out of the sunroom, cell held high.

The text she'd gotten made her drop that soju and run.

"Cops just swarmed into your company building," she told us. "Threatened to grab all the computers...papers..."

AJ's cell started buzzing on the glass topped table nearby then. And he grabbed it up and barked "Ya!" into it before going off a mile a minute in Korean so intensely that I pitied whoever was on the other end.

And before I could ask what the hell was happening, Hae Won did this soap opera gasp and said, "Oh my God..."

"What?!"

She shoved the cell into my face and said, "Oh my God," again, which freaked me out of course.

But not as bad as the comments beneath the YouTube video she was showing me. I gasped even louder than she had.

And bellowed, "Okay, what the actual fuck is going on right now?"

It was a whole flood of comments about AJ and his mother. Yes, his mother—you heard right.

"Are they really trying to say him and his mother had some kind of...thing? Because she bought them friendship rings?!"

I reached up to put my hand over the one on the chain around my neck as if someone might try to snatch it off.

"Oh, they won't say it outright. They just ask a lot of sick questions to get the ball rolling. 'Why would a mother want to share couple rings with her own son?' 'Was her unnatural love for her son the true cause of her husband's rage?'"

"They knew about his father, too? That he beat her?"

"AJ used to say he was...angry all the time, or something like that. In interviews."