Ch. 34 – Man of the House

Derrick got off the bus, and walked toward Hack Alley’s front door, which was still held up by the duct tape he had applied in the morning.

Shutting it behind him, he got to work on tidying up the space, and then brought out the power tools to attach the door hinges back into the frame.

An hour later, the door creaked a bit when he closed it, but it could lock and stay shut, which was the more important thing.

It was time to get to work.

#

The next week went quickly. Between tidying up the shop, Derrick saw some of their usual patients. Uncle Po with his hearing aid. Auntie Jiang and her creaky prosthetic elbow.

Derrick was not looking forward to putting in the cochlear implant for Granny Chu. Tony might still be in the hospital by then, and Derrick didn’t want to cut her open by himself.

He had nightmares every night: nightmares where he wasn’t able to save Tony. He would be ready to make the incision, and he would tear Tony’s skin ragged with an ugly cut. And as he was suturing the laceration on Tony’s liver, his hand would slip, and widen the laceration even further. Blood would leak out from the wound, so much that it soaked right through the gauze, and filled up Tony’s abdominal cavity, and then his face would go bone white—

It felt like the sharp blade of a scalpel was up against Derrick’s throat, whenever he thought about Granny Chu’s operation. He had made it through last night by the skin of his teeth; being the primary surgeon was bad for his heart. If the feeling didn’t pass, he would have to reschedule it. Risking an operation in this state of mind was asking for trouble.

Dammit. If only Tony were feeling better.

Derrick sat down at the table where all the overdue bills were piled up, many of them unopened, as Derrick knew that they just wouldn’t be paid that month. Hack Alley would have to start charging their elderly patients . . . a fair amount. Tony had always insisted that they provide discounted services to the elderly, but each job took time, and earned so little . . .

The door to the shop opened, and a pair shuffled in, speaking softly in Korean.

“Hello, Derrick!” the woman said in English. She beamed, and her grey-flecked hair bobbed up and down as she waved.

“Hello!” her husband said, no less enthusiastically. His tugged his faded baseball cap off, and held it with both hands.

“Mr. and Mrs. Kim, good to see you two, please come in,” Derrick said.

The pair sat down at a workbench—there weren’t many seats in the shop—and Mrs. Kim launched into her routine interrogation of Derrick’s personal life, as Mr. Kim nodded along.

“How is your appetite? You were having problems eating when we last met, right?”

Derrick cleared his throat and forced a smile. He never lost his appetite, but hadn’t had the heart to tell her that he and Tony had been skipping meals recently to help with the rent payment. “It’s much better now, thanks for asking.”

“Did you meet a girl, yet?” Mrs. Kim smiled innocently.

“Ha ha ha . . . no, not yet. But what can I help you two with?”

Mr. Kim grimaced, and gestured toward his leg. “My leg is . . . not working,” said, enunciating every word carefully, before smiling apologetically at Derrick, and then turning to his wife and unleashing a firehose of Korean.

The Kims were one of the few Korean families who had lived in Chinatown since before the refugees started pouring in. After vising Hack Alley for the first time, they had gravitated toward Tony and Derrick, as the two men could speak English, and weren’t part of a gang. Only Mrs. Kim was fluent in English, and neither of them could speak Chinese, so Derrick was often the interpreter when the Kims needed to do a complicated job for one of their Chinese neighbors. As the years had passed, the Kims became closer and closer, sending Tony and Derrick vegetables sometimes, and a few beers at other times. They were good customers, and nice people.

They went back and forth gesturing at the leg prosthesis, which he had extended straight in front of him. Nothing seemed wrong with it when at rest, but Derrick had seen Mr. Kim wobbling a bit when he had walked into the shop.

Mrs. Kim nodded at her husband, and then gestured emphatically at his leg. “Here’s what happened. He was carrying some flooring to the truck, and then someone ran by him, and hit the floorboards.” She slapped her fist against her open hand. “Just like that. Pow! And then, he turns around, and almost falls over. He’s okay, he’s still standing, but the floorboards: he drops them, and we have to buy new ones, because they broke. And then, on the way back, he falls to the ground.”

“After that, his leg always has issues.” She continue nodding at Derrick, eyes wide and waiting for his response.

“Thank you for explaining the situation to me, I’d be happy to take a look at it,” Derrick said. “Why don’t you come on in and take a seat here on the examination chair.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Mr. Kim said, pushing off the workbench as he wobbled to his feet.

Derrick turned around, gesturing for them to follow him to the examination room, but felt a tug on his sleeve.

“Here, for you,” Mr. Kim said, pressing a small velvet bag into Derrick’s left hand, and then giving it a firm shake with both of his.

“Oh, we can work out the, uh, payment? later—”

“No! No. It’s a gift,” Mr. Kim said, his eyes sparkling. “Open!”

The small, cheap-looking velvet bag was held closed by frayed drawstrings. Derrick placed the bag into his prosthetic hand, and drew the mouth of the bag open slowly.

It was a gold chain. Not a particularly elaborate one, but well-made.

“Wow,” Derrick said, turning the chain over in his hands. It clattered on the hard surface of his prosthesis. “This is for me?”

“Yes!” Mr. Kim said, wrapping Derrick’s hand around the chain. “Try it.”

Mrs. Kim nodded. “We were always so worried about you! We come to this shop for years now, and you still don’t have girlfriend!”

Derrick winced. Sure, poor guys could pick up girls in Chinatown, even if they weren’t in a gang. But surely they could see that Derrick had a bigger problem. Surely they could see his face. He wouldn’t be getting any girls looking as he did. But their expectant smiles shined so brightly he couldn’t dwell on it.

“Thank you so much! This is just too much. Thank you again. Why did you do this for me?”

And then it came: the sigh of a tired old Korean woman. “Bah. We bought it for his nephew one day, as a present for his eighteenth birthday,” she said, rubbing her husband’s back. “But the nephew died last week, shot at the bank, right before the party. We tried to send the necklace to his parents—there’s always a use for these things—but they sent it back. It reminded them too much of their son.”

“Ah. I’m sorry to hear about that.”

“We gave them some flowers, but we had no one to give this chain to. So why not give it to you? We could never have a son, even though we tried. And you and Tony are good to us, almost like we are your own parents.”

Derrick smiled, and nodded back at them, rubbing away the hot tears that welled up. He draped the gold chain over the mouth of velvet bag and fed it back inside. The bag had become heavier, with the unrealized dreams of the Kim family.

“I’ll take good care of it. Thank you so much.” Derrick crouched down towards the workbench, and wrapped his arms around Mr. Kim, and then Mrs. Kim. “Let me put this away in my room, and then I’ll come take you two to the operating room.”

#

The repair was routine, all dry work. Derrick didn’t have to cut any flesh open. Mr. Kim’s leg was a simple model, one that Hack Alley could source third-party components for. The Kims opted for those every time, even though they were more fragile than the OEM parts, as Mr. Kim’s handyman job didn’t pay enough.

Derrick mopped up the reclining chair in the operating room, and walked the Kims over to the shop. The pile of unpaid bills sat on the table where Derrick processed patients’ payments. A large bill for rent, and many smaller ones for utilities and other charges. It would make sense to charge the full price for the job.

Let’s see. So accounting for the parts, the hourly rate, and the standard bonus for this job, the total would be . . .

“How much do we owe you?” Mrs. Kim asked, rummaging through her worn purse.

The two of them had been coming to Hack Alley for years. Mrs. Kim had been wearing the same few dresses the entire time, and Derrick had never seen Mr. Kim wearing anything but his work clothes. It was tough being a handyman in Chinatown, and Tony understood that.

Derrick nodded. “Just give me a second to run the numbers . . .”

He slashed twenty-five percent off of what he had calculated for each line item, and wrote them all down on a piece of scrap paper. It was what Tony would’ve charged.

“Thank you for waiting, here’s your total.”

Mrs. Kim looked up from her purse, and let out a sigh of relief. “You and Tony are always so reasonable. I was worried if I would have enough!” She pulled out some crumpled bills—the Kims weren’t savvy with paying by phone—and placed them in Derrick’s hand.

“Thank you very much for stopping by, and let me know if you have any issues,” Derrick said, nodding at the Kims.

They all said their goodbyes, which took a good ten minutes, and the Kims walked out of Hack Alley’s front door, Mr. Kim walking proudly on his own, as his freshly oiled leg prosthesis glided smoothly along.

The door shut, and Derrick walked back over to the desk with the bills, and stared at the money. The job had made money for Hack Alley. Not a lot, but it had made some. And the Kims would be able to keep working, now that Mr. Kim’s leg was functional.

Derrick, Tony, and the Kims would all scrape by for another month. Hopefully. And hopefully for another month after that, and another month after that . . .

Another two months was all you could ever count on in Chinatown.

But there was something different this month. There was a nice, gold chain sitting in a velvet bag in Derrick’s room.

He swore to himself that he would never, ever wear it. No getting it snatched by a thief or a homeless person.

The necklace would stay nice and safe in his room.