Chapter 8: Iron Pot, Saw, Nails

Bom set the jar of pepper paste on the stone sill of the arch and slid it across to him.

"From your grandmother," she said.

Gyu-ho looked at the jar for a long moment.

It was wrapped in the blue tea towel that had hung on the oven door his whole life.

He could smell the kitchen through the cloth, the stove and the bean paste and her hand cream.

"She sent you chestnuts too," Bom said. "I ate them in the car. I'm not sorry."

He picked up the jar and held it against his chest under the hood.

"You know," he said.

"Ju Gyu-ho," she said, very quietly. "Twenty-seven. Sow. F."

It was the rating board, word for word.

"Ki-tae has been saying it in the Hanbat gym for a week," Bom said. "I didn't believe him until she gave me that."

"Have you told Yook?"

"Not yet," Bom said.

"Why not?"

She tapped her coin on her teeth and didn't answer that.

"There's a Hanbat car parked at the bottom of her lane," she said instead. "With a camera on the dash."

His hands tightened on the jar.

Grandma went to the co-op on foot every second day, down that lane, past that car.

"Is she all right?" he asked.

"She's fine. She's feeding everyone in the county out of spite."

Bom leaned one shoulder against the arch, on her side of it.

"Yook told me to win the next lot that brings me close to you, and to describe your face," she said.

He went cold under the hood.

"He'll keep sending people until somebody does," Bom said.

"So why tell me?" he asked.

"Because the next one he sends won't be me."

She looked at him through the gray of the hood.

"Put up a lot that brings someone to your side. Make sure it's something worth fighting for. I'll make sure it's me."

He didn't know if he believed her.

She was Hanbat's bidder, and Hanbat had a car with a camera at the bottom of Grandma's lane.

This could be exactly the job Yook had given her.

But Grandma had given her the tea towel, and Grandma had sold to strangers for sixty years without once being cheated twice.

"I need an iron pot," he said. "And a saw, and nails."

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