New Draft!

Alright, here's draft two.  It is, thus far, officially untitled.

*************

                We followed Julia to the car.  Like her, it was stately, expensive and a little intimidating.  The black sedan was straight to the point and though she had probably owned it for months, the interior looked and smelled as if she had bought it earlier that day.  She motioned for us to take the back seats as she slid into the driver’s.  I sat.  The awkward roil in my stomach was something that I was growing accustomed to in the three days that I had been in Korea.

“Where are we eating dinner, again?”  I felt like Julia had given Ian more details.

“I don’t know. “ He leaned forward. “Julia, where are we going to eat?”

“Uh,” then she said something I didn’t understand.  I tried to work it out in my head.  ‘Bead-um’ is what I had heard her say.  I spent the next several minutes running through every food or type of food that started with the letter B.  While I was playing my own personal alphabet game, Ian was productively narrowing it down. “Rice, vegetable, fish, soup,” Julia was continuing to Ian.

“Does she remember that we’re vegetarians?” I was letting Ian take all the falls tonight.  He tentatively reminded her.

“Oh, yes.  Okay.  You eat fish?”

“No.   No fish, chicken, beef or anything like that.  We do eat eggs and milk, though.”  His throat tensed with every explanation.  I stared at him lazily.  After the last eight hours spent making and remaking lesson plans for her approval, which I still hadn’t won, I could hardly look at her.  Shifting on the bread colored leather seat, I looked instead out the window and let the neon shop signs overwhelm my train of thought.  I counted glowing red crosses atop churches.  Eleven if you count the ones just past those hills.  I thought Koreans were Buddhists.

“Your parents are vegetarians?” Julia and Ian’s conversation had continued.

“Mine aren’t.  They eat a lot of meat, actually.  Casey’s mom is, though.”  Hearing my name drew me down from the hills and into the car.

“Oh, really?  It’s good to do.  You are nice children, obedient.”

We drove a few minutes more in silence.  She began to mumble to herself and drive more slowly down the street.  I leaned toward her a little, worried she was trying to talk to us.  She wasn’t.  She dialed her phone.  A jeweled J swung heavily on it.  I squinted at the headlights of the oncoming cars as we changed directions on the four lane street.  After less than a minute on the phone, she made another U-turn and we pulled into a nearly empty parking lot.  I tried and failed to sound out the elaborately written Korean on the fluorescent sign.  Small, blocky type in the lower right corner answered me: “Vietnam Cuisine”.