“Am I crazy?” She wiped the sweat from her forehead, catching her breath.

“Honestly, I think you are right. Everyone else has lost it, Margot.” He turned his head as if just noticing the sky—a smoldering tangerine and hot-pink fire. “The world is fucked. But we deserve the truth.” He unbuckled his seat belt. “Can we eat now?”

Margot and Miguel exited the car under the last of the day’s light. She took a deep breath. She always loved seeing Los Angeles plated in gold by a receding sun, the outlines of palm trees. For a few quiet moments, you might hear birdsong instead of car honks and alarms and trick yourself into believing it was paradise.

Entering the restaurant, she could smell the meat grilling over the gas burners—fat sizzling while flames licked sesame, soy sauce, sugar, onion, and garlic. Nothing could quite connect people like food.

The hostess seated them at a table of glazed wood with raw edges. After ordering beef short ribs and pork belly, Margot showed the waitress—a thin middle-aged woman with pale powdered skin and a short bob, tidy black apron and skirt—the framed image of her and her mother on the day of Margot’s high school graduation, the most recent photo that Margot could find. “Do you know this woman?”

“Yes, I think so,” the waitress said. “But from a long time ago.”

“Do you mean years?”

“Let me ask the owner.”

She fetched an older Korean man in his seventies, with bright silver hair and dressed in an olive green sweater-vest and khakis. A gold watch glinted. With new dentures, he smiled like a false sun.

“We’re just wondering if you knew my mother.” Margot handed him the photo.

He nodded, lifting his brows. “Looks familiar.” His eyes then considered Margot a shade too long.

She made an effort not to turn her gaze away. She immediately didn’t like him and she wanted him to know it.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Margot asked.

He scratched his head. “I don’t know. So many customers.” His nostrils flared. “All look almost same.” He grinned—those Paul-Bunyan-statue teeth, cold and white, clinical. “Almost same. Excuse me.” Bowing his head, he turned to another table where he greeted a group of boisterous guests—regulars or friends.

“That was shady,” Miguel said.

“Maybe he’s just confused.”

“He doesn’t seem that old.”

The waitress returned with a tray full of banchan, small white plates glowing.

Margot decided to switch tactics. “Do you remember a woman named Mrs. Baek? She used to work here. Red lipstick?”

The waitress smirked. “Oh, yes, very red.”

“When did she stop working here?” Margot asked.

The waitress glanced behind her shoulder. “Earlier this year. Spring, I think.”

After switching on the tabletop grill’s gas burner with a click and a hiss, the waitress hurried away, empty tray in hand. Around the low blue fire, they munched on banchan—seaweed salad, mak kimchi and kkakdugi, lightly pickled mu, seasoned spinach, potato salad. A feast for the senses.

“Well,” Margot said. “At least we know Mrs. Baek was telling the truth about opening her store in March.”

Elbows on the table, Miguel played with his chopsticks as if pinching the air in front of his face. “After the riots, what did your mom do?”

“What do you mean?” Margot tasted the kkakdugi, perfectly crunchy and a little sweet. Her face tingled, hot from the flames in the center of the table.

“Your mom stopped talking with Mrs. Baek then. She was busy. But it seems kind of pivotal, right? That they stopped talking, and now suddenly, just this year, they became friends again? Seems coincidental.”

“After the riots, I think my mom worked at some fast-food restaurants. She took on random jobs until she could save enough—a couple years later—to start a business again.” The seasoned spinach smelled of fresh sesame oil, which melted in her mouth. “I just remember it was very rough. She was able to save some of the merchandise and hangers and stuff from her old store, and we lived with those clothes in boxes in the apartment since we didn’t have any place to store it. We ate government food—like canned pork, powdered milk. The Salvation Army gave us toothbrushes.”

She tasted the seaweed salad, one of her favorites, which suppressed some of the sadness she could feel rising inside of her. Its delicate gelatinous acidity, its brininess satisfied her. How she yearned for the ocean right now. As a teenager, she would ride the bus on her own to the beach and spend hours walking or sitting on a bench, reading and watching the water. “It was hard. It was really hard back then.”

The waitress returned to the table with a platter full of raw meat—the marinated short ribs and pork—to grill. Soy sauce and sugar, ginger and garlic caramelized, dripping fat into the fire. With an intense feeling of gratitude, Margot moved the galbi and slices of pork belly to keep them from sticking to the grill. How joyful, how abundant life could sometimes be—despite the disappointments, the tragedy. Every meal, even a somber one like this, was a celebration of what we had left, what remained on this earth to taste and feel and see.

She imagined her mother at the Grand Canyon, the dark shadows pressed against red-and sand-colored rock striated over billions of years by wind and water. She thought of Las Vegas, her mother’s hands gripping the steering wheel, the open windows, and the fine powder that caked their faces and arms.

“During that time was when my mother drove us to Vegas.”

“Vegas? I thought your mom didn’t go anywhere?”

“It was just once. I was probably about six years old. She had never driven on the freeway before, I don’t think. She was really slow.” Margot laughed. “I’m surprised we were never pulled over. Anyway, we were supposed to meet up with someone there. I think this was right before my mother opened her new store, the last one, in the swap meet.”

“Interesting.” He finished the last of the seaweed salad. “I guess it could’ve been anyone that she was meeting up with? She didn’t have any family, though, right?”

“No,” Margot said. “But . . . I don’t think any of this has to do with Mrs. Baek. I mean, I believe Mrs. Baek now, but it is odd that my mother would’ve just cut her off that way, right?”

“Well, it probably wasn’t intentional,” Miguel said. “Sometimes people grow apart, or maybe your mom just didn’t have time for friends—only church and you, I guess. She was trying to survive, right?”

Once the meat had browned, Margot laid pieces on Miguel’s plate, like her mother would’ve done, before serving herself. A heaviness gathered in her chest. She wrapped a bite of warm white rice, soft pork belly, and ssamjang in a red lettuce leaf, still wet, and crammed it into her mouth.

As a teenager in restaurants, she had often glanced around her at larger groups in their booths, envying the volume of people, the generations that could be brought into a single period of time and space, the architecture of a family over shared food. There was a kind of rigid hierarchy between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But the politics protected a sense of togetherness and place, a statement that read in the silence of subtle gestures (the pouring of another’s glass, the use of two hands, the serving of others first): We will always protect each other.

Yet despite those gestures, those fragile attempts to express their feelings, she and her mother couldn’t get along, relax. Were they too foreign from each other?

Or was it the intensity of two women alone, two women who would be mirrors for each other, for each other’s sadness, disappointments, rage? If one would experience joy, the other would feel not her own joy rising but a pang of jealousy rooted in a fear of abandonment that would cause her to strike the other down. And where did this fear of loneliness come from? Was it universal or specific to her mother? Or maybe even specific to being Korean?

Her mother, as a child of the war, would have surely died alone if she had not been found. And the whole world told women every day, If you are alone, you are no one. A woman alone is no one at all.

Miguel had only spent a few days in LA here and there on vacation, so they decided to see the city after dinner. They could use a break, a diversion. Anything to get her out of her own head and heart, which by now had become flooded with details of her mother’s life. She did everything for so long within her power to avoid the reality, the pain of her mother, and now it came down on her in a deluge of confusing facts, images, and emotions. The sock lady, Mrs. Baek, red lips smeared. The obituary of her mother’s lover, who resembled Margot as well—the squareness of the jaw, maybe even the eyes, the cheekbones. The restaurant owner’s brand-new smile. Her mother facedown on the carpet. The dark smell. A gas. The smell she could not get out of her nose and mouth.