The Decent Proposal by Kemper Donovan Page A

back to them on her own terms. Each Sunday she attended a church service in Koreatown, and if she concentrated hard enough while singing the hymns, eyes on the cross, she could still feel the light of Jesus inside her like when she was a little girl. Mike was grateful for her religious upbringing; now more than ever, she prided herself on not having plunged into the first-generation abyss of resenting her immigrant parents’ failure to conform to white American standards. A few months ago, her father had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and the disease was progressing more rapidly than expected.
    Something small and hard burned inside her at the thoughtof her quiet and dignified father dying, radiating a pain she knew would consume her if she gave it free rein. She slammed her car door much harder than necessary, and turned resolutely to her office building.
    Mike wanted desperately to help him, but while she was capable of supporting herself, she had no money to spare. If she hadn’t been able to expense all her social activities (dinner, drinks, movies, books, gas, even valet parking), which were all tangentially related to her job in the entertainment industry, she wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere or do much of anything. It was outrageous, but while she maintained a swanky L.A. lifestyle wherein blowing several hundred dollars in a single night at some douchey club was no big deal, she had no way of helping her parents pay for the state-of-the-art surgery (terrifyingly called “deep brain stimulation”) that might help keep her father’s disease at bay as long as possible. Mike’s parents had sacrificed for years to send their only child to Amherst without any student loans, and never once did they press her to become a lawyer, doctor, or engineer as so many other immigrant parents did. She’d reaped all the benefit and now was powerless to share any of the burden—other than the emotional one she placed on herself.
    I’m a bad daughter , she thought, physically shaking away the emotion while entering her office, doing her best to force the poison out of her system. No one at Square Peg knew about her father, just as they had no idea about her religiosity. The breezy small talk that made up the bulk of her day was too trifling for such weighty concerns. Richard was the only one who knew, and he knew everything. Whenever they spoke on Sunday afternoons he asked, “How’d church go?” and she always answered, “Fine,” or, “It was cool,” but they both knew something significant lay beneath the routine exchange. In the last few months he’d taken to adding a follow-up question, “How’s your dad?” and she usually answered the same way.
    Later that morning, she direct-messaged him on Twitter:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  drks/din later?
    His reply came almost simultaneously:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  pls
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  rush st?
    There was no response, so she wrote again:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  i came to u last time . . .
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  fine
    he wrote back a few seconds later.
    Mike grinned.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  8p don’t be late like ujzh
    She kept the window open. In the afternoon, while a client complained to her about his studio quote not being high enough, she reached out to him:
    been sitting on the f’ing fone for half an hour with this whiny SOB.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ugh
    he responded, and it truly helped. She felt better, felt heard.
    But she wanted more.
    In the seven years since college, she had certainly sown her wild oats. Mike was glad for all the experiences whipped up inside her whirlwind twenties, and she had stored each of them away like a wise, industrious ant for the lean times to come.At this point she had