Taking Jana (Paradise South #2) (5 page)

“No. No manager. No broker, no sale,” he whispered through his strained wheezing.

Despite the fact that other than her parents owning the building free and clear, thanks to Jana, the business had zero value. After Jana had dug them out from the debt incurred by Dane, the best the restaurant ever did was break even. It was Chang Park working a job…for free. His very own
non-profit
.

“Dad, be reasonable.”

He slowly filled his lungs, wincing from the pain, and said, “I will be back in half the time this doctor says. Half. No one but family runs my place. The restaurant,”—he paused to cough while the doctor and Jana both glanced at the monitor’s spike—“will be yours someday, and you can stop that bedpan slavery.”

The
bright-eyed
doctor cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable by the family dynamics and definitely concerned by his patient’s increase in blood pressure. He bravely ventured a comment anyway. “I like your spirit, Mr. Park. You’ll need it to move toward your new, healthier lifestyle. But to do that, I’ll need you to understand how extremely serious your situation is.” He moved closer to the patient, which apparently gave Jin direct access to Jana’s arm.

“I need to talk to you outside while the doctor is with Daddy.”

Her mother had the worst timing. She needed both her parents to hear, to wake up, and to be on board. How clueless they were as to the magnitude of her father’s state, even though Jin knew it when she called her work and her cell phone and then her brother’s. Why did the fact that Jana’s father was out of surgery make Jin less worried about the man? The woman was back to oblivious now, almost more in denial than ever.

“Mom, we should all be here with Daddy and the doctor.”

“It’s really okay. I’ll be back several times over the next couple of days,” the doctor said, overhearing Jana.

Not part of the unspoken plan, Doc, but thanks.
Jana grinned to be polite.
Fine.
“Daddy, I’ll be back later tonight to relieve Mom. I’ll get settled at the house and check in on the restaurant, okay?”

And she’d check the financials in the restaurant’s back office, as well. She had to strengthen her case for selling the damn lead weight her father loved so much.

Chang nodded and returned his attention to the doctor, who was now only looking at Jana a little too conscientiously.

Jin pinched Jana’s arm and whispered, “Smile!” in her ear.

Again, not subtle at all.

“It was nice meeting you, Dr. Brighton. Thank you for everything.”

Then Jin pulled Jana outside the room as if an urgent wartime message had to be conveyed before the world came to an end.

*

Jana’s mother was all nerves, and her anxiety was more than contagious.

“Mom, what is it? You’re making
me
nervous, and I’m an ER nurse. Dad has already had a quadruple bypass today. How much worse could it be? Please relax and say what you have to say.” And please make it something other than asking about the status of her food intake, and if she’d met a man to sweep her off her fucking feet like Chang Park had done for Jin.
Right.

But there, outside the hospital room, her mother transformed into a different person, a person so serious, so strained by some infinite weight, a responsibility, maybe a
heavily-toted
secret, and so out of character, that Jana couldn’t help smirking. And like the time she was caught smirking at her grandmother’s funeral—just a coping mechanism—and she’d gotten slapped from then to her next birthday, she thought her mother might lift her hand and do it again, twenty years later.

But her mother didn’t. Instead, Jin narrowed her eyes and spoke in hushed Korean. “
Ja-Na
Sun.”

Nearly ten years ago was the last she’d heard her whole Korean name uttered by her mother, and it made Jana shudder.

“We, your father and me, you know, are so strong and healthy, always eating good Korean food. Well, you know, we don’t really need or have health insurance.”

“Don’t be absurd, Ma. I got you and Daddy set up on a policy like three years ago, despite your ludicrous argument.”

“Daddy canceled.”

Jana’s lungs deflated. And there was no next breath.

“He needed the money for something else, for the restaurant, and so many of Daddy’s business club friends don’t have insurance. So expensive, those monthly payments. Such a scam, they all say.”

Right. A scam. It felt like the scam was on her because she knew very well what was coming. Her heart began to race.

Breathe!

But still, nothing.

Breathe damn
it!

Through her nostrils, she inhaled. The sterile hospital air was thin,
bleach-scented
. Although she’d willed her lungs to work now, she couldn’t fill them with a whole, satisfying breath. She needed to sit down. But no chair. Anywhere. So she leaned against the
scuff-marked
wall and stared at her mother.

“So now, here is the hospital bill statement or whatever they call it”—her mother pulled out a folded mess from her purse—“and we need you to take care of it because there isn’t enough, you know, in our bank to pay with.” Then Jin looked down at her purse. At least she knew to look away, not daring to meet Jana’s eyes. Because Jana didn’t know if her death stare would actually kill her mother, and worse, she didn’t know if she wanted it to.

But it wasn’t her mother’s fault. It was her father. Chang Park and his coronary had pushed Jin against the metaphorical wall. Just like when Jana had run to them, screaming with excitement with her Manhattan Metro University acceptance letter in hand a decade ago. Her mother was the one to break the news: “
Ja-Na
Sun, there is no money.” And the woman looked away in the same
guilt-stricken
way.

“The billing lady assigned to us wants to speak to someone about the ambulance and the rest of the expenses to come. She didn’t understand me, with my accent.”

Of course, her accent, after forty fucking years in the US. “What did she not understand you saying, Mom? That your eldest child, the
god-blessed
son, is a selfish, broke asshole, so your ‘pathetic, unmarried nurse’ of a daughter will come to the rescue? Again!”

Jin shot Jana a look that was equal to slapping her clear across the face. Hard. Again, Jana was shocked her mother didn’t actually raise her hand and do it, first the smirk, then this? And they both knew Jana wouldn’t have had the balls to ever speak that way to her father. Why then was it passable to disrespect her mother?

Jana had no answer for that. Damn it, she should really speak this way to both of them, to finally turn off the spigot of her
ever-flowing
support and the full financial coverage of her fully grown fucking parents. And goddamn her siphon of a brother.

Jana shook her head as her eyes darted to the gleaming white floor.
Remember, Mom is under his thumb, Jana
. How could she even put this on Jin? If Jin ran things, if her mother was in a different marriage, a different life, and if her mother was more like Jana’s
iron-fisted
grandmother, Jin might have stopped Chang’s absolutely ludicrous decision to cancel their health insurance, and they’d have their own resources to cover this mess. And maybe even have life insurance and other contingency plans.

So, just how much was the burden they lovingly heaped on her shoulders? She dreaded opening the folded mangle of a bill, but her fumbling fingers opened it anyway.

First page, “ambulance,” sans health insurance, “twelve hundred dollars”. She swallowed back a ball of
tightly-wound
fear as she flipped to the next page because she knew. She knew what was coming, being in the damn medical field. She wished to God she didn’t though.

Line item, “quadruple bypass.” Her eyes followed across the page, and her knees got weak. Her head throbbed.
One hundred and
fifty-two
thousand
. She stood there with the paper rattling in her cold trembling hands. Still seven to ten more days to go in the hospital. Then the
follow-ups
, drugs, physical therapy, home care, and all the rest.

All Jana felt was nausea. A panic attack would have been welcome at that point, or mild hysteria, even. But no, nothing. Any and all emotion including the hope and joy she’d accumulated over the last year of living her dream, her nursing position at one of the most prestigious hospitals the world over, all vacated her being that instant, leaving a cold robotic numbness.

Jana lifted her eyes and looked up at her mother. Then like a zombie, she kissed her mother’s cheek and left the small cowering woman outside her father’s hospital room, as Jana dutifully made her way toward the business office to discuss her father’s financial situation—now Jana’s situation.

And it all begins
again.

CHAPTER 4

S
he tipped the
cab driver well, despite her new completely fucked situation. He’d driven well enough, but most of all, he’d stayed quiet. Noiselessness was what she needed, vitally. Anything else would have been the tipping point. In her fragile, icy state, she thought for sure she’d shatter into pieces. She laughed as the green bills left her hand and slid into those of the bearded driver. What was the difference anymore between twenty dollars and twenty thousand? Or two hundred grand even?

At one time, while selling her soul, dancing on top of her obliterated moral compass, the cash she’d have lying around, all stuffed in shoeboxes and tucked under her mattress, was too much to count. And as she inserted her key to unlock the glass door of the Park family’s
walk-up
, her overactive mind heard her mother telling her to “smile” at the doctor. Why not say, “Land him, Jana!” She cringed at the thought. Being with a man for his money wasn’t something she was capable of. Her mother could keep her fantasies because that’s all her mother had. And as for her mother’s reality, Jin Park could keep that too. If Jana wanted to be a trophy on a leash, she’d have snagged one of her doting club regulars years ago.

No, she’d be deeply connected and enthralled and in total symbiosis with whomever her future partner would be. A long time away, though, not until she cleaned up her parents’ new mess. Because she couldn’t burden anyone else with this load; she had her pride and she had a conscience. Even if her parents so obviously did not.

But, she’d admit at her lowest points, like now, it was tempting to just connect with a man who had resources. But she also remembered the daytime talk shows she’d zoned out to for the years she worked nights, disbelieving the women who had strategized marrying rich. The thought made her ill, especially knowing that the husbands those women manipulated around the chessboard to hit their wallets, well, those men had been coming to her for lap dances every week. She’d have none of that. No marriage of convenience, no money contract. She’d rather stay alone than ever, ever buy in.

The musty stairwell smell was familiar enough, but the hint of seafood and pickled cabbage in the air was what hit home. She watched the top of the stairs get closer, her purse threatening to fall off her sagging shoulder and her roller bag thumping up each mocking step, each
thud
making her flinch as the throbbing in her head marched to the beat.

Jana got to the top, got the house door open, and fell into the cluttered apartment with a surrender and a disdain that matched the energy of her ER on a night of a massive city train wreck.

Tossing her purse and dropping the roller bag where she stood, she moved her limp body to the brown plaid couch, the one she’d known as a child, the very same. She’d offered to replace the repulsive thing a billion times over, but her father would have none of it. He’d take what will no doubt be hundreds of thousands from her now—actually, again!—but not a new couch.

Her hands went up to her pounding head, fingers massaging her temples. Not helpful, not a dent of relief. Exhale.

Sleep? Eat? Neither was even thinkable.

Action. She had to do something. She had to attack.

She grabbed her purse and headed back down the stairs fumbling through the clanking ring of unmarked keys as she went. God, how many times had she told them to label the keys? Taking no care on the steps, she stumbled but caught herself on the rickety banister. Her heart pounded through the scare until her fingers found the jagged silver key by memory. She caught her breath and put the key into the side door at the bottom of the stairwell.

*

The chairs were up on the larger round tops, but the
two-tops
lining the walls were still dirty, chairs only pushed in by the assumedly rushed closing kitchen crew, unmonitored since ten hours ago, so why would he or she or they give a shit, right? The floor had definitely not been swept, but again, who, if not her father, would be there to say—or yell in her father’s case—a thing about it. There was a makeshift closed sign hanging on the front door, but she’d definitely need to give her and her mother at least two days’ leeway. She pulled the paper down, grabbed a pen from her bag and hand wrote, ‘Until further notice, due to Family Emergency.’

She walked back through the kitchen, which reeked because, in addition to the floors, the damn garbage had been skipped. She decided then that she’d find the papers she needed to run preliminary numbers and get the hell out of there, out of the entire building for that matter. The option to sleep in her childhood bedroom upstairs was out too, since the ventilation from the kitchen was
building-wide
. And Jana’s old bedroom had the benefit of being directly above the kitchen, closest to the stench.

She got to the back office door and before even messing with the keys, she pulled out a small container of menthol vapor balm from her purse. A nurse comes prepared with the minimum essentials. She dabbed some under her nose to be able to function in there for even a few minutes.

Not having been in the back office too often when she was younger, she had no immediate recollection of the key, so she tried the rest of the bunch. The eleventh key clicked.

Just the sight of the
closet-sized
hole of an office with all the stacks and samples and catalogs and broken knobs and parts made her crumble to the
grease-slicked
floor and sob. She gasped between every few outpours, but covered her mouth with her shirt as a
pseudo-filter
, knowing the poisonous
sewage-like
air of the
thirty-year
-old commercial kitchen was killing her slowly with each and every intake.

After all the years she’d worked to escape the potential of becoming her parents in that restaurant, and then the fight to save them, then her escape from the strip club scene…after all that, now she was being stuffed back into a dark black hopeless box, one she didn’t think she’d ever have the strength to climb out of in the first place.

Three years in at The Wet Spot, Newark, then four more at the Manhattan sister club during her nursing school stint. God, she’d been gyrating
eye-candy
by night, at the mercy of horrid, horny men and boys, while by day, a nursing student, busting ass on organic chemistry and pharmacology when she should have been sleeping. Why hadn’t she drowned her nursing dream in the Hudson years ago? She could have kept dancing at The Wet Spot for Christ’s sake, eventually worn down enough to take an offer from one of her many creepy regulars, as a mistress or hell, as a dutiful wife. Why not dive right into a loveless,
fuck-filled
marriage of comfort and ease? And when her tits started to sag, she’d be traded in for a younger, tighter version of the shell of a woman she’d once been, but she’d still have the ease and comfort, right? She’d even have it better than her mother by this time.

God, why had she put herself through any of the upward struggles? She’d gotten into her dream school, then for a taste of the energy surge at one of the best hospitals in the entire fucking world, to have her family take it away from her, snatch it the fuck away. Again!

The floor safe, covered with dust, dented at the top edge, stared at her. She laughed out loud through her salty, pathetic tears. The undoubtedly empty safe, except for maybe twenty dollars of coin rolls, doubled as a printer stand and a “refrigerator” magnet door, with vendors’ phone numbers haphazardly stuck onto its
rust-splotched
surface.

God, she’d probably need to help her mother replenish the coins tomorrow. Because Ilana back at MMU Hospital had probably already snagged her week’s shifts. And because why wouldn’t a skilled, trained nurse need to go to a Fort Lee, New Jersey bank to get twenty bucks of dime and quarter rolls for an already dead restaurant? And the joke of the century: She’d have to come up with
ten-thousand
percent more than that for her father’s hospital bills.

She pushed herself up off the floor. Her tears had slowed. The odor of the place was making her gag while the mint balm made her upper lip tingle and not much else. She dusted off her backside, wiped her face, and fully entered the dingy broom closet of an office. The huge CRT monitor took up most of the damn space, dangerously weighing down the warped, albeit thick, piece of plywood mounted to the entire length of the wall, acting as a desk. Under the ‘desk’ was the
decade-old
computer tower, which, to her surprise, powered up when she pressed the greasy little ‘on’ button. Why was she even thinking her parents had kept any information updated on the damn thing? They’d told her up front they wouldn’t use it when she’d bought it for them before moving closer to campus. She’d gotten them a
brand-new
tower and LCD monitor to make their lives easier. Where the hell the thin panel monitor was, though, she couldn’t imagine. They’d probably given it to Cousin Daniel, their acting accountant, as payment for some tax prep.

While the computer booted, she saved time and her
soon-to
-explode stomach, by rummaging through the
twelve-inch
pile of papers next to the kitchen equipment catalogs her father had no business thumbing through.

She was looking for the most recent tax returns that her spineless cousin, Daniel Kwon, prepared for them every year. And every year that asshole would conveniently forget to tell her parents they needed to quit, that the state of their business’ financials was abysmal. But Daniel’s folks were doing great in the carpet and flooring business, and the passive aggression was clear to no one but Jana.

Nothing in the pile, so she threw open the file cabinet drawer as her guts started to really turn. Wow, alphabetized? That was an unforeseen second surprise. Categorized by what? ‘
All-Food
Service.’ Okay, by vendor name then. ‘Blue Tickets.’ Okay, so, no, by topic. She prayed ‘CPA’ would be in the ‘C’ section because there was no ‘Accountant’ under ‘A.’ Her father had always bragged about Cousin Daniel becoming a ‘Certified Public Accountant.’ Yes, the title was his thing. But in C, there was no ‘CPA’ file, but before she closed the drawer to move her search to the lower
M-Z
drawer, her eye caught something. Laughing her ass off, but choking on the putrid air at the same time, she found a file labeled ‘Cousin Daniel.’ C for Cousin.
Of
course.

It was a thick file and—hallelujah—it had the current year’s return all the way through five years back. She yanked the folder, slammed the
self-locking
office door, and sprinted out of the kitchen, out of the restaurant, taking a deep and only slightly less disgusting breath in the stairwell. It wasn’t nearly satisfying or clearing enough. She opened the exterior door and stuck her head out for the fresher, albeit hotter, summer air.

Yeah, the oxygen was way better outside, so she ran up to get her roller bag while balancing the file under her arm, then back down, escaping, letting the door slam shut behind her. She’d call a cab and sleep at the hospital, standing up if she had to, but she wasn’t about to reenter that stench.

*

She locked the door behind her and leaned against the brick wall of the building. She called the cab that had dropped her off. Who knew cabbies carried their own business cards these days? She wouldn’t know since subways were her sole means of getting anywhere she didn’t walk to in the City.

The cab dispatch lady said it would be a
ten-minute
wait, which was plenty of time for Jana to review the folder tucked under her arm.

Having done years of tax returns for Charlene, Amber, and a few of the other girls at the clubs, and, of course, her own, she felt confident when she let the file fall open in her hands. The Tax Form 1040 for that year was on top. Just what she’d thought, hardly breaking even. It was worse when she considered the fact that her father under compensated himself to minimize payroll taxes. So much for them counting on Social Security in three years.
Jesus
.

With her clothing already tainted by having even stepped into that kitchen, she crouched down to sit on the
filth-strewn
sidewalk. She pulled a pen from her purse for her fidgety fingers to jot down notes and numbers as she thumbed through more of the documents. By the time the cab came to take her back to the hospital, she’d figured that the restaurant wouldn’t last more than a month without her father standing in it morning to night.

She then added the accruing medical bills and took into account that she’d be making
zero
money while missing work for the foreseeable weeks while her father was in the hospital. Then he’d be brought home, and he’d assumedly need expert care that they couldn’t afford. Would they need her to do it then? Probably, except for her father’s extreme lack of trust in her; she was a hospital
piss-pan
maid and nothing more. Yeah, she definitely had to hire someone, an experienced homecare professional, a real
hard-ass
. Add another seven or eight grand to the pit.

She knew the coverage available to the uninsured at her hospital was difficult to acquire, and Jersey was even worse. Even Medicaid was out of reach for her folks because their current tax returns showed just over the maximum allowed to even qualify. They were in the gap, and although they’d be eligible a year from now when the restaurant was dead and gone, this year, now, she was just, well, extremely fucking screwed.

She remembered her savings account, which had approximately thirty grand in it, savings for an eventual down payment on a brownstone in Brooklyn.
Reset that
clock.

And with her few empty credit cards, maybe twenty thousand available on them, she’d take out cash advances.

She couldn’t ask her parents’ extended family; it would ruin their reputation, more important to Chang Park than his daughter’s life, she was certain.

She laughed out loud when she realized that she’d completely skipped her brother as a source of help. She had taught herself on a deep, subconscious level that Dane was an empty,
cold-hearted
stone, not worth skipping across a murky,
scum-covered
retention pond.