Chapter 51

Chapter 51

Chapter 51 Elementary School Debut Ceremony (4)

At 7:10 in the morning, my eyes opened on their own before the alarm even rang.

It was thanks to getting up early lately to send Lia off to school.

Had it been about a month?

Of course, Lia was mature for her age, so getting her ready for school was unbelievably easy.

She always woke up before me, washed herself, and changed her clothes without any help.

All I had to do was prepare breakfast.

Even that was often toast or rice with soy sauce and eggs, something I could make in five minutes under the excuse of having a simple breakfast.

The most troublesome part was taking her to school.

Navigating the congested roads during rush hour while finding a safe place to stop close to the school entrance was quite difficult. After all, my competitors were practically every parent at the school.

But now even taking her to school had become something I no longer needed to worry about.

Because a school bus service had started. And its route passed directly in front of our house.

Now, sending Lia to school simply meant eating breakfast, enjoying a cup of coffee, and watching her board the bus.

At first, I hadn't realized what a blessing this entire arrangement was.

Don't they say happiness is relative?

Sometimes you have to witness other people's misfortunes to realize how fortunate you are.

And I had begun witnessing those misfortunes every morning.

Ever since I was invited to the group chat for the parents of Class One, First Grade.

「Subin's Mom: (Photo)

Subin's Mom: Good grief, I sent him to his room to change clothes, and he was sleeping on his bed! This is driving me crazy!

Siha's Mom: Apparently, Siha left her indoor shoes on the school playground. She doesn't even remember where she left them. Do you think we'll be able to find them?

Doyun's Mom: I heard the cleaning staff usually put everything they find in the lost-and-found.

Siha's Mom: I'll go check right away. Thank you!

Bora's Mom: My daughter keeps crying because she doesn't want to go to school today. I want to cry too! T_T

...」

There were twenty people in the group chat.

Every morning, an average of three or four incidents, large and small, erupted in the chat.

That meant nearly twenty percent of the parents in a single class experienced some sort of school-morning disaster every day. Like Russian roulette, they could only hope it wouldn't be their turn this time.

Raising a child other than Lia in South Korea apparently required that level of resolve.

Of course, although I had more free time than other parents, there was now one additional task to attend to besides Lia's school routine.

Construction on our coffeehouse extension had finally begun.

"Hey, you lot! Don't you want to work? We're supposed to start at seven, so what are you doing dragging yourselves in at ten past? What? Your car broke down? Good grief, I can smell the liquor on your breath from all the way over here, and you're telling me your car broke down?"

"Oh, quit your nagging and get everyone working. Yongman said we had to take special care with this place."

Right on cue, I heard the voices of the men who had come to work outside.

I dragged my stiff body downstairs to put some water on for coffee.

"Good morning!"

"You could've slept longer today. Why are you up so early?"

"My eyes opened all by themselves!"

-Whiiiiistle.

"You've already put the water on."

"Hehe."

The loud whistle coming from the large-capacity kettle revealed what Lia had been doing since waking up early.

"It's dangerous, so I'll do it next time. All right?"

"Yes!"

I covered a tray with paper cups instead of glass cups.

Then, once the strong coffee I'd prepared in each cup had dissolved completely, I picked up the tray and headed toward the construction site.

The site was right beside our coffeehouse building, but carrying a tray there required quite a long detour.

That was because of that rascal Sani, who kept showing up every day despite my request that he stay away until construction was finished, lest someone discover him again.

Honestly, he was never any help.

Grumbling about Sani in my head, I arrived at the site to find work already in full swing.

"Please have some coffee before you continue."

"Oh, goodness, you didn't have to bring this again. Worker Choi! Call everyone over for some coffee! The property owner brought it for us."

"Thank you kindly. I'm telling you, the coffee here tastes much better than the stuff Mr. Park used to make, and he even ran a café before it went under."

Serving the construction workers a cup of coffee every morning was my way of thanking them for willingly taking on such a demanding project.

It also gave me a chance to hear Worker Choi's proud reports on their progress.

"Just look at this floor. The boss even paid the ready-mix driver extra for washing the truck so he'd bring us a properly thick batch of concrete. That's why we poured it so solid. At another site, they'd bring watery concrete, and no matter how well you worked it with a vibrator, it'd crumble once it hardened. But here, we're overseeing every last detail ourselves."

"Thank you for being so thorough."

"No need to thank me! It's not just anyone we're doing this for. Yongman asked us again and again to do a proper job, so of course we've got to build it well."

I couldn't properly understand nearly half of what he said.

Judging from the context, I simply assumed they were building it more sturdily than they would an ordinary house.

"Oh, by the way. Did Yongman leave safely?"

"Yes, I saw him off myself. He really didn't want to go."

"I just don't understand why he has to go all the way to Mongolia when he could stay here in Korea. Has he got a sweetheart waiting for him over there or something?"

"Haha, who knows?"

The amount of time Yongman had been permitted to stay wasn't particularly long.

He'd wanted to remain until construction was finished, but since he'd only been allowed to come along under the pretext of helping carry the luggage, I eventually put him back in the car and sent him home a week later.

The expression on his face as he returned to the Celestial Realm was so much like that of a prisoner being dragged off to a detention camp that I almost wondered whether sending him there had been a mistake.

"If you're that curious, why don't you write him a letter? The property owner here said he'd mail it for us."

"Forget it! What's with writing letters? That's embarrassing. Of all places, that fellow had to go somewhere his phone doesn't even get a signal. He's making everyone worry. Anyway, thanks for the coffee. We'll throw the cups away ourselves, so you should head back inside, sir. It's hot out here."

"Then I'll leave everything in your hands."

When I returned with the empty tray, Lia had already finished getting ready for school.

"I haven't even made breakfast yet. Have you already changed?"

"The bus might come early."

Had she somehow anticipated that missing the bus would mean the start of a hellish race?

Lia had made every possible preparation for her first bus ride.

"Then shall we have breakfast quickly? How about rice balls?"

"Yes! I want to help too!"

"No, I'll have them ready in no time, so just sit down."

They were only rice balls.

An incredibly simple dish requiring nothing more than tuna, mayonnaise, and shredded seaweed.

And there happened to be exactly two servings of leftover rice from yesterday.

Now all I had to do was mix everything together...

-Jingle.

"We're here!"

"Hmph, they said there'd be construction, but it's terribly chaotic outside."

"We're here too! Our shamanic ritual finished a little early today."

"That's because you tricked them into thinking a ritual to ward off bad luck loses its effectiveness if it goes on too long."

"Hey, I didn't trick anyone!"

No wonder the amount of rice had seemed just right.

Resigning myself to the commotion outside, I took the rice out of the cooker and began washing another batch.

...No, wait a minute! Today wasn't the weekend.

And since Lia was going to school now, they'd long since lost their excuse of coming to look after her.

"Why have you all come so early when the coffeehouse isn't even open yet?"

"Ahem."

"Oh my, I must have gotten the time wrong."

"I've always come here even when the coffeehouse wasn't open!"

They each offered plausible excuses, but none would even meet my eyes.

That was because they were all busy taking photographs of Lia wearing her schoolbag.

-Click. Click.

"Lift your bag a little higher."

"Like this?"

"That's right! Oh, where's your indoor-shoe bag?"

"I leave my indoor shoes at school!"

"What a shame! You need that for the complete look."

That was it.

Since I'd taken Lia to school in the mornings and Serin's mother had brought her home every afternoon, none of them had actually seen Lia setting off for school.

That was why they'd all gathered here on the first day of the school bus service.

"I sent you all the pictures from the entrance ceremony. Why did you come all this way so early in the morning to take more?"

"You call those photographs? You took them carelessly with that ancient phone of yours. There wasn't a single decent one, tsk."

Their long-awaited photo session continued through the delayed breakfast, caused by the late-arriving uninvited guests, until Lia barely managed to board the school bus on time.

"I'm off to school!"

"Have a good day."

"Be careful out there!"

And so the yellow school bus drove away along the road.

-KaTalk.

A photograph arrived.

It was a picture Lia had taken.

The photograph showed all of us waving toward her from outside the bus.

"Oh my!"

"Heh heh. Somehow, Lia takes better photographs than you."

"Waaaaah! I'm not in the picture!"

"That's because you can't use shapeshifting arts, you rascal! Hey! Stop wiping your snot on my clothes!"

For once, it was a boisterous morning not unlike those experienced by the other parents in the group chat.

"But why does the weather have to be like this today? It's so overcast with all those dark clouds."

"Exactly. It's been sunny all week."

The sky was so thick with dark clouds that even the photograph had come out dim.

But there hadn't been any forecast of rain.

_______________

"Ahem. Chief Son, which black bean noodle restaurants are good these days?"

"Do you mean Chinese restaurants, ma'am?"

"No, not fancy restaurants. You know, places that make their own deliveries and serve fried eggs on top of their gan-jjajang."

"I'll look into it."

"Please do. Yesterday, I watched some MeTube videos and visited a place myself, but it really wasn't any good. If it's someone's first time eating black bean noodles, shouldn't they start with a place that gets the basics right?"

Chief Son struggled to suppress the smile forming at the corners of his mouth at the CEO's sudden request to find a black bean noodle restaurant.

Ordinarily, the CEO was a person thoroughly convinced of her own superiority.

She wasn't especially rude to others or openly arrogant, but the subtle way she looked down on people was particularly noticeable whenever she spoke with other parents.

Although her family wasn't wealthy enough to be called a chaebol household, she'd received financial support from her well-to-do parents to study at Harvard. She'd then founded an IT company and rapidly developed it into a strong small-to-medium-sized enterprise with annual revenue exceeding twenty billion won.

It was a remarkable achievement made possible by both her background and her abilities.

That was why invisible distinctions of class and status had always existed in her eyes.

Whether someone's standing came from wealth inherited at birth or a position earned through sheer ability made no difference.

But recently, ever since a certain child had begun riding in the car frequently, the CEO's attitude had changed completely.

'A child from a single-parent household living in a coffeehouse that looks like a construction site. She meets every condition the CEO would normally despise in a friend for her daughter, yet she likes the girl so much.'

She'd even taken the child to eat at a large supermarket instead of an upscale restaurant, and on one occasion, she'd secretly practiced playing gonggi on the back seat.

But the greatest change of all was her manner of speaking, which now conveyed requests and gratitude rather than commands.

That applied even when she spoke to him, someone who held the grand title of chief secretary but was effectively nothing more than her chauffeur.

And it applied when calls came from other employees, as one did now.

"Yes, this is Jung Sohyeon, CEO of SL Software."

(CEO, we have a serious problem!)

"What happened?"

(The Daechun Group Audit Department contacted us. They said there are some matters they need to verify, and they're on their way to the company right now!)

"C-Chief Son..."

"I'll hurry."