A man whose name does not matter, had many children with different women. He only spent time with the children he had with his wife. They had two daughters and a son together. The youngest daughter, Patty, required constant attention in her youth and as she got older. The man was not the most attentive father, not even to the children he lived with, so discipline of the child fell to the mother. Patty was a handful. She was the youngest and insisted on the attention of anyone near her. She needed their eyes and their words that told her how beautiful she was. She liked to feel like the favorite, the best of her siblings, and it was easy for her to assume that she was the best but that everyone else was too afraid to say so.
Most of the other children of the man never knew him well. They knew of him, but they cursed his name and gave reverence to their mothers for raising them despite the absence of the man. One of these children, a man named Daekwon, was among the oldest of the man’s children and he never had any interest in knowing the man who made him. He worked as a librarian at a public library in the very town where Patty and her siblings lived. They hardly knew of Daekwon. Patty’s older sister knew him, but not as her brother, he was just the very nice librarian who introduced her to excellent new books and ideas that she would have never encountered at her school. The first time Patty met him, she was extremely upset with her sister for making her come to the library. Patty depended on her sister for rides from school on days when she stayed late for practices, and Patty would always complain that her sister made her meet her at the library. On one such occasion, Patty met her sister at the checkout desk where she chatted up the librarian, Daekwon.
“Can we go?” Patty asked, inserting herself between the two.
Her sister frowned down at her and then forced a smile at the librarian. “Daekwon, this is my little sister. She’s not the most polite person in the world.”
“Daekwon!” Patty said loudly as she turned her attention to the man. “That’s seriously your name and you’re a librarian?”
“This is a library,” her sister reminded her.
Daekwon just smiled. “Yes that is seriously my name.”
Patty fell silent when she saw the man’s face. He looked a lot like their father. Her sister grabbed at her arm and forced her toward the exit. “We won’t bother you any more.”
Daekwon smiled and waved them away, and Patty would not take her eyes off the man. She wondered if he was related to their father somehow.
“Do you know that man?” Patty asked when they were in the car.
“Obviously I do, he works in the library,” her sister said as she drove them home.
“I mean, is he related to daddy? He looks just like him.”
Patty’s sister thought on it and then said, “I guess he does. I never really noticed it before.” She said it like a shrug. She knew the man that her father was and she had heard whispers that she had untold numbers of siblings all around town, possibly the country. She never cared too much about her father or the life he led outside of their family home.
“I’m gonna talk to mama about it,” Patty said despite her sister’s disinterest.
Patty did ask her mother about the librarian and she didn’t have a definitive answer.
“I’ve seen a lot people who could be your father’s children, but he won’t own up to it, he put all that in the past. If they look related, they probably are so be careful who you fall in love with.”
Patty took it as confirmation. She didn’t know how many half siblings she had, but she viewed them as a threat. It’s true her father was a largely absent figure in their lives, but he was their father. She didn’t want someone else getting the little attention that he had to spare.
Patty thought of ways to end her half brother, but she was never murderous by nature. She thought to enlist the help of her real siblings, but they would tell her that she was wasting her time and concern. It was stupid to think their father cared about any of them when he hustled away for drinks with friends after work and had every excuse in the book to avoid family time. But there was the matter of inheritance in the event of their father’s death.
Patty considered her options. She didn’t want to pay someone to beat up her maybe brother, that would cost money that she didn’t have. But maybe she could manipulate someone into becoming mad enough with the man that they would beat him up.
Patty went to the library the day after she met Daekwon for the first time. He was standing at the desk and he waved enthusiastically when he saw her.
“How are you? How’s your sister?”
Everything about his smile reminded Patty of her father. Before she could answer him, a mother with her two sons waved goodbye at Daekwon. The younger seemed broken hearted to leave him and it was obvious that many people appreciated the work that Daekwon did.
When the family was gone, Patty said to him, “Do you know who our father is?”
Daekwon shook his head, “I never knew my father. Can I help you find a book?”
“You never wondered who he is?”
Daekwon forced a smile and said as politely as he could manage, “That’s not really any of your business.”
This made Patty angry. How dare this man try and dismiss her, it was not something that she was used to.
“I need help with a research paper at school.” She was lying, but she knew that when her sister was working on research papers, she would spend time in the private collection rooms where they kept reference books and where a librarian had to be present to ensure that the books were respected and replaced in their proper place.
Her idea to ruin the librarian unfolded without any effort in Patty’s mind. She followed Daekwon to the research room, feigning a smile for anyone who noticed them. When they went inside, the door closed automatically and Daekwon went to work pulling books on some made up topic that Patty claimed she needed. As he found books and placed them on a table for Patty to consider, she would casually flip through, then make up a reason why it was not what she needed. He even leaned over her shoulder at one point to show her the sections in the books that were the most relevant. After about twenty minutes of this, Daekwon was frustrated, but resolved to maintain his professionalism.
“I think I pulled everything relevant to the Spanish-American war,” he explained calmly. “You can try the internet if none of these are sufficient.”
Patty smiled menacingly. “You like your job?” she asked him.
“I do, very much.”
“Is this your favorite part? Getting little girls by themselves.” She stood from her chair and approached him. Patty was about 15 years old at the time, but she knew what sex was. She had been made uncomfortable before by older men who ogled the burgeoning femininity of her body and she figured that all men were incapable of resisting a pair of breast and a soft butt. She put a hand on Daekwon’s chest and leaned close to him. She felt her breast brush against him.
Daekwon was instantly uncomfortable and he back away, still trying to be polite, but Patty was aggressive. When he pushed her away, he grabbed one of her breasts by accident and it was all that she needed.
“Please,” Daekwon struggled, but Patty ran from the room, feigning tears and covering her chest. Everyone in the library noticed and as Daekwon awkwardly left the research room, it seemed that all eyes were on him, already judging and making assumptions.
Things happened quickly after that. Patty told her mother a story about the librarian inappropriately touching her when they were alone in the research room and even though her sister knew Daekwon well, and the pettiness of her sister, even she believed it because she had never seen Patty so upset before.
Of course Daekwon refused the allegations to police, but he was arrested anyway. And though he was never convicted of any crime, his reputation was tarnished from then on. He lost his job at the library and he could never get another, no matter how far away he moved from his home town. It seemed that his new reputation followed him wherever he went.
Daekwon had never imagined another life for himself outside of a library, and the only job he could find was in a prison. He never told any of the prisoners why he left his last job, but even they seemed to find out, probably from a security guard who happened across the information, and soon that job became dangerous for him to continue.
Today, Daekwon works as a bagger at a grocery store. And he refuses intimate interaction with anyone.
Patty had banished him to a horrible fate, far away from her so he could not affect anything that mattered to her.
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