บท 12: Chapter 12: Not a Good Pastry
Clouds had veiled the moon.
Yu Jingting halted in his tracks, the oppressive darkness around them, Suizi's suppressed statements now the only sound.
"Wang Fenfang is right, I have a curse in my fate; my birth chart... it's just not good."
"You're lucky you weren't born ten years earlier."
"Huh?"
"Ten years earlier, all those baseless thoughts in your head would have landed you in a shed. We should believe in atheism."
"..." Coming from a son who practiced shamanism, those words were utterly unconvincing.
"Ever since my mother gave birth to me, she's never been happy, and misfortune always seems to follow those around me. My father had someone calculate my fortune, and they said my life is tough on my family."
Suizi had put on a brave face at the Chen family's home, but Wang Fenfang's words "a curse in her fate" indeed struck a nerve.
"Smashing his window is letting him off too easy—come on, let's smash the back yard windows too." Yu Jingting turned, intending to head back.
"Stop messing around! I'm trying to talk to you about something serious!" Suizi punched him lightly.
"I'm also talking about something serious! Why doesn't he ask our family's old lady to do the calculation? Before we got our marriage certificate, she calculated for you, saying you would bring prosperity to your husband, bear talented sons and beautiful, intelligent daughters, and whoever married you would be sure to prosper."
"But our mom doesn't really know how to do that—"
"If our mom can't calculate, does that make the person your awful father consulted any better? None of it's real, why not choose to believe the pleasant lies? With your dad's drinking habits, who could be happy living with him? I'm different, though. Live with me and see, you'll definitely be happy every day."
He didn't miss a chance to step on others while blowing his own trumpet.
"But there's truth to our chickens and ducks hardly laying any eggs, and while others' pigs bear lots of piglets, ours gives birth to just one."
A sow could give birth to 5-15 piglets at once, so by comparison, Suizi felt she might truly be cursed.
"Promise you won't hit me, and that you'll let me climb onto the kang, and I'll tell you a secret."
"What is it?"
Yu Jingting made up his mind, though reluctantly.
He had wanted this matter to die in his gut. His image in Suizi's heart was already poor; confessing what he had done would add insult to injury.
But seeing her struggle so much, he couldn't bear to let her be miserable any longer, and could only reveal the painful truth.
"Your chickens and ducks didn't stop laying eggs; it was me who took them."
"???"
"You can't call it stealing if it was taken," he reasoned. Taking without permission is stealing, but if the mother-in-law allows it, isn't it just taking?
Chen Kaide was always borrowing money to drink heavily and pass out everywhere. Begrudging and lazy, whatever eggs he collected hardly ever made their way to Suizi and her mother. Selling those eggs behind her mother-in-law's back could at least save up some living expenses for Suizi.
"In any case, you are definitely not someone who brings misfortune to your family. Since you married into our family, our chickens lay eggs both morning and evening. You absolutely bring prosperity to your husband." A chicken that lays two eggs a day, who has that!
"Are the twice daily eggs not because you scared the chickens into an abnormal physiological state by kicking around their coop? That's not important—when did you start taking eggs from my family?"
"I take them when the chickens lay them in the daytime, and at night if they lay at night. After your family turns out the lights, and the fence isn't high, I can easily climb over."
When it came to stealing eggs, he'd even developed a whole theory of it.
"You have to observe their cycle: if you collect the eggs very early, then over the following days, the laying time will gradually shift until it reaches evening. Then, you have to wait a while before they can lay again."
This sophisticated theory of egg theft left Suizi speechless.
"Why don't the dogs bark?"
"Dare they?"
A dog happened to pass by. Yu Jingting squinted—did it look like Li Youcai's dog?
He picked up a stone and threw it, demonstrating to her how he made all the dogs in the village fear him.
The dog yelped and ran away with its tail between its legs.
Suizi was shocked into silence.
The cases of the chickens and the dog were solved, just the pigs were left.
After a long while.
"What about the piglets from our family?" They couldn't have been stolen and sold by him too, could they?
"What piglets? What do they look like?"
Seeing him hem and haw made Suizi suspicious.
"Do you know what's really going on?"
"No idea." He wasn't the disloyal type—betraying his mother-in-law was something he couldn't do, not even if you killed him.
"Let me think for a second."
The day the sow gave birth to piglets, Chen Kaide was drunk as a skunk, and she had been sent to stay with her grandmother. Her mother was the midwife.
It was quite possible that her mother had taken the piglets to sell, keeping the money for herself.
How would piglets survive without their mother's milk? Surely another sow must be nursing them.
"I'll ask around to see whose pigs had litters around the same time as ours." The focus would be on his family, because he seemed so guilty.
A bead of cold sweat formed on Yu Jingting's forehead.
"I can tolerate a few stolen eggs, but stealing my piglets is absolutely unacceptable."
"It really wasn't me!"
"Then who was it?"
"Ah! Wife, look, why is the moon so bright tonight?" Yu Jingting pointed at the obscured moon and spouted nonsense.
"Are you close with my mom? She lets you steal eggs?" asked the most educated woman in Yang Village, brimming with wisdom.
"Let's go, let's go, let's hurry home—I'm starving!"
Yu Jingting, afraid she would keep questioning him, carried her on his back and hurried home.
She asked him to put her down several times, but he refused; eventually, she stopped struggling.
At first, Yu Jingting was on guard for questions about the piglets, but Suizi only asked about other things.
"Do you prefer Corn Cakes or steamed buns?"
"White Steamed Buns." He liked everything, whether edible or not.
Thinking of that part of her which he couldn't eat but could only nibble, Yu Jingting licked his lips.
He loved it too much.
"Where would I get white flour from for you?"
"It's naturally white, almost like flour," he muttered under his breath, mainly because it was tender.
"Then I'll make you Cornmeal Buns tomorrow." Essentially, round steamed buns.
For the moment, Suizi still didn't understand the shamelessness in his double entendres.
Yu Jingting's spirits ballooned; he was overjoyed.
It was rare for his wife to want to understand him; she asked, and he answered everything.
Carrying her on his back, their back-and-forth made them look just like a newlywed couple with a harmonious relationship.
Li Youcai stood in the courtyard, his heart thumping wildly.
That rascal from the Yu Family was making a commotion, taking Suizi back to her mother's house. He didn't dare join the other villagers in watching the excitement, fearing it would draw fire to himself and arouse suspicion.
Wouldn't Lun Lamei sell him out?
Li Youcai was worried when his big yellow dog returned home limping and with its tail between its legs.
The dog stood at the gate and barked down the street; following the sound, Li Youcai looked over.
Yu Jingting was carrying Suizi on the moonlit path; no matter what they were saying, from such a distance, he could hear that young thug's arrogant laughter.
Li Youcai spat forcefully on the ground.
"Enjoy your strut for now; sooner or later, Suizi will dump you." He had to think carefully about how to deal with Lun Lamei and not let her drag him down.
As they neared home, Suizi had nearly finished asking about his preferences when she changed the subject.
"Has the price of pork gone up?"
"You want to eat some? Tomorrow I'll sell some sewing needles and buy it for you." The man, hopelessly lost in the sea of his wife's tenderness, couldn't extricate himself.
"If the price of pork has gone up, then the price of stealing piglets must be high too, right? If we sold our piglets at today's prices, they'd fetch a good sum, wouldn't they? We took a loss back then, didn't we?"
"Indeed, more than ten pounds each and only sold for four yuan—dammit!" He had let his guard down!
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