14: The Father's Bill

The first invoice arrived at the Pingjiang Road flat in the long flat manila envelope the Suzhou municipal hospital used for everything that was not condolence-related, hand-delivered by a brisk young accounts clerk in a navy windbreaker who handed it to my mother on the doorstep at ten past noon on a Saturday and asked her, with the small rote politeness of a clerk who had said the line three thousand times, to settle within ten business days.

My mother carried the envelope into the kitchen and laid it on the table beside the rice cooker and did not open it.

I had taken the early-morning train down from Hangzhou for the weekend. I was sitting on the small brown couch in the front room with a cup of weak tea on the side table and a back issue of the Suzhou newspaper my mother had saved for me on my lap and the small low ambient sound of the kettle on the stove and the radio in the kitchen turned on low. I had been pretending to read the back pages of the newspaper for thirty-five minutes. I had actually been counting the kettle's clicks, and the radio's slow shuffle through a pre-noon traffic update, and the small distant sound of my sister Xiaoyu in the back bedroom going through her school satchel with the grim concentration of a fourteen-year-old who had a Mandarin essay due Monday and had not started it.

The doorbell rang. My mother went. The clerk delivered. My mother came back. She put the envelope on the table.

She did not open it.

She turned to the rice cooker. She measured rice. She rinsed it. She measured water. She set the cooker. She did all of this without looking at the envelope, and the not-looking was the loudest thing in the kitchen for the next four minutes.

I stood up from the couch.

I went into the kitchen. I picked up the envelope. I opened it with the small kitchen scissors my mother had used for everything from chicken bones to electrical tape since the year I was seven.

The invoice was three pages.

The total at the bottom of the third page was eleven thousand four hundred and thirty yuan.

Inpatient: three nights, two-bed room, three thousand and change. Biopsy: one thousand eight hundred. Hepatology consult: nine hundred. Lab panels (full): two thousand seven hundred. Pharmaceutical (initial): one thousand six hundred. Imaging (CT, additional ultrasound): nine hundred. Administrative and supplies: a small graveyard of two-figure line items totaling roughly a thousand.

Eleven thousand four hundred and thirty yuan. Settled within ten business days.

I had two thousand four hundred and forty in my wallet from the small accumulating gully and Hollow income, a Tianyu wallet credit of two thousand more from yesterday afternoon's listing of Crescent Moon mastery scrolls (two of them, three hundred yuan each, listed at a discount to move quickly because I had needed the cash by today), and a savings account in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China with seventeen hundred and twenty yuan in it that I had been adding to since the start of summer break.

Six thousand one hundred and sixty yuan total.

Five thousand two hundred and seventy yuan short.

I folded the invoice in half. I folded it in half again. I tucked it into the inside pocket of my jacket where the notebook was — the To Save / To Bury notebook — and the notebook bumped softly against the folded paper as the paper settled into place.

My mother had set the rice cooker. She was now standing at the sink rinsing the kettle for fresh water. Her hands moved in the small steady motions of a woman who had decided, at a precise moment thirty seconds ago, to become composed.

I did not say anything.

I crossed to the sink. I took the kettle from her, gently, set it down. I put my hand on her shoulder. The shoulder was thin under the blue sweater. My mother was forty-four years old. She had been a primary-school teacher for fifteen years, until two years ago when the school had restructured and her contract had not been renewed and she had taken a part-time job at the Pingjiang Road tea house where she now worked four mornings a week wiping tables for fifteen yuan an hour and four cups of tea I knew she did not drink because she brought them home in a thermos for my father.

I did not let my hand stay on her shoulder long. She did not like to be visibly comforted. She was the kind of mother who stiffened, very slightly, under the touch of her grown son, because the touch told her that she had let herself look like a person who needed comforting, and she had spent forty-four years not being that person.

"Ma."

"Mn."

"I have it. Don't worry about it."

"You have eleven thousand four hundred and thirty yuan?"

"I have most of it. The rest is — incoming. Tonight or tomorrow."

She did not turn around. She set the rinsed kettle back on the burner. She did not light the burner. She looked, for a long moment, out of the kitchen window at the small back courtyard with the cement wall and the bicycle rack and the laundry line and the small tin basin where she had washed greens for fifteen years.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"This game."

"Yes."

"How much do they pay."

"It's not a salary. It's auction sales. Items the players buy from each other through the company's official market. It's — it can be a great deal of money for the right player. I am the right player."

She turned. Her eyes were her eyes. They had the small particular set she wore when she was deciding whether to ask the next question or not. She had a great many questions, all afternoon, that she would not ask. I knew them all. I had heard her not-ask them in old timeline; I knew, for instance, that she would not ask whether the game was safe, or whether it would interfere with my schoolwork, or whether it was the kind of game where unkind people might try to take advantage of a freshman. She would not ask any of these because to ask any of these would be to admit she did not know who her son had become in the last week and a half, and she did not, in old timeline, ever want to admit that.

She asked, instead, "Are you sleeping."

"Some."

"Some is not enough."

"More than some, soon. I'm finding the rhythm."

"Mn."

She turned and lit the burner.

The rice cooker began its small click-click. The kettle began its slow climb. I went back into the front room. I picked up the cup of weak tea. The tea was cold. I drank it anyway.

***

After lunch — pickled cabbage, a small dish of cold tofu with sesame oil, and the same pork ribs my mother had promised on the phone last Sunday and had clearly bought half a portion of — Xiaoyu sat across the small front-room coffee table from me with her chin on her hand and the back of a Mandarin essay's first paragraph in her other hand.

"Ge."

"Mn."

"This is bad."

"Show me."

She handed it over. The essay was on a prompt I remembered from old timeline because I had helped her with it then too — *describe a person who has changed in a way you did not expect, and what the change taught you.* She had written half a paragraph about her best friend at school, the one with the long ponytail who had been a quiet bookish girl until last spring when she had unexpectedly joined the dance team. The half-paragraph had mentioned the dance team three times and the change once.

I read it. I handed it back.

"It is bad."

"Ge!"

"You are writing about the wrong change."

"What's the right change."

I lowered my voice. Out of habit. The radio in the kitchen was on. My mother was washing dishes. My father was, this Saturday, still in the hospital — he would come home Monday morning and would be on outpatient observation for the next two weeks. He was not in the flat. The flat was only my mother and Xiaoyu and me.

"The right change," I said, "is the one that hurts you to write about. If a change isn't worth writing about, you would not have to be assigned to write about it. The teacher wants to see you wrestle with something. Your friend on the dance team is not something. You are not going to wrestle with anything writing about your friend on the dance team. Pick a different person."

"Like who."

"Like Pa."

She did not answer immediately. She looked down at the essay paper. Her fourteen-year-old face had the same small precise set my mother's face had at the kitchen window, the same not-asking. She had been told, last week, that her father was in the hospital. She had not been told, in any detail, what for. She had not asked. She had been busy, all week, the way fourteen-year-old top-of-her-class girls were busy when they were trying not to ask the question they did not want to be told the answer to.

I waited.

She said, very quietly, "Ge, I don't know how to write about him."

"I know. That is why it is the right change to write about. Start with one small thing. The way his cough sounds different. The way he sits in the armchair now versus how he sat in it last summer. One small thing. Build the paragraph from the small thing."

"All right."

"And Xiaoyu."

"Mn?"

"You don't have to be brave about it in the essay. The teacher does not need you to be brave. The teacher needs you to be honest. *Honest* is not the same as *upset*. You can be honest and also not be upset. But you cannot be brave and also be honest. Pick honest."

She looked at me for a long beat. The fourteen-year-old face that I had spent five years not seeing in old timeline because I had been in a helmet two cities away looked back at me across the small front-room coffee table in her grade-eight school sweater with the small embroidered school crest at the chest, with her chin on her hand, with her hair in two short ponytails that she had insisted on starting to wear flat-against-her-head the day she turned fourteen and that my mother had cried about for twenty minutes in the kitchen the morning of her birthday because the two short ponytails were the haircut my mother had worn at fourteen and Xiaoyu had not known.

"Ge."

"Mn."

"You're different too."

I held her eyes.

"Mn."

"You came home this weekend."

"I'll come home next weekend."

"You don't usually come home in September."

"I do this year."

She watched me for a moment longer.

"Are you all right."

"Yes."

"Are you really all right."

"Yes."

"Will you tell me if you aren't."

I did not answer immediately.

"Yes," I said.

She nodded. She picked up the essay paper. She took it to the corner desk by the window — the small desk with the wobbling left leg my father had been meaning to fix for two years — and sat down with the back of a pencil in her teeth and crossed out the first paragraph with a single steady line.

I sat on the couch and watched her start over.

***

I left for the train at four. My mother walked me to the door. She did not put on her shoes; she stood in her house slippers on the threshold. The afternoon light came in through the open door across the small foyer. My sister, in the front room, was bent over the desk writing.

My mother handed me a small enamel-coated thermos.

"Pork rib soup. For the train."

"You did not need to."

"You did not eat enough at lunch. You will eat the soup on the train."

"Yes, Ma."

She watched me for a moment. Her face had the small particular set again. She was, I knew, deciding whether to say a thing.

She said it.

"Cangtian."

"Mn."

"I am very glad," she said, "that you are taking care of us. I want you to know that I see it."

I did not move for a heartbeat. I had not expected the line. My mother, in old timeline, had never said anything close to that line in any of the three or four months in old timeline when the small ground beneath her had been collapsing without my noticing. She had said other things. She had not said this.

I said, "Ma, you don't have to—"

"I see it. I am only telling you. Go." She made a small shooing motion with the back of her hand. "Catch the train. Eat the soup."

I went.

At the corner of Pingjiang Road, twenty meters from the door, two arms came around me from behind without warning. The arms were the precise length and the precise pressure of a fourteen-year-old's arms when they were applied for the maximum-deniability double-second hug.

"Bye, ge."

"Bye, Xiaoyu."

She let go. She ran back toward the door without looking back. She had a fold of money, two folded one-hundred-yuan notes, sticking very visibly out of the breast pocket of her school sweater that she was, very obviously, going to deny knowing about when she got back to her desk and discovered it had been planted there. I had planted it during lunch when I had reached past her to take a piece of tofu.

She would find it. She would look at it. She would not say anything to my mother. She would put it in the small box at the back of her desk drawer that I knew about because she had thought, all of my old timeline, that I had not known about it. She would save it for the school book fair next month.

I caught the train.

On the train I sat by the window and ate the pork rib soup out of the enamel thermos with the small plastic spoon. The soup was hot. The spoon was the spoon Xiaoyu had used at six years old, which my mother had kept and which she gave to me with the thermos every time I went back to Hangzhou. I ate it slowly. I watched the late afternoon flatten out across the rice fields between Suzhou and Hangzhou into long pale gold panels.

I took the folded invoice out of my jacket pocket. I unfolded it. I refolded it the other way. I tucked it into the back of the To Save / To Bury notebook.

The notebook had a new line. I added the line in pencil between *To Save: Mother* and *To Save: Father*, very small.

*Eleven thousand four hundred and thirty by Tuesday.*

I closed the notebook.

The train passed through a small town whose name I did not see clearly. The setting sun caught a window in a flat above a noodle shop and turned it briefly orange.

I closed my eyes.

I had four days.