Fang Ruxiang didn’t ask why. She just took good care of Jiang Youyou. Because you couldn’t inquire into something for too many details and it would be useless to inquire.
The pregnant Jiang Youyou didn’t have many hobbies. If there was, there was the only one: to have blueberry tarts. She still remember the wish she once made in the coffee house:
“My future husband must do things like this man-accompany the pregnant me going shopping, help me with the milk powder tins she bought, take care of me, buy me the blueberry tarts I like best even if it was midnight.”
Jiang Youyou had made a phone call to Pu Yuanhui and it was received by a woman who said, “My husband has gone to his shop and he forgot to carry his cell phone with him. What are you calling him for? And who are you?”
Jiang Youyou hung up.
Well, it turned out that he had got married. But why should he give me a diamond ring and the diamond should be so big?” Jiang Youyou didn’t think she the kind of person who would entangle with others, but she went around Shenzhen looking for Pu Yuanhui. She paid a visit to Xu Nuo and had Luo Junchang’s friend help her to get Pu Yuanhui’s address.
Pu Yuanhui gradually began to put on weight after he got married. He didn’t return to the gang, but just restarted his home appliance shop. The shopkeeper’s wife was a shrewish and stout woman of thirty-eight, ten years younger than Pu Yuanhui.
The shopkeeper’s wife often said to the neighbors, “It’s his good fortune I’m willing to marry him. He’s robbing the cradle.”
When Pu Yuanhui was tidying away the odds and ends on the counter, he saw a woman with a big belly standing across the road.
Mrs. Pu came over. Perhaps she thought her husband was really very handsome, she hugged him from behind. She also had a big belly. It was really very hard for a woman of older maternal age.
Jiang Youyou turned round and left, ’cause she saw Pu Yuanhui turned away.
Do you still remember? In this noisy city, at that noisy night, those devils were devouring me with threatening gestures. The hardship of the live tortured me and I was knocked down. I was not afraid, even if I was bleeding, because I had seen the way to the nether world and my body was then only a lifeless body.
However, I saw you then, appearing like the god. Your light covered me to drive my fear and loneliness away for me. The hand you stretched out to me, I took hold, and I didn’t want to let go of it.
Do you forget me? Or is it that I don’t want to forget you? Your turning, does it mean your evasion or is it because you don’t have the heart to hurt me? You will think of me at midnight later, although I had only a very small but unyielding soul.
When Pu Yuanhui looked back with tears running down his face, there was no sign of her on the opposite road.
When Jiang Youyou was giving birth to her baby, Li le acted as a fake husband. He was very happy ’cause he had the name “Le”, in the meaning of “Happiness”. The reason he felt happy was because he couldn’t see, unable to see the coming of the happiness referred to his inability to see the turning-away of the happiness.
That scream of pain made the hearts of almost all the people in the delivery room tremble.
Jiang Youyou felt-pain, the desperate pain, coming out of her throat, accompanied by the cries of a newborn baby.
The welfare institution had another abandoned baby. It was a boy, with an especially big head, extremely weak bones and particularly beautiful fingers.
Jiang Youyou had been missing for a long time. No one could find her. Fang Ruxiang thought she was probably out looking for a job.
It was a fine day in October, the autumn breeze sent the cool everywhere and the autumn sun was shining brightly. Looking at the Big Head baby crawling on the ground, Fang Ruxiang couldn’t help playing with it, “Call me ‘Granny’.”
And the sound the Big Head baby uttered was “Yiyi Yaya” and “Woof, woof.”
Three years passed. No one would adopt the miserable child. Fang Ruxiang was overcome by great sorrow.
There was a piece of news on TV: “In the morning the thirteenth, there was a corpse of a woman floating on the river near the bridge in our city. The corpse was highly decomposed and emitting stinks, so it can be estimated that she has been dead for a relatively long time. At about twelve, the reporter saw it at the scene that the yellow white female corpse lay with her back up in the grass on the bank of the river, stinking to high heaven, surrounded by flying flies. On seeing the corpse, one passing-by lady can’t help vomiting on the spot. Not very long ago the firemen arrived at the scene and salvaged the corpse ashore at about eleven. The policemen also arrived quickly and set up a police cordon. At present, the case is under further investigation.”
The Big Head baby crawled near the TV set with his head up looking up and uttering, “Yiyi Yaya, Mum Mum.”
Fang Ruxiang patted him on his big head, “What are you muttering for? It isn’t your mum.”
A sudden breeze came, blew the leaves off from the ginkgo tree in the yard. The leaves fluttered like butterflies. Although their lives were short, they were beautiful, lying quietly in the mud, recall their once fresh and lively season.