bow

Chapter 20

When Zhong Shuli arrived in Shuyang, the sun had already set behind the brick wall next to the plain clouds, and the moss glowed moistly from the fading rock cracks, and the whole town was immersed in a long lunch break.The yellowish three-storey small western-style building stands among the buildings of uneven height, and the brass and iron doors downstairs are open, revealing several wooden tables and benches on the first floor.

Zhong Yu sat on a table by the door, skillfully rolling out dough to prepare wonton wrappers. When he saw his son who had stepped across the threshold, he raised his head and smiled, put the flour back into the freezer, and brought out a rich vegetable basket, saying : "It's so early. What kind of food do you want to eat today?"

He looked at his mother who was as stagnant as a small town, and said: "Mom, I'm back." He immediately added: "If you want to eat spicy chicken, boiled fish, potato shreds, fried pork with fungus, anything, you Let's see and do it."

When the sky just started to darken, Mother Zhong's food was already intertwined with the smell of food from the neighbors, melting into the orange-red sunset.Zhong Yu handed him a bowl of custard, and said, "Go, send it to Mrs. Chen's little grandson."

Zhong Shuli carefully walked out the door with the bowl in his hand, chatted with Mrs. Chen for a few words before leaving, and walked home slowly.After walking a few steps, I saw a person standing at the door. The person heard footsteps and turned around to look at him.

"Dad..." The next sentence choked in his throat and turned into: "Mr. Gao, may I ask why you are here?"

Gao Zhan was not infected by his son's embarrassment, but walked towards him and said, "Shu Li, after so long, are you still angry with me?"

Zhong Shuli watched his figure magnify step by step, the forehead lines and crow's feet seemed to be carved out by a knife, the silver hair on the temples shone occasionally in the humid night, and the hunched forward posture became more and more embarrassing , is no different from any elderly man who has fallen into the street.The other party patted his arms and said, "I'm sorry, Dad was wrong, can you forgive me?"

He reached out and rubbed his cheeks, fearing that he would not be able to hold back his emotions, he took a deep breath: "Dad, I miss you very much."

When the father and son entered the house, Zhong Yu just looked up while preparing the bowls and chopsticks, and didn't say anything.The three of them sat at the same table as if nothing had happened, and the mother served the family a meal with her own hands. Everyone took the meal as a matter of course and swallowed the grievances and boredom of the day.

Father picked up a few chopsticks and praised a few dishes. Mother looked calm and explained the secret to making this dish well. Finally, she said: "You remember it, and she can cook it for you in the future."

As if Gao Zhan didn't hear this sentence, he put a chicken leg in Zhong Shuli's bowl: "The chicken leg made by your mother is always too bland, so you didn't like to eat it when you were young. In fact, the chicken is better if the taste is lighter. Fresh and tender, try again."

Zhong Shuli buried his head in delivering the rice to his mouth, feeling his cheeks became more sour, and the rice in his mouth tasted a bit bitter, only then did he realize that his tears had overflowed.Faced with such a scene, a ten-year-old child has no other choice but to cry, and it is still the same if replaced by a 30-year-old adult.

After the meal, Mother Zhong got up and put away the bowls and chopsticks. After draining the water, she turned on a second-hand bulky TV and tuned to the news channel.Listening to the sound of the water and the TV, Gao Zhan felt his weak courage being gradually eroded, but he still held on to the last bit of hope and said, "Yu'er, come back with me."

Zhong Yu lived here for more than three years. When he first came back, he only knew his relatives when he was young. The ancestral house had been sold long ago, so he bought this small western-style building with his years of savings.Originally, he only planned to live in this room, but in the end he couldn't stand the empty days, so he took this place as a place to live, and achieved self-sufficiency by selling wontons.Hearing these words now, he could only turn his head away from the sink, frown and smile.

Zhong Yu didn't show any surprise at the visit of the uninvited guest Lu Shijun the next day. Instead, he happily turned on the computer and showed them Edward's photos and information.

Zhong Shuli glanced at the blond man standing among the flowers and plants on the screen, turned his head away, and said dissatisfiedly: "How can I judge whether this person is good or bad based on just a photo, what is his home address, and who are his relatives at home?" , what kind of work do you do?"

"Mr. Zhong, I knew you loved checking your household registration so much. I should have advised you to take the civil service exam after graduation." Mother Zhong shook her head.

"Auntie, you can't let him be a public official. If he becomes a customs officer and shuts Edward away if he doesn't agree with him, then it will be a mystery for you to meet."

When Zhong's mother left to cook, Zhong Shuli quickly climbed over the wall on the computer, and Lu Shijun watched from the side, remembering the past when his parents deciphered his password to spy on privacy when he was a child, a weak smile floated on his face .

"You and your mother have a really strong relationship." Lu Shijun commented, he is also the only child in the family, and occasionally he would talk to his parents about things that are up and down, but not so plainly.

Zhong Shuli said: "Look at me now that I like to play some trivial jokes with my mother. In fact, our mother and son didn't talk so much before. My family is a combination of a loving father and a strict mother. My mother gave up for marriage. After finishing my studies, I have always had high expectations for me. When I returned to China to study in high school, because I couldn’t keep up with mathematics, the two of them quarreled every day while tutoring. Although I could check the math papers three times after answering them back then, I always refused to accept me. Mother, she resolutely applied to a British school."

"Isn't your mother a little disappointed?"

"Maybe. Later, my father insisted on letting me come back. I don't know if he really wanted me to familiarize myself with the domestic environment earlier, or it was my mother's intention. However, the relationship between the two eased a lot after that. After those things happened, my mother was depressed all day long. Widow Huan, I was afraid that it would be bad for her to continue like this, so I tried my best to make stereotypes, and ended up in this state of neither big nor small."

After dinner, Zhong Shuli was sent by his mother to deliver homemade tortoise jelly to the neighbors in an alley, while Lu Shijun helped Zhong's mother clean up the dishes.

Zhong Yudao: "Shijun, speaking of it, this is the first time I've seen you in three years. I heard that you went abroad for further studies, when did you return?"

"It's been almost a year since I returned to China, and I only met Zhong Shuli two months ago."

"Together?"

Lu Shijun was taken aback for a moment, but she didn't expect Mother Zhong to ask such a straightforward question, and after thinking for a long time, she replied, "We live together."

Mother Zhong put away her gloves, turned off the faucet, and stood there looking at him: "I won't interfere with his freedom of love like Xiao Li did, but as his mother, can I ask you not to give up on him so easily?"

He remembered that he was in the dark, with rubble and rubble within his reach. There was a cold steel pipe next to his head, which was poking down to the deeper ground. His consciousness was hazy, and he heard the roar from the steel pipe: "Consciousness!" Jun, Lu Shijun, where are you, hold on. Shijun, Lu Shijun—”

"It's so noisy, I heard it, it's so noisy." He murmured in his heart.

He looked back at Mother Zhong: "Auntie, how did you know what happened between us?"

"When I borrowed your house to leave that day, I was just a little puzzled, and I didn't take it to heart. Until..." Mother Zhong lowered her head suddenly, as if trying to suppress the emotion that was pouring out of her chest.

He continued: "Until after the earthquake, Gao Jing went bankrupt, and he had nowhere to go back to me. He didn't tell me what happened, but his mental state was extremely tense, and he was in trouble all day long. Insomnia. I was too careless at the time, watching him talk to me every day, looking for odd jobs day and night to make money, if it wasn’t for cleaning one day and seeing two or three empty cans of sleeping pills, I really never thought about it He nearly collapsed."

"Post-traumatic stress syndrome?" He remembered that Qiao Yun had mentioned this term to himself.

"Yes, during those six months he often had nightmares, and sometimes he would call out your name."

Two people who comfort each other and use each other have been honed by time to look like they fit together.It's just that they are used to each other's existence and communication, so when they think of the future, they feel a little uncomfortable due to inertia. He often comforts himself like this.But after the world was really apart, he realized that the bedding does not need to be tidied up every morning, that the document will be automatically saved without pressing Ctrl+S, and that he can communicate with foreigners without knowing baseball or football. The impression of bone marrow is tenaciously parasitic in life, and I still feel unbearable when I try to remove it.See you after returning to China. The unfamiliarity at the beginning of the contact and the intentional alienation later seem to have an appropriate explanation today. Lu Shijun's chest feels a little tight. I have the right to resent and blame, but why is the other party so concerned?

Zhong's mother said: "So, Shijun, can you simply tell me how you two met?"