Read Novel Full Chapter 300: Dad's Grave
Chapter 300: Dad's Grave
December 2, 9:50 a.m. Someone downstairs called up asking what floor Zhengping Firm was on.
Shen Zhixia was slipping the three pages of neighborhood interview notes into the file when He Xiufen rose from her chair and walked to the stairwell.
"Second floor. Stairs are narrow—keep one hand on the wall."
The woman who came up was fifty-six, in a blue-gray padded jacket, carrying a non-woven bag with a plastic bag poking out of the top—dried persimmons inside. She stopped at the doorway, took in the long table first, then the people.
"I'm looking for Lawyer He."
"That's me."
"I'm Wen Yulan." She held the bag out. "Persimmons. Sun-dried them myself."
He Xiufen took the bag and set it at the corner of the desk, pulling a chair from against the wall.
"Sit. Want some water?"
"No. I'll say my piece and go."
"How'd you find us?"
"Chen Yue'e told me." Wen Yulan sat down, hands resting on her knees. "She said a woman lawyer came by yesterday, bought a jin and eight liang of tofu, and asked if she could count the money out herself. Said she asked after every little thing."
Shen Zhixia opened the register, pen pressed to the page.
"Fifty-six." Wen Yulan supplied it herself. "I used to live at Number 2 Courtyard, north end of Jianping Lane. Moved out nine years ago. Now I live in Mingguang Lane, Chengdong, with my son."
"You knew Feng Wenzhen."
"I was seventeen when I started working at the pickle shop at the west end of Jianping Lane. She came in every day for soy sauce." Wen Yulan smiled; a tooth was missing. "Every time, she'd go over the account with me. I can't read more than a few characters, but I'd know the sound of her working an abacus anywhere."
"You visited her in her final days."
"I was at the funeral. About ten days before she passed, I went to see her once." She paused. "She asked me what floor my son's apartment was on. I said the seventeenth. She said, 'That's high.' Then she said, 'What'll you do when the power goes out?'"
He Xiufen pulled her reading glasses from her pocket, then set them down again.
"When was this?"
"Late September. I don't remember the exact day—I've never been good with dates."
"She always asked practical questions."
"If you ask, someone's got to answer." Wen Yulan said. "That woman never asked about fluff."
He Xiufen leaned back in her chair.
"What brings you here today?"
"One sentence." Wen Yulan's hand moved over the bag. "Last month, Youxing came looking for me. He waited at the bus stop—waited through two buses."
Shen Zhixia's pen stopped. She looked up at He Xiufen. He Xiufen wasn't looking at her.
"He asked me how far the road had been paved out where we're from."
"Where you're from?"
"We're from the same production team. His dad's grave is on that slope. The road runs below it, so the grave has to be moved. The village posted the notice at the end of June—all relocations before spring next year." Wen Yulan said. "It was windy that day. He stood under the bus stop sign without even a hat on."
"Where does he want to move it?"
"He wants to move it into the public cemetery, put both parents together in one plot. Buried together." She said. "His mother talked about that one thing her whole life. His father died young, and she raised two kids on her own. Every Qingming she'd go up there and couldn't get the words out."
"Money's short."
"Short by a lot." Wen Yulan said. "He told me he didn't have that kind of money. He also said—'My sister's holding onto my mom's house, and I can't bring myself to ask.'"
"How many times has he said that?"
"Twice. Once at the bus stop, once downstairs from my building. The second time he'd had a little to drink. He talked around it, and when he'd circled back, it was still the same sentence."
He Xiufen turned the seven words—I can't bring myself to ask—over in her mind, her gaze falling on Shen Zhixia's pen tip.
"Go on. I'll have it written down."
"One more thing." Wen Yulan said. "The year before last, on the twenty-eighth of the twelfth month, I brought his family wedding candy. My son got married."
"What time of day?"
"Three or four in the afternoon. Overcast. I went in, and her lamp was on. Paper spread across the table, one hand pressed on top of it."
Shen Zhixia wrote: "3–4 p.m., lamp on, paper on the table."
"She said—'I've written it down. If they fight later, there'll be something holding it in place.'" Wen Yulan said. "I asked what she'd written. She said, 'Don't ask.' On New Year's Eve I passed through the lane, looked up—her window was still lit. New Year's morning I went to pay respects, and she said she'd spent two nights writing it."
He Xiufen put her glasses on, then slowly took them off again.
"I'll have all this written down, then read back to you. If you hear anything off, say so."
Shen Zhixia read the two pages aloud. At the jin and eight liang of tofu, Wen Yulan smiled. At "if she asked, someone had to answer," she nodded. At "wedding candy," she cut in.
"There was a pack of cigarettes too," she said. "Wedding candy and a pack of cigarettes. She smoked tobacco leaves—rolled her own."
Shen Zhixia added it, then read through a second time.
"Sign your name." He Xiufen pushed the pen over.
Wen Yulan didn't take it. Her hand moved over the bag again.
"The people in that lane will curse me."
"Curse you for what?"
"For siding with outsiders." She said. "Youxing grew up in that lane. He did his homework on every doorstep on that street."
"Yet you're still signing."
"I don't live there anymore." Wen Yulan picked up the pen. "In my son's building, I don't know a single neighbor's name in the whole hallway. They can curse me all they want. I won't hear it."
She wrote her name slowly. When she reached the third character, she curved it wrong and paused, looked at it, but left it as it was.
He Xiufen took the two pages, examined them twice, confirmed the page count, and wrote in the corner: "December 2, two pages." Only then did she file them away and walk her to the stairwell.
"The words are yours. I didn't add a single stroke."
"If you had, I wouldn't claim them." Wen Yulan kept one hand on the wall going down. "Lawyer He—those two nights she spent writing, that house must have been cold."
Back at the desk, Shen Zhixia asked, "Why did she agree to sign?"
"She moved away." He Xiufen tipped half the persimmons onto a plate. "The ones willing to sign aren't the brave ones. They're the ones with nothing left to lose."
Shen Zhixia thought of Zhu Xiuzhen crouched on the doorstep yesterday, sorting chives, her hand frozen against her apron.
"Kang Youxing," she said. "If he wants to fight the will, why doesn't he lead with the grave?"
"If he brings up the grave first, he's as good as admitting that paper is real." He Xiufen said. "Admit that, and the house belongs to her. If he needs money, he'd have to ask his sister for it."
"So he'd rather call the will a forgery."
"A forgery's easier to say than the truth." He Xiufen squared the edges of a stack of paper. "Remember this—when someone fights you over a piece of paper, what they really want is usually something else."
[Thud. Something else is buried under the paper.]
[Thud. This isn't the page he wants.]
4:00 p.m. Footsteps stomped downstairs. Lu Jibai came up with two baked flatbreads, oil seeping through the bottom of the paper bag.
"I made a call this morning." He set the flatbreads on the long table. "The seven-day deadline ended yesterday. No appeal filed."
Shen Zhixia wrote a line in the file: December 1—Qin Hao's side has not filed an appeal. When she finished, she pressed the pen tip onto that line.
"On paper, it's over."
"He didn't file. That means he accepts it."
"Means he didn't file." Lu Jibai said. "If he wanted to sue, he could walk into the court and file a complaint himself. Nobody can block that road."
He Xiufen pushed Wen Yulan's two pages toward him: "Take a look."
He read front to back, then flipped back to the first page.
"The 28th, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day—three dates." He said. "She remembers dates. That holds up in court, better than saying 'her mind was clear.'"
"If it's about the grave," he looked up, "make him write it down himself."
"That's exactly what I'm thinking." He Xiufen said.
Lu Jibai handed the papers back and asked Shen Zhixia, "Where did she sign?"
"Below the main text."
"Don't have her sign again." He said. "Once is enough. Ask a second time, and people start asking why."
He nudged the flatbreads toward her. "Eat one. You haven't been downstairs since morning."
Shen Zhixia broke one in half and set one half beside He Xiufen's cup.
The next morning at 10:30, the office phone rang once. Jiang Guifang—Kang Youxing's wife, fifty-eight, her voice shoving every word through the receiver.
"Don't you go working on that woman behind our backs."
He Xiufen answered: "2:30 this afternoon. Both of you come up. I've got a table."
1:50 p.m. Kang Wenying arrived first. He Xiufen had her read through the two pages, then said at the end: Tomorrow, 9 a.m. Bring your key. We're going to the old house.
2:30 p.m. The stairs creaked.
Jiang Guifang came in first—short hair, sleeve protectors pulled over her padded jacket cuffs, and before anything else she swept her eyes across the table. Kang Youxing followed, one hand braced on the doorframe, the other clutching a plastic document folder. It was only once he'd planted his feet that you could see his back was bad. Sitting down, he used his hand to ease himself onto the chair.
"A firm with two lawyers, sitting in one room, all talking for one side." Jiang Guifang said.
"This entire room is paper. Anyone who wants to look can look." He Xiufen said. "Did you bring paper?"
"We didn't bring paper. We brought a living person."
"A person works too. He speaks, I write." He Xiufen nodded toward Shen Zhixia. "Write."
Kang Youxing didn't look at Kang Wenying. He set the document folder on the table and smoothed its corners twice.
"I'm not here today for a lawsuit." He said. "I just want to ask one thing. What gives you the right to sit in a room with my sister?"
"The six documents she brought, which I examined one by one." He Xiufen said. "If you want to see them, I have copies."
"My mother couldn't recognize people those last two years." He patted the table edge lightly with his palm. "If she couldn't recognize people, does anything she wrote count?"
Shen Zhixia opened her mouth—"She could still recognize people in September"—and He Xiufen called her name.
"Zhixia."
She swallowed the rest of the sentence and nudged the water glass half an inch toward Kang Wenying's hand.
"She had to be helped just to sit up." Kang Wenying's voice was very soft. "How could I have taken advantage of her confusion?"
"You didn't take advantage—the paper grew itself?" Jiang Guifang said. "A hundred yuan a sheet, and there are people on the street who'll write it for you."
"I know Mom's handwriting."
"You know it. We don't."
He Xiufen didn't take that half-sentence. She pressed her palm flat on the table.
"Handwriting's off the table today. Today we talk about what you want."
"What do I want? My mother's house. Half and half." Kang Youxing said.
He Xiufen pushed a blank sheet of paper to his hand and laid a pen on top.
"Write it down." She said. "What you want. Write it down, then read it aloud."
"If I write it down, that's a lawsuit."
"For a lawsuit, the first line of the complaint says the same thing. Write it today, save yourself a trip."
Jiang Guifang reached to stop him: "Don't write."
Kang Youxing had already picked up the pen.
He wrote slowly, wrist pressed into the paper, lips moving with each character. When he finished the first line, he lifted his head to look. Shen Zhixia saw that he'd written the wrong character for "share"—a homophone—and his pen paused on one stroke as if to correct it. She opened her mouth.
He Xiufen gave a small shake of her head.
The second line he wrote was three characters. When he finished, the pen didn't lift. The tip stayed pressed on the final stroke.
Jiang Guifang leaned over and read aloud, one character at a time: "Number 23 Jianping Lane, house by share. Dad's grave." Her voice dropped on the last three. "Why'd you write that for?"
He Xiufen blew lightly on the paper to dry the ink.
"Your mother's handwriting." She said.
"I don't recognize it." Kang Youxing said. "I haven't seen her writing in years."
"Whether you recognize it or not, you'll look before you leave." He Xiufen said. "I'm keeping these two lines."
"Keep them." His hand didn't move.
Kang Wenying had been watching the paper. Now she asked: "What happened with Dad's grave?"
No one answered.
The pen turned half a circle in his hand. The tip came back down toward those three characters, started to strike them through—and stopped.
[Thud. The second line. He didn't cross it out.]
He Xiufen pulled the paper toward her. The pen rolled half an inch with it. It left a black dot on the page, just to the right of "grave."