Chapter 14: What the Teahouse Can Pay

Jinyu opened the Tingsong at the usual hour with the whole of page one in her head.

She poured the sergeant's first pot herself and did not spill a drop.

All morning she carried trays past the printer's table, and the boatmen's table, and the two old silk winders who shared one bun.

Every one of them had a line in the book.

At noon she took the tin of savings out from under the counter, shut herself in the storeroom with a lamp, and counted.

Eight hundred and ten yuan.

It was the roof money, the coal money, and everything her father had left that the lease had not eaten.

She wrote the figure on a scrap of paper and sat looking at it among the barrels.

Twenty-six names were still unpaid in the book, and four thousand three hundred yuan stood against them.

The scrap of paper was a very small part of it.

The storeroom door opened behind her.

Auntie Hu came in with a sack of flour on her shoulder and set it down without a word.

She looked at the tin, and at the scrap, and at the lamp.

"You've read it," she said.

"You knew?"

"I put it under my flour, didn't I?"

"I can't read much, but I can read the colour of a girl who's been crying in my kitchen at night."

Jinyu laughed and it came out cracked.

"Auntie, the whole lane is in that book."

"The whole lane eats at my stove."

Auntie Hu dug into the front of her blue apron and drew out a grey cotton sock tied at the top.

"Two hundred and ten."

"I've been saving it for my coffin since your mother died."

"I can't take your coffin money."

"The widow behind the incense shop got hers. Mine can wait."

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