My Sworn Sister's Cousin-by-Marriage Walked Into My Teahouse novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Back Room

Jinyu hides Qiao above the kitchen and dresses her cut hand. Qiao calls her Aunt Jinyu, keeps the red-stringed ledger close, and the sergeant orders a pot of tea downstairs to last the day.

They waited in the storeroom until the constable's humming moved to the lane mouth.

Then Jinyu pushed the door open and Qiao stumbled out into the lamplit kitchen, blinking.

A nail on the barrel had opened a long scratch across her right palm.

Blood ran down to her wrist and dripped on Jinyu's clean stones.

"Sit," Jinyu said.

"It's nothing."

"It's on my floor. Sit."

Qiao sat on the cook's stool by the stove and held out her hand.

Jinyu took a bottle of rice spirit from the shelf and a roll of clean cloth.

She knelt in front of her and turned the hand over under the light.

The palm was small and narrow.

There were calluses on the side of the middle finger from a pen, and a black ink stain had sunk into the skin.

"Hold still," Jinyu said, and poured.

Qiao hissed through her teeth but did not pull away.

Jinyu wound the cloth around the palm, once, twice, and tied it off at the wrist.

Her thumb rested on the pulse there longer than the knot needed.

It was fast.

"Thank you, Aunt Jinyu," Qiao said.

Jinyu looked up.

Qiao's mouth had a crooked tilt at the corner, and her eyes behind the wet glasses were suddenly bright.

"Don't," Jinyu said.

"Ruolan wrote it in the letter. I'm to call you Aunt. It's the custom. You are my cousin's wife's sworn sister, so you're my elder."

"I'm twenty-eight."

"I'm twenty-four. That's four years of elder. I take the custom seriously."

"You're a thief on my kitchen stool," Jinyu said. "You can call me what I tell you."

"What should I call you?"

Jinyu stood up and washed the blood from her hands in the basin.

"Ask me again when you've stopped dripping."

She said it lightly, and was annoyed at how her voice came out.

She settled it in her head, as she dried her hands.

Qiao was Pei Mingshan's cousin on his mother's side.

Ruolan was Jinyu's sworn sister and Mingshan's wife.

So Qiao and Jinyu shared no blood at all, only a marriage and an oath, and a family that insisted on counting them kin.

It was a dull fact and it should have been a comfort.

She took Qiao upstairs by the back stair.

The back room over the kitchen was narrow, with a slanted ceiling.

The winter tea was stored there, and one low window opened onto the roof tiles.

Jinyu cleared the sacks off a cot and brought a quilt and a lamp.

She also brought a dry gown of her own that was a hand too short.

"The woman who cooks for me is Auntie Hu," she said.

"She sleeps in the kitchen annex. She'll hear you if you cough."

"She'll believe you're my cousin from Suzhou, or she won't, and then she'll tell me so."

"Is she a talker?"

"She is a wall. Everything goes in and nothing comes out."

Qiao stood in the middle of the little room holding the satchel against her chest.

She hadn't put it down once.

"Change," Jinyu said. "I'll turn my back."

She turned toward the window.

She heard wet cloth peel off, the rustle of the dry gown, the creak of the cot.

When she looked round, Qiao was sitting with the satchel in her lap and a black cloth book on her knees.

It was a ledger, thick as a brick, tied shut with red string.

"Is that what they want?" Jinyu asked.

"That, and me."

"May I?"

Qiao's bandaged hand closed on the cover.

"Not yet," she said. "Ruolan told you, didn't she?"

"She wrote 'don't ask.'"

"Then I'm asking you to let me be the one to say."

Jinyu looked at the book, then at the woman.

The red string had been knotted the same way every time, with a tidy bow.

Where the cover had slipped, a corner of the first page showed.

It was ruled in columns, with a name in each line and a sum beside it, and a tiny red tick beside most of them.

A few of the ticks had a red thumbprint pressed beside them.

Jinyu saw this and did not understand it.

"Is it money you took?" she asked.

"It's everything I took," Qiao said quietly. "That's the honest answer, and I'll give you the rest when I can."

Jinyu nodded slowly.

She didn't say that last April, when the lease had come due and the stove had cracked, she had found something at her door.

Someone had pushed an envelope of three hundred yuan through the slot in her door with no name on it.

She had thought it was Ruolan being proud and shy at once.

She had never asked.

Now she looked at the book in the thief's lap and could not have said why that envelope came to mind.

"Sleep," she said. "I'll bring tea."

She was at the door when Qiao's voice stopped her.

"Jinyu."

She turned.

It was the first time Qiao had said it plain, without the joke.

"I've never been in anyone's house who wasn't paid to keep me," Qiao said. "I don't know how to say thank you."

"Drink the tea."

Jinyu went down the stairs, banked the stove, and did not sleep.

At first light the front shutters rattled under a fist.

She opened them on the sergeant, with a constable behind him and a folded warrant in his belt.

"Landlady," he said, and walked past her into the hall. "A pot of your best. I'll take the corner table."

"For how long?"

He sat down with his back to the wall and his eyes on the kitchen door.

"All day," he said.

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