Chapter 9: The Cup

Granny Bai was waiting at the tea stall on Saturday morning with two glasses already poured.

Tang Yu had slipped out of the courtyard at nine, meaning to buy breakfast.

Jiang Lü had been asleep on her stomach with one bare foot hanging off the bed.

"Sit," said Granny Bai.

"I was only getting steamed buns."

"You were getting away. Sit."

Tang Yu sat.

The lane was just waking up.

A man swept the stones with a long bamboo broom, and incense drifted over the monastery wall.

"She cooked for you," Granny Bai said.

"Yes."

"She has never cooked for anyone."

"I know."

"No, you don't."

The old woman turned the glass in her small brown hands.

"I'll tell you something, and then you can do what you like. She won't. She'd sooner chew the stove."

Tang Yu waited.

"Seven hundred years ago, in the Song, this city was the richest in the land," Granny Bai said.

"The paper money was invented here."

"Jiang Lü kept a stall of her own then, selling silk, and she took on an apprentice named Su Qinghe."

"A papermaker's daughter, twenty years old, with ink on her chin."

She drank.

"They lived together for forty-one years. She aged. Jiang Lü didn't."

"By the end Qinghe was an old woman who couldn't climb the stairs."

"Jiang Lü carried her up every night and sat by the bed and held her hand."

Tang Yu's chest ached.

"And then?"

"And then she died, in the autumn, under that ginkgo. The ginkgo's seven hundred years old. Jiang Lü planted it."

Granny Bai set the glass down.

"She hasn't left that courtyard for love since. She stood at the gate for a hundred years."

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