They Jilted the Broken Scholar, So I Married Him novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Three Months

Madam Shen refuses, then gives Lanxi three months and a paper that ends the marriage; Madam Lu will not look at her; the physician says the register will strike his name by the new year unless he can write it.

My mother did not stop kneading when I told her.

She leaned on the dough with both fists until it stretched across the whole board, and then she folded it and leaned again.

"Say it once more," she said.

"I told the whole lane I'd marry Lu Chengzhi."

"You told the lane."

"Yes."

"Before you told me."

"There was no time to come and ask," I said. "They were already laughing at him."

She put the dough down.

My mother is a short woman with thick forearms, and she had run the stall at the foot of East Bridge alone since my father died.

When she is angry she gets quiet.

She was very quiet.

"He is twenty-three years old and he plays with stones," she said. "He cannot dress himself. He cannot tell you if he is hungry."

"He can say my name."

"Once. The physician said that was a lucky echo."

"Mother."

"You will wash him. You will feed him. If he cries at night, you will be the one up. You will do this at twenty, and at thirty, and at fifty, for a husband who may never know your face." She wiped her hands on her apron one finger at a time. "And that is if he is kind. A boy with a hurt head can hit."

"He was kind before," I said.

"Before is gone, Lanxi."

"Then I'll be kind to whoever is left."

She stared at me for a long while.

The oil lamp ticked on the shelf where the clean bowls were stacked, forty of them, the covered ones at the end.

"I have known for three years why you take the academy bowls yourself," my mother said.

I felt my face go hot.

"I never said," I said.

"You never had to. You come home from that gate a different girl." She looked at the covered bowls. "You have never asked me for one thing. Not a ribbon, not a day off."

"I'm asking now."

"I know you are."

She sat down on the flour sack and put her face in her hands for a moment.

When she took them away her eyes were wet, and she wiped them on her sleeve.

"Three months," she said.

I stopped breathing.

"Three months, Lanxi. You marry him, you take him into your care, you do everything a wife does but the bed, because I won't have you tied to a man who cannot choose it. If at the end of three months he is no better, you come home. The magistrate will write a paper that ends it, and nobody in this lane will say you did wrong."

"And if he's better?"

"Then I will make your wedding noodles myself, and I will say you were right in front of the entire lane."

"The whole lane would faint."

"Good," said my mother, and picked the dough up again.

We went to the Lu house at first light, the two of us, in our best jackets.

Madam Lu received us in the front room with her back to the window.

The hall was bare.

The embroidery frame stood in the corner with a half-finished crane on it, and the screen behind her had two pale squares where scrolls had hung and been sold.

She listened to my mother's terms without moving her face.

"A bride price is not required," my mother said. "I ask only that my daughter is treated as a daughter in this house."

"A small wedding," Madam Lu said. "In three days. I will not borrow for it."

"Nobody asked you to."

"And my son's name will go on the contract of a noodle seller's family."

My mother's mouth went thin.

"It is a good name, the Shen name," she said. "It has fed half this lane."

Madam Lu did not answer.

She did not look at me once.

I stood there with my hands folded and my face hot, and I did not answer her.

"Three days," Madam Lu said at last, and rang a little bell on the table for the maid to see us out.

Then the physician came in through the courtyard door, carrying his bag, to change the dressing on Chengzhi's head.

I asked if I could stay.

Chengzhi sat on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves, swinging his feet.

When the physician touched the stitches he flinched, and I said, "It's only a moment," and he looked straight at me and went still.

The physician noticed.

He unwound the old cloth, put on the new, and washed his hands in the basin before he said anything.

"There is a bruise inside the skull," he said to Madam Lu and to me. "It may go down over a year, or three, or it may not. Speak to him plainly. Keep him among things he knows. Do not frighten him."

"What else?" I said.

He hesitated.

"The registry," he said. "A juren whose name is not on the county's rolls at the new year is struck from them, with his stipend and his place at the capital exam."

"He's ill," said Madam Lu.

"The registry does not count illness, madam. It counts ink." He closed his bag. "He must be able to write his own name by the first month, or there will be no name to write."

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