Chapter 8: Zero Points

The wedding was held three weeks later in the Su garden, under four hundred paper lanterns Mrs. Su had hung herself.

Su Yu fell asleep under the lanterns at two o'clock, in his wedding suit, on a bench behind the rosebushes.

Lu Chen found him at ten to three and woke him with one finger on the nose.

"The ring," Lu Chen said.

"It's in my pocket."

"Which one?"

Su Yu patted all of them with growing alarm.

He found it in the third, in a velvet box, with the price tag still inside the lid.

He had gone to the jeweller's alone, on his lunch break, and chosen it himself.

He had carried it for six days without letting anyone near it.

"The tag scores nothing," Lu Chen said, and peeled it off with his thumbnail. "The rest of it scores a great deal."

There was no one on Lu Chen's side of the aisle.

He walked to the front alone at three o'clock, in a dark suit Mrs. Su had taken in at the waist the night before.

His hands were clasped hard in front of him.

Then Mrs. Su stood up from the first row on the groom's side.

She picked up her handbag and her husband's sleeve and moved both of them to the empty chairs on the other side.

"I'm family on this side," she told the guests, loudly. "Chairman, sit."

The Chairman sat.

Lu Chen did not look round.

He kept his eyes on the lanterns, and Su Yu saw his throat move twice before the vows began.

The Chairman himself read them, from the typed agreement.

He read Clause One in the voice he used for acquisitions and nobody laughed.

They said I do, and they signed the register, and Mrs. Su cried into three handkerchiefs and a tablecloth.

By ten o'clock the guests had gone and the garden was dark.