Family

Grandpa Lin took her back into the house, opened a jar taller than Lin Er beside the household shrine, and took out a large apple.

Her dad had bought it when he came home. Otherwise, the only apples the family could usually bear to buy were the ones people sold by the bag in the countryside.

They didn't cost money, either—just a pound of rice for a pound of apples.

The rice her family gave them was either old or broken, but the apple sellers didn't mind, because their apples were only palm-sized, and at least several in each bag would be rotten.

Lin Er remembered rarely eating a good apple as a child. Her family ate the bad ones first, but they couldn't bear to eat them quickly, so after sitting for too long, the good ones often went bad too.

"Go wash it. Your face really isn't hurt, is it? Do you need some gentian violet on it?"

Lin Er took the apple. In the dim old house, her expression was hard to see as she shook her head.

"I'm really fine, Grandpa. It's just that I have to bring a parent to school next week. Could you come?"

Grandpa Lin patted her head and took her to the courtyard to pump water and wash the apple.

"All right. I won't tell your grandma."

The apple was large. Lin Er left half in the kitchen under a water dipper and gave her grandparents a slice each. She didn't ask when her dad had left; it must have been sometime after he took her to school.

Her dad came home every year during the busy farming season, when there was rice to cut, peanuts to pull up, and rice and peanuts to carry home.

Before the land was reorganized, the plots around here had been scattered, some large and some small, at different elevations.

There weren't many machines to begin with, and no one came to the places that were hard to reach.

It all had to be done by hand.

If they planted too much for her grandparents to harvest, her dad had to come back.

He usually left once everything was hauled home. After that, her grandparents could pick the peanuts off the plants and thresh the rice.

She remembered that in the years when they planted the most, the peanut leaves at home weren't completely cleared away until Little New Year.

There wasn't much room in the pigsty, and no one had thought to ask her to help. After eating the apple, Lin Er checked the leftovers in the kitchen.

There was only half a plate of eggplant.

She told the two of them before taking a basket and heading out.

Peppers, cucumbers, and eggplants were plentiful at this time of year. Her grandparents were skilled at farming and gardening. Lin Er went to the vegetable garden she usually visited, only to remember when she arrived that the land still belonged to someone else and hadn't been given to her family for a garden.

She went to the old gardens she remembered instead.

One old garden was across the pond, and the other was in the old hamlet, where the earthen walls of the collapsed ancestral house had been pulled down and leveled into a vegetable garden.

She walked along the banks of three ponds. The ancestral house was the first place at the entrance to the old hamlet.

She pushed open the door. Inside, the vegetable garden was neatly divided in two: one side belonged to her family, the other to the elder granduncle next door.

One cucumber was very old, its skin already yellow. Lin Er thought it had been missed during picking, but as she reached for it, she remembered that people still saved their own seeds when growing vegetables. Her grandpa had probably left it for seed.

She quickly turned her hand aside and picked another one.

After picking cucumbers, she found a broken sickle in a gap in the wall and picked the grown eggplants too. Finally, she picked a few peppers and headed back.

The chives were only half a palm long, too short to eat yet.

The water in the pond outside the ancestral house had turned green, and someone kept ducks on it. She used to wash the vegetables there after picking them, but she couldn't anymore.

On her way back along the pond, her second grandaunt came out to dump the trash and saw her face, smeared with blotches.

Her startled cry nearly made Lin Er, who was lost in thought, drop the vegetable basket.

"Xiao Er, what happened to your face?"

Lin Er was the eldest in her immediate family, but counting her grandpa's and elder granduncle's families together, she was the second oldest girl.

When her name was first decided, people who didn't know it thought the family hadn't wanted to give her a name and just called her Xiao Er after her cousin.

Even after they learned that her name was Er, they didn't change what they called her. They called her Xiao Er for years. When she first started elementary school, she thought her name was Xiao Er too, and wrote Lin Xiao Er on her exam papers.

That was also why she got two zeroes on her entrance exams for junior high: she had even gotten her name wrong.

Fortunately, there were nine years of compulsory education. Otherwise, she wouldn't even have been able to attend junior high.

"Second Grandaunt, it's nothing. I just got gentian violet on my face, and it won't wash off."

Second Grandaunt put down her shovel and broom and pulled her close for a good look before saying, "Why were you playing with that stuff? It won't come off for ten days or half a month."

Holding her vegetables, Lin Er nodded obediently. "That's right, it'll take ages!"

When Second Grandaunt realized she'd come out to pick vegetables for dinner, she finally let her go home.

After Lin Er had worked on her homework for a while, the yellow light bulb wired into the pigsty came on. Grandpa was in there beating peanuts off the plants, while Grandma Lin gave her hands and face a quick wash and prepared to make dinner.

When she saw the basket Lin Er had brought back, she took a few eggplants and peppers straight to the well to wash them.

"You're growing up. How come you didn't go out to play today? Go see if Huihui lost track of time playing again. She still hasn't come back!"

Lin Er put her pen away. The yellow light was hard on her eyes, and she could just as well do the work tomorrow.

By the time she went outside, it was already getting dark. It got dark quite late in September, and her heart skipped a beat. Elementary school didn't let out this late.

"Grandma, where does she like to play? She still isn't back at this hour."

In the kitchen, Grandma Lin's knife swished as she cut the eggplant. Without turning around, she replied, "Go to the top of the hill and call for her. Who knows whose house she's at? She plays until dark without coming home."

Lin Er went through the bamboo grove behind the house and up the hill. After she called out a few times, she heard an elderly woman's voice answer.

She could faintly hear the woman saying, "Huihui, your sister's calling you home for dinner!"

After a while, just as Lin Er was growing impatient and planning to go over, a child came out the back door of that house, still wearing a schoolbag and walking reluctantly.

"Can't you see it's getting dark? You didn't even come home—you've been playing at someone else's house with your schoolbag on all this time!"

"Sis, where are the spicy strips you promised to bring me?"

Lin Er fell silent. Looking at the skinny, dark little monkey coming toward her, she really couldn't recognize her as her sister.

Lin Huihui took a few steps, then turned her head with an expression that said she'd known it.

"You didn't bring them, did you? Forget it, I figured as much. Let's go home. What are you standing there for?"

Well, that's my sister, all right. It couldn't be anyone else.

That evening, a small basinful was taken from a pot of hot water for her grandpa, and the three women and girls shared the rest to wash.

They used one towel to wash from head to toe. The girls washed first, then their grandma.

Expressionless, Lin Er took the towel that had been wrung out and wiped her face. Then she watched Grandma bathe her sister and gesture for her to come over too.

"Grandma, I didn't use up all the hot water I bought at school, so I bathed before coming home."

Grandma Lin gave her a doubtful glance, muttered that it was a waste of money, then went to wash herself. When she was done, she called the two girls over to wash their feet.

By then, Lin Er had already taken Lin Huihui to the well to pump water and wash their feet.

When Grandma Lin saw that, she washed her own feet and poured the water out.

People in the countryside went to bed early. Her family saved electricity, so they always bathed after dinner and went straight to bed afterward. She guessed it wasn't even eight yet.

Lin Er lay at the foot of the bed. Even after Lin Huihui had stopped tossing and turning, she still couldn't fall asleep.

After bringing Xiao Wang his meal at noon that day, she had told him she might not be able to bring him another meal that evening.

Since she'd come home, the family had only prepared a set amount of food. They sat at the table, picking up dishes as they ate, and anyone would notice if she ate even a little more. There really was no way to give him any.