Chapter 12: Not a Good Pastry
Dark clouds obscured the moon.
Yu Jingting stopped in his tracks, the oppressive darkness swallowing everything, leaving Suizi's repressed narration as the only sound.
"Wang Fenfang was right, my fate is cursed, my astrological sign... not so good."
"Lucky for you were not born a decade earlier."
"Huh?"
"A decade earlier, and your baseless thoughts would have got you locked up, we must believe in atheism."
"..." There was no persuasiveness in these words coming from the lips of the son of a fortune teller.
"Ever since my mom gave birth to me, she was never happy again, and unfortunate things always happen to people around me. My dad once had someone calculate my fortune; he said my destiny brings misfortune to my family."
Suizi was quite tough when she was at the Chen family, but Wang Fenfang's words "destined to bring misfortune" indeed hit her Achilles' heel.
"Smashing a piece of glass is too cheap an act — let's go, let's smash the glass in his backyard too." Yu Jingting turned around and wanted to go back.
"Stop messing around! I'm telling you something serious!" Suizi hit him.
"What I'm saying is serious too! Why didn't he ask our old lady to do the fortune-telling? Before we got married, our old lady did the fortune-telling for you and said you would bring prosperity to your husband and children, and your sons will be talented and your daughters will be beautiful and intelligent, whoever marries you would be wealthy."
"Our mother doesn't really know how to do fortune-telling——"
"Our mother can't do fortune-telling, but does that mean the person your mean-hearted father found could? They're all not real, why not believe in something pleasant? Who could be happy living with your drunkard father like him? I'm different. Live with me and see, you'll surely be happy every day."
Even while belittling others, he didn't forget to blow his own trumpet.
"But it's true that our chickens and ducks seldom lay eggs, and our pig gave birth to only one piglet while others' pigs give birth to many."
An average sow can produce 5-15 piglets in a litter. Comparatively, Suizi indeed felt that she brought misfortune.
"Promise that you won't hit me and won't forbid me from sleeping on the heated bed, then I'll tell you a secret."
"What?"
Yu Jingting made up his mind.
He planned to keep this thing to himself as it would only make his image, already poor in Suizi's heart, even worse.
But he couldn't bear to see her in such distress, so he had to bite the bullet and tell her the truth.
"Your chickens and ducks aren't barren, I just stole the eggs."
"???"
"I can't really say I stole, I just took." Stealing means taking without permission, but if your mother-in-law agrees, isn't it just taking?
Chen Kaide drank heavily and borrowed money all day, spilling his guts everywhere after getting drunk. Lazy and greedy, even if the eggs were collected, they would never reach Suizi and her mother. Helping mom-in-law to sell them could save some living expenses for Suizi.
"Anyways, you are definitely not a person who brings misfortune to a family. After you marry me, our chickens will lay eggs sooner or later, and you will definitely bring prosperity." No one can match the productivity of a chicken that lays two eggs a day!
"Do you mean only because you threw a firecracker into the chicken coop to frighten the chickens that they laid eggs? That's not important——when did you steal the eggs from my house?"
"I took them in the day when the chickens laid in the day, and I took them at night when they laid at night. After your house turned off the lights, the fence wasn't high and I could easily climb over."
Speaking of stealing eggs, he had even summarized a set of rules.
"You have to observe the cycle; if you find an egg very early, the time will gradually shift over the next few days until the chicken starts laying in the evening, and then you have to wait for a while before it can lay again."
This brilliant theory of stealing eggs left Suizi dumbfounded.
"Why didn't the dog bark?"
"Dare it?"
A dog happened to pass by. Yu Jingting squinted. Was it Li Youcai's dog?
He picked up a stone and threw it over to show her how he had managed to make all the dogs in the village afraid of him.
The dog wailed and ran away with its tail tucked between its legs.
Suizi was so shocked that she couldn't find her voice.
The cases of the chickens and the dog were solved; only the pig was left.
After a long time.
"What about my piglets?" He didn't mean to steal and sell those too, did he?
"What piglets? What do they look like?"
Her hesitation and evasion aroused suspicion in Suizi.
"Do you know what's going on inside?"
"I don't know." He wasn't the kind to betray anyone, especially his mother-in-law, even if it killed him.
"Let me try to recall."
On the day the sow gave birth, Chen Kaide was drunk as mud. She was sent to her grandmother's house for a short stay, while her mother delivered the piglets.
It was likely that her mother sold the piglets and secretly kept the money.
How could the piglets survive without their mother's milk? Surely, they were fed by another sow somewhere.
"I'll investigate to see if there was any other family whose sow gave birth around the same time. I need to especially keep an eye on his family since they seemed secretive."
A drop of cold sweat appeared on Yu Jingting's forehead.
"I can tolerate the theft of a few eggs, but stealing my piglets, absolutely not."
"It wasn't me!"
"Then who was it?"
"Ah! Darling, look, isn't the moonlight so bright?" Yu Jingting pointed towards the obscured moon and tried to change the topic.
"Are you close with my mother? Did she allow you to steal eggs?" asked the most educated woman in Yang Village, brimming with wisdom.
"Let's go, hurry home, I'm hungry!"
Yu Jingting, afraid she would continue to question him, started walking home very quickly, carrying her on his back.
She pleaded to be let down a few times, but when he didn't comply, she gave up struggling.
In the beginning, Yu Jingting was on guard, constantly expecting Suizi to question him about the piglets. But, much to his surprise, Suizi only inquired about other things.
"Do you prefer Corn Cake or steamed buns?"
"Steamed Bun." Whether they were edible or not, he liked them all.
Yu Jingting thought about the one on her body that he couldn't eat, only nibble, and licked the corner of his mouth.
He loved it too much.
"Where can I get white flour for you?"
"It's naturally white, almost like white flour." He muttered quietly, more than anything, it was tender.
"Then I'll make you some cornmeal buns tomorrow." Like the round-shaped steamed buns.
Suizi didn't yet understand some of the double entendres in his shameless comments.
Yu Jingting blushed with excitement, his heart full of happiness.
It was rare for his wife to show interest in getting to know him, therefore he would answer whatever she asked.
He carried her on his back, each asking and answering, like a newly wedded couple, full of intimacy.
Li Youcai stood in the courtyard, his heart pounding.
The hooligan from the Yu family had taken Suizi back to her mother's house to make a fuss. He didn't dare to watch the excitement with the villagers, fearing he would draw fire upon himself and become the suspect.
"Would Lun Lamei betray him?"
While Li Youcai was worried, a large yellow dog in his house came back limping, with its tail tucked between its legs.
The dog stood at the door and barked towards the street. Li Youcai looked in the direction of the barking.
Yu Jingting was walking on the moonlit road, carrying Suizi on his back. Even from a distance, he could hear that rascal's arrogant laughter.
Li Youcai spat forcefully on the ground.
"I'll let you show off for a while. Sooner or later, Suizi won't want you." He needed to think hard about how to dismiss Lun Lamei without getting himself implicated.
They were almost home, and Suizi had almost finished asking about his likes and dislikes, then she changed the subject.
"Has pork become more expensive?"
"Do you want to eat it? I'll sell the threads and needles tomorrow to buy it for you." The man was drowning in his wife's gentle sea and couldn't help himself.
"With the rise in pork prices, the price of piglets would also have gone up, right? If we sell our piglets now, we would get a good amount of money, wouldn't we? We suffered a loss at that time, didn't we?"
"Exactly, back then, each piglet, weighing over ten catties, was sold for only four taels - Jesus!" His guard was down!