The Boxes That Came Back

When the messenger came to the door, Gu Qing was waiting to hear back from Yao's shop. He held only one pale gold flower, split along a fold. He asked Madam Gu to come to the shop herself. Shopkeeper Yao was waiting. All four boxes were still at the shop. The flowers that had passed inspection had been set aside, and she was to come look at the ones they couldn't accept. She was about to take the flower when he handed her a little paper packet too. Inside were the bits of petal that had fallen off during the inspection.

Gu Qing hid the paper packet in her sleeve and changed her shoes, tying the laces in knots she couldn't slip open. Shen Su sat beneath the window and asked nothing. Gu Qing went as far as the door, then doubled back to take a red flower with the thinnest coat of starch, as if afraid nobody had ever seen what she could make when she did it well.

The rear courtyard of Yao’s shop was quieter than she expected. Three women making flowers each occupied a workbench; none stopped to look at her. The wooden rack beside the door held forty-four accepted flowers, while another thirty-six had been packed back into the chest. Mistress Han picked one up and bent an outward-curling petal. The white crease opened, exposing the silk fibers inside. Gu Qing spoke first: “Could it have happened on the road—”

Madam Han set last year's sample beside it, held the stem, and bent the petal the same way. The old sample had faded a little, but the petal sprang back into place. She left it at that and laid the two sprays side by side. Gu Qing still had the good spray she'd brought clenched in her hand. Sweat trapped in the paper wrapping had dampened the stem.

“Forty-four stems accepted, for two hundred and sixty-four wen.” Yao Liao pushed over the paper with the figures on it. “You had a hundred and sixty in advance. I'll give you another hundred and four today. I won't take these thirty-six. The materials and the labor are yours. I'll pay for the work of getting replacements at short notice on my end. If the next batch comes in like this, I can't take it.”

Gu Qing set the good flower on the counter and said she could replace the others. Yao Liao asked how many days she needed. Gu Qing opened her mouth to say five, then thought of the half cupboard of petals she hadn't opened and the next batch due at the end of the month, and stopped. A woman beside them turned over the sandglass and went on binding stems, leaving her to find her own answer.

“Ten days,” she said at last.

“In ten days I'll have stock from somewhere else. We won't replace this batch. The remaining hundred and twenty stems come in two batches, and we'll keep the original dates for now. Send me a count by the fifteenth of what you can actually make. If it has to be fewer, so be it. Tell me early and I'll find someone else.”

At the word “reduce,” Gu Qing's eyes grew hot. On the way there she had worried she couldn't afford to lose two hundred stems. Now that Yao Liao was allowing her to cut the order, she was afraid the slip with Gu Qing's name on it would be torn out of the ledger. She asked if she could keep to the original number. Yao Liao looked at the good flower in her hand, took it, and put it with the forty-four. “You can make good flowers. You knew which ones were good. Why did you send the other half?”

Gu Qing couldn't speak. If she'd missed the flaw or lacked the skill, she might still have asked for a little leeway. But she had sorted the trays herself, and remembered the forty-four on the left and the thirty-six on the right. She counted the hundred and four copper coins twice. The second time she came up one short. Yao Liao pushed it toward her from the corner of the table. It had rolled into a fold of Gu Qing's own cuff.

She didn’t go to the West Market that day. She carried one box full of returned flowers and asked the people who’d come to take the other three back on their way. She walked faster and faster until she ran into Xiaoman at the mouth of Locust Lane. Xiaoman had no basket today, only a gray cap wrapped in cloth. She saw a gleam of pale gold showing in the box and reached out to hold the lid down. Gu Qing suddenly asked, “Where’s that one stem of yours that I didn’t change?”

“At the shop.”

“Lend it to me for a look.”

Xiaoman gave her no answer either way. She asked, “If we start now, is there enough time?” Gu Qing looked up. They were standing in front of a mustard greens stall, and the vendor was urging them to make way for the shoppers behind them. Xiaoman stepped aside first. Gu Qing carried the box to the edge of the gutter and only then realized she had been pressing its rim against her chest all the way, hard enough to hurt.

At home, Gu Qing spread all thirty-six stems over the table. Some centers and bamboo stems could be taken out and used again, but there were white marks on the petals, and even washing out the starch couldn't hide the damage at the folds. Shen Su picked up a flower to take apart, and Gu Qing told her to leave it for now. Her grandmother's hands stopped, but she gathered the torn paper into a little basket so the wind wouldn't send it all over the yard. That gesture hurt Gu Qing more than anything at Yao's shop had.

That afternoon Xiaoman came as agreed to settle up for the last of the rough work. Gu Qing listed the quantities delivered in recent days and paid her two cash for each. She set the two coins for the earlier rework apart and kept her hand on them, saying that part had been late after all. Xiaoman looked down, left it unchallenged, and put the rest of the money away first.

“I won’t be coming tomorrow. The hat trim shop has booked me for three days, and after that I still have work at the dyehouse.”

“There are still a hundred and twenty sprays to do.” As soon as she spoke, Gu Qing heard herself pressing Xiaoman for work when she had meant to ask her to stay.

“I only agreed to work through this batch. I told you when you asked.”

Gu Qing thought back to the day she took the big order. Xiaoman had said half a day, and what Gu Qing had heard was a half day she could count on from then on. She lifted her hand from the two cash. Xiaoman did not take them at once. After a moment Gu Qing said, “Take the two from before as well. I never showed you properly how that knot inside was tied.” Only then did Xiaoman reach out. She threaded the two coins onto a short string of their own, separate from the wages in front of her.

Before leaving, Xiaoman took the pale gold flower from her sleeve pocket and set it at the edge of the worktable. Gu Qing saw at a glance that it was asymmetrical, and still her first thought was to fix it. Xiaoman said, “You can look at it for two days. I'll get it the day after tomorrow. The material was deducted from my pay at the time, so this one's still mine.” She went to gather her needles without waiting for Gu Qing to praise it.

Gu Qing picked a fine, sharp needle out of the tray and said the thick one Xiaoman had used before tended to stretch the holes. She could take this one with her. Xiaoman shook her head and took out a packet she had just bought to show her. Three needles of different thicknesses were stuck through the paper. The hat trim shop had let her choose her own, and she had paid for them herself. Gu Qing put the fine needle back in the tray. She wanted to ask what the shop was paying Xiaoman, but thought she might have a hard time hearing the figure and let the question go.

When Xiaoman left, Shen Su came out to see her off and handed her half a packet of sour plums by the door. They exchanged a few words about the new cake stall on the street. Xiaoman laughed and said she would bring some for Granny next time she bought them. Indoors, Gu Qing was taking apart a damaged flower. At the sound of that laugh she pulled so hard that she tore the center too, though it could have been salvaged. She pressed the scraps into her palm and waited until it was quiet outside before opening her hand.

On the ninth, for the first time, she made all the rough stems she had meant to give Xiaoman to do. Three sets took most of the day. In between she had to tend the fire and buy thread, and later she had to undo a place where her own winding had gone crooked. She stopped marking time on the old schedule. At dusk she crossed out the original two hundred. Beneath the two later batches of sixty each she wrote thirty, rubbed it out, and wrote forty. She had to try making eighty sprays before she could tell whether she could do them reliably. It would take more than liking what she saw.

She took six new samples to Yao’s shop and asked Mistress Han to look at them the way she inspected a delivery. It was eight li there and back, her hands froze, and even so one of the sample flowers was turned down. Mistress Han showed her which layer was wrapped too tight and told her to take it home and undo it. This time Gu Qing didn’t hide it. As she carried the rejected sample through the shop, a girl buying a hairpin asked if it was a new design. She said, “It was a trial that went wrong. I can’t sell it yet.” The girl went back to looking at other things, without laughing at her or saying anything much to make her feel better.

On the night of the eleventh, after Grandmother fell asleep, she broke down the time each spray would take again, separating the work she could do herself, the work she had to hire someone to do, and the time she simply had to wait. The waiting column was longest, and the ink spread into a blot on the paper. She used to think that if she kept both hands moving, everything else would keep pace. Now there was not a petal in the tray that would dry a quarter hour sooner just because she was in a hurry.

The number delivered the next day was eighty. Gu Qing wanted to reduce each of the following two batches by twenty, keeping the delivery dates of the twenty-fifth of the second month and the twenty-fifth of the third. Yao Liao agreed and wrote the reductions beside her name. The order, originally worth twelve hundred wen, now amounted to only one hundred and twenty-four flower stems, including the forty-four already received, with a nominal value of seven hundred and forty-four wen. She had lost the sale of seventy-six stems, thirty-six of which had already consumed materials and labor. Yao’s shop would not hold those vacated places for her. As Gu Qing left, she saw Madam Han calling someone from another workshop into the courtyard.

The sixty coins owed to Sister-in-law Ji should never have been delayed until today. The ten-day credit term had run to the beginning of the second month. Gu Qing had already set aside money to pay the bill, but then bought more paste and silk, using it to plug the immediate gap. On the second she had gone to ask for an extension. Sister-in-law Ji agreed only to another ten days; all materials after that had to be paid for in cash. Gu Qing had still thought then that receiving payment on the eighth would let her settle the debt easily. Now she had indeed been paid, but it was only enough to fill the old hole. She no longer treated this sum as capital someone else was willing to let her use.

Back home she gave most of the hundred and four cash to Sister Ji to settle the sixty already due for materials and spent the rest on rice and charcoal. Sister Ji threaded the coins back onto a string one by one before drawing a line through the old entry. She gave Gu Qing no discount for old acquaintance and asked no questions. She simply felt the offcuts Gu Qing had brought back to trade as she always did and turned down the ones she couldn't use. Gu Qing thanked her and only when she reached the door did she say she'd have to buy less for a while. Sister Ji said, “You still have to eat. If there's nothing cooking at home, come put another stick on my fire. There's always enough to go around.”

Gu Qing didn't go over for that meal. She steamed two bowls of rice in her own pot, cut up a little pickle, and set it all on the table before calling her grandmother. The pale gold flower she'd borrowed from Xiaoman stood in the empty vase, one side high and the other low. The evening wind came in through the crack in the door, and the higher petal moved a little without creasing.