Before Boarding the Boat

On the eighth day of the fifth month, Gu Qing threaded the cord through the last box, without leaving it until the night before they were to go. Inside were six ordinary flowers she had promised earlier for a neighbor’s wedding banquet, separate from Luo Yi’s follow-up order. She delivered them herself. The customer looked them over, took them, and asked for four more. Gu Qing counted the three days she still had free, then shook her head. The customer laughed and said that once she had been south she would be above taking small orders. Gu Qing’s face stiffened a little, but she still gave no promise of those four stems.

She said she would be glad to take the order if it could wait until she came back. She was afraid of doing a poor job in the rush before leaving. The wedding banquet couldn't wait, so the customer went elsewhere. On her way out, Gu Qing was still doing the sum in her head, four stems for thirty-two cash, as though turning the order down had let the money leak out of her pocket. Partway home she bought a small packet of salt and thought that thirty-two cash might not even cover an extra day’s rest on the road. Her brow furrowed again, and she only loosened her grip when the paper packet crackled in her hand.

On the ninth, Yao Liao sent someone to ask for eight more curled-petal sprays in the last part of the fifth month, at a slightly higher price. The messenger said she only had to set aside the finished pieces until the customer came. Gu Qing had no eight suitable sprays in her cupboard. If she pushed to make them, the next two nights would go to flowers, leaving no time to try out their luggage or see to the door lock. She asked whether the middle of the sixth month would do. The messenger went back to ask and returned with word that the banquet would be over by then, so the shop would buy elsewhere. Gu Qing put the blank sheet away without tearing off the line with the higher price as a keepsake.

Xiaoman brought over two hat flowers of her own, asking Gu Qing, if she passed a stall selling new-style hats in Nanpu, to take a look at how the fastenings were made. There was no need to buy any or copy the design; telling her about it afterward would do. She had brought the flowers not as farewell gifts, but to ask which color Gu Qing thought looked brighter in dim light. Gu Qing chose blue; Xiaoman chose gray-green. In the end they put one on either side and kept both. They could now disagree in a sentence and go on working, without immediately deciding who should listen to whom.

Gu Qing said that if customers asked for her curled-petal design, they could ask Xiaoman first instead of waiting for her to get back. She still felt a tightness as she said it, as though she were opening the doors of an empty cabinet and letting people see they had somewhere else to go without her. Xiaoman nodded. The hat trim shop was busy, she said, and she would take what she could manage. If she used the clasp Gu Qing had adapted, she would pay the design fee they had agreed on later. Gu Qing said all right and left a clear sample without adding any warning about people stealing her business.

On the tenth they went to the South Landing to pay the deposit for boarding on the twelfth day of the fifth month. The passenger boat Gu Qing had chosen would call at three large landings. The boatman wrote down their berths and destination. Downstream it would take about five or six days. If they disembarked at an intermediate stop and stayed longer, they would pay for the next leg separately. The original ticket didn't let them resume whenever they pleased. They put down a hundred and sixty cash for the outward journey and would pay the rest before boarding. They kept the money for the return trip with them, since they might take a different boat back.

Shen Su waited on the bank with the brim of her hat pulled low. She got up on her own to have a look by the boat, then came back and sat down. Gu Qing let her sit and asked whether she had seen clearly where to put her foot. The old woman said she had. The handhold on the boat was loose and she had already told the skipper. When Gu Qing went to look, he was replacing it. Grandmother had found that loose handhold by touch and asked for it to be changed all on her own, without twenty questions from Gu Qing.

Before leaving the port, she bought two pairs of straw-soled shoes, one as a spare for herself and one a little larger than her grandmother usually wore, so she could still wear them if her feet swelled from walking. Shen Su tried the larger shoes herself and found they dragged, so they went into the luggage for now; there was no need to force herself to wear them yet. The cost of the shoes also went against the twelve hundred cash set aside for the journey, along with thirty for looking after the tree and a deposit of one hundred and sixty. The balance dwindled again and again. Watching it did not put Gu Qing at ease, but she knew it was shrinking because the journey was taking shape, not because an empty bag had suddenly sprung a hole.

On the afternoon of the eleventh, she went to the Zhous’ shop for the lightweight umbrella. It was finished. The paper was thin but opaque, and the ribs were slimmer than usual. Open indoors, it looked like a gentle cloud. Zhou Jiping had her try it herself first, lifting, opening, and closing it once each. He asked whether holding it up for half a li would make her hand ache. She said it was lighter than the old one and would be better still if the canopy were larger. He said a wider canopy would need more ribs to keep it from turning inside out in the wind. She couldn't have both advantages in one umbrella.

Gu Qing looked at him and laughed, saying everyone lately seemed to like using that line to stop her in her tracks. Zhou Jiping didn’t know she’d lost four hundred wen on the Wen job and charged the agreed twenty-four. She counted it out for him, giving him nothing extra and making no offer to bring back cakes from Nanpu in exchange. Lu Ying saw them from the front of the shop and told her brother-in-law to wrap it up for the customer instead of just standing there looking. Zhou Jiping gave a cough and took an old cloth to cover the umbrella. Gu Qing saw the crooked edge and recognized the cloth she had left in the shop on a rainy day.

He asked first if he could use this piece of cloth, and she nodded. It had once been nothing more than a rag for wiping the racks. Now it held the umbrella closed, with a knot in the cord she could undo herself. Gu Qing rolled the knot between her fingers and suddenly felt how much she would miss this place. She'd thought the trip would only carry her forward. It was only now that she felt a length of thread trailing behind her, tugging without pain, with no promise that cutting it would make her any lighter.

Zhou Jiping walked her to the mouth of the lane and said the new shop should be fully open by the time she came back. Gu Qing asked if the little table would still have a place. He laughed and said he'd moved the bricks. Whether there'd be room was another matter, and he wouldn't hold a spot for her. She laughed too and said she'd see when she came back. They left “coming back” free of any obligation for the moment and stood until a cart had passed. Then they went each to their own door, looking back at just the wrong moments to catch each other.

After supper, Shen Su checked the luggage item by item: a thin quilt, dry clothes, soft shoes, knee guards, a little cloth pouch for heated stones, a shortened wooden footstool, and the shallow box for the gray lotus. They took only medicinal ingredients the doctor had approved for everyday use, without adding a heap of unfamiliar remedies out of fear of traveling far. Gu Qing took everything out and put it back, discovering that she had also stuffed in a tray of unfinished petals, thinking she could continue when she had spare time on the journey.

Her grandmother didn't tell her she couldn't take them. She only asked where she'd dry them and where she'd get the starch. Gu Qing looked at the dry petals for a long moment, then took the tray out herself. She kept a little packet of needles and thread for mending clothes and put everything else in the cupboard. If she really needed to make a flower on the way, she would see what she had to hand then, instead of trying to fold half a worktable into the boat cabin before she even left. The tray made hardly a sound as it touched the bottom of the cupboard, yet Gu Qing felt as if she'd put down the heaviest piece of luggage.

Auntie Chen came for the second spare key and asked which part of the window to shut. Gu Qing walked her through it again. Sister Ma came too, and the three of them went over how to open the lock, go through the gate, and lift the well cover on the spot, leaving nothing they could only find out by reading the paper. The six weeks of care would run from the twelfth through the twenty-fourth of the sixth month. Gu Qing and her grandmother expected to be back earlier, but would pay the agreed amount in full. Sister Ma would still take over for the ten days Auntie Chen was away in the latter half of the month, as they had settled. Gu Qing's growing anxiety gave her no reason to change the arrangement.

Luo Yi arrived just before closing, carrying a small bag of dry flatbreads. She said they weren’t gifts for customers at the new Shixian shop. They were what she usually ate on the road, and if they went hard they could be softened in hot water. Gu Qing offered her a flower, but she declined, saying fifty were enough to fill her shop for a while and any more would only mean more tidying. Seeing the needle and thread still lying by the luggage, she laughed and said that if Miss Gu saw a good design down south, she might let someone else wear it for a couple of days before rushing to bring it back to Yunjin.

Gu Qing almost said she knew that already. In the end she only asked whether customers down there preferred blue or green. Luo Yi said some didn’t buy flowers at all, saving the money for an extra little packet of powder, and some only wanted a knot on the box. Gu Qing listened carefully and stopped fretting over people who hadn’t chosen flowers. She put the dry cakes in the small bag she would reach for first on the road and walked Luo Yi to the door. They made no arrangement for an order to be waiting as soon as she returned. They only said that if Gu Qing was passing in the sixth month, she could come sit awhile in the new shop.

Only then did the courtyard truly quiet down. Her grandmother put the unfinished needlework away in the cabinet, leaving a small clear space by the window. Gu Qing stood there, her fingers still reaching out of habit for something to pick up. All they found was the layer of old cloth at her cuff. She let go, hung up the clothes she would wear in the morning, and set the two ties for her trouser cuffs side by side on her shoes so she wouldn't have to search the whole house just as they were leaving.

Late that night, Gu Qing wrapped the household’s three hundred cash of principal in dry cloth and put it in a box away from the wall. She separated the remaining travel money, setting aside what had to be paid aboard the boat. She checked one last time, without adding two more cash merely to make a neat, full string. Her grandmother was already lying down, the little gray-lotus box beside her pillow. Still awake, the old woman asked whether she should get up first at daybreak or wait for Gu Qing to call her.

“I'll wake you,” Gu Qing said, then added, “If you wake first, wake me too.”

When they'd finished talking, the room fell quiet. Gu Qing blew out one lamp and left the little one by the stove to finish up by. She suddenly remembered that cold day in the twelfth month when she couldn't sell any flowers and had felt that everything would settle down if only she had a regular stall. She still had no stall. She had a few more customers willing to wait, one less fee for working on site, and half a table gone, and tomorrow she would set out for somewhere far away. She didn't tally any of it as a win or a loss. She simply turned down the wick.

Before bed she opened the door to look out into the yard. The plum leaves huddled darkly together. The racks were already up in the Wens’ courtyard, and the red flowers Madam Meng had laid out to dry occupied one corner. Gu Qing could scarcely make out the red in the dark. She saw that the racks were steady and that the materials were clear of the old drain, and stopped craning her neck. She turned and closed the door. The bar dropped cleanly into its slot. Under the quilt Grandmother shifted her legs a little to make room for her on the inside, as she had when Gu Qing was a child and came back to bed after playing. Tomorrow, though, two of them would be going out.