She worked until past nine in the evening, and the house still wasn’t completely cleaned.
Seeing that the work simply couldn’t be finished that night and that Xiaoxi was drowsy and ready for bed, the Cleaning Auntie packed up her things. She said, “Don’t worry. Tomorrow morning, I’ll finish my other work downstairs and then come back to continue cleaning for you.”
Tonight, she had mainly cleaned the upstairs loft and the bathroom for Xu Huiqing. The kitchen hadn’t been touched yet.
When she left, she took with her a large bag of trash swept from under the loft bed and the room cabinets, along with the broken cardboard boxes from the living room cabinet. Xu Huiqing, feeling rather embarrassed, gave her half of the bag of lychees she had bought that day. The auntie politely declined twice, then smiled and took the lychees with her, leaving Xu Huiqing and Zhou Huaijin alone.
Logically, by this time, Zhou Huaijin should also have been heading back. The roof tiles and the floors in the room and living room had all been patched up; they just needed to dry.
But earlier, when they were cleaning, the dust in the room had been too thick, too dirty. Xu Huiqing had wanted them to eat before working and had even thought of cutting a watermelon for them. But the Cleaning Auntie was eager to finish and go home, and Zhou Huaijin was also afraid of working too late. Plus, the tables and chairs were covered in dust, a chaotic mess. So they had just decided to eat after they finished.
Especially the living room table. Xu Huiqing had wiped it down before and thought she had cleaned it, but the Cleaning Auntie poured laundry detergent on it and scrubbed it with a brush, revealing the tabletop’s original color.
It was unbelievable that it was actually cream-colored!
Now that the Cleaning Auntie was gone, Xiaoxi needed a bath and to go to sleep. It clearly wasn’t suitable for Zhou Huaijin to eat here. Xu Huiqing gave him the watermelon, lychees, and roast duck she had bought that day.
These were originally bought for Zhou Huaijin anyway. She and Xiaoxi couldn’t finish a whole watermelon by themselves, and there was no refrigerator at home.
Zhou Huaijin didn’t want to accept it, but Xu Huiqing smiled and stuffed everything into his hands. “If you don’t take it, it’ll just spoil and go to waste here. I don’t even have a refrigerator.”
“You’re giving me all this? What will you eat?” Xu Huiqing’s kitchen was still a complete mess, with nothing in it. He had seen earlier that this was all the food she had bought.
Holding Xiaoxi, Xu Huiqing saw that the girl on her shoulder was almost asleep. She lowered her voice and whispered, “I still have the jujube paste cake.”
She had bought two pieces of it. Xiaoxi had eaten one earlier.
A piece of the cake was over half the size of her palm. The little girl hadn’t finished hers, and some was left. That was enough for her.
Zhou Huaijin left her the lychees and went back with the watermelon and roast duck.
After Zhou Huaijin left, Xu Huiqing quickly fed Xiaoxi some formula, brushed her teeth, and bathed her. She lifted the dust sheet she’d used earlier, wiped down the bamboo mat on the bed, and laid Xiaoxi on it. She just gave her a few gentle pats, and soon the little one was sleeping spread-eagle on the bed, her little tummy rising and falling.
Watching her sleep so peacefully, Xu Huiqing couldn’t help but think of Xiaoxi in her previous life.
Back then, after Xiaoxi was found and returned, it had taken her several years to gradually stop the little girl from curling up tightly into a ball and startling awake during the night.
In this life, probably because she had brought her back in time, Xiaoxi hadn’t yet suffered any abuse. In just over a month, the little girl had already returned to her childhood sleeping posture, all sprawled out.
She couldn’t remember where she’d read it, that the sleeping positions of people and animals could show whether one felt safe in their environment, and that sleeping spread-eagle was the most secure and relaxed posture.
The curled-up fetal position Xiaoxi had slept in during her previous life was the posture of the least security.
Feeling a pang in her heart, Xu Huiqing’s eyes grew slightly moist. Hatred for that family surged in her heart again. She couldn’t help bending down and planting a gentle kiss on Xiaoxi’s forehead.
She had wanted to lie down beside Xiaoxi and hold her, but she was filthy, her hair and body covered in grime. She had to heat water to wash her hair and bathe first.
By this time, she had an electric kettle. Xu Huiqing heated the water and started washing her hair. Before she could finish, she heard a low knock on the door.
After taking the roast duck and watermelon back, Zhou Huaijin had cooked some noodles and made roast duck noodles.
He knew his new neighbor across the way hadn’t eaten dinner either and had nothing at home, having given him half the roast duck. While making the noodles in the kitchen, he saw the light still brightly on in the opposite house and knew the neighbor surely hadn’t slept yet, so he knocked on her door.
“Who is it?” Xu Huiqing asked warily.
Zhou Huaijin’s voice came from outside the door: “I made too many noodles. Thinking you probably haven’t eaten either, I brought you a bowl. I left it at the door. Just return the bowl tomorrow.”
Xu Huiqing opened the door. The opposite door was already shut, only a sliver of light escaping through the gap, and on the ground was a bowl of noodles in a soup bowl.
On top of the noodles lay a fried egg, a few greens, and some slices of cooked roast duck.
Before she had Xiaoxi, Xu Huiqing could sometimes survive on just a steamed bun a day at school without feeling hungry. But after becoming a mother, she couldn’t bear hunger at all. The moment she got a little hungry, she needed to eat quickly, or else her whole body felt weak, she saw stars, and her stomach churned with a gnawing discomfort.
She had long been hungry, fighting against it. Now, seeing the noodles on the ground and smelling the enticing aroma of food, she couldn’t hold back anymore. She carried the bowl to the already-cleaned round table, went into the kitchen to rinse the shampoo from her hair, wrapped her wet hair in a new towel, and sat at the dining table to eat her dinner.
After finishing a hot bowl of egg and roast duck noodles, Xu Huiqing was covered in sweat, her limbs relaxed. She slumped back against the chair in a “Ge You Slouch [T/N: A famous Chinese internet meme of actor Ge You slouching lifelessly on a couch]” and felt so utterly comfortable that she didn’t want to move a muscle.
She was too exhausted!
Cleaning was just too tiring!
Even though the Cleaning Auntie had done the bulk of the cleaning that evening, she and Zhou Huaijin hadn’t been idle for a moment either. They’d helped out the whole time; otherwise, they couldn’t have possibly finished before ten.
Now, sitting in her chair and surveying the living room, it finally looked like a place fit to live in.
Besides the round table and four folding chairs, there was a row of cabinets against the wall, over a meter high. They had originally been piled high with broken cardboard boxes full of old books and other junk. Now, those boxes had all been thrown out. Once the cabinets were cleaned, Xu Huiqing put the books she thought were still readable inside. Old magazines and newspapers were all taken away by the Cleaning Auntie. The top of the cabinets was cleared off, looking clean and tidy.
Xu Huiqing thought she could go to the Night Market tomorrow and buy a vase and a bouquet of fresh flowers to put on the cabinet.
Although this was only a temporary residence, she still wanted to create a comfortable environment for Xiaoxi. She didn’t want her to think that just because the house was simple, life could be handled carelessly.
She could also hang some picture frames on the wall, creating a photo wall with pictures of her and Xiaoxi, both together and alone.
In her past life, she had missed three and a half years of Xiaoxi’s life. In this life, she didn’t want to miss a single day of her growth, wanting to record every daily change and development.
She wanted to make ‘Xiao Xi’s Growth Journal’, chronicling every little bit of her daily growth and all the happy and unhappy things that happened. If one day, when Xiaoxi grew up, she still felt her mother didn’t love her, Xu Huiqing hoped she would look at the growth diary she wrote for her, so she would know that her mother truly loved her and had never stopped loving her. She was reflecting on what she had done in her past life that made Xiaoxi feel unloved by her.
Was it when Xiaoxi was in high school, when she accidentally overheard Old Zhao, Old Lady Zhao, and Second Sister Zhao talking and learned the truth about Xiaoxi’s abduction in her past life, and then sent Xiaoxi to board at school? She had been afraid that the things she put in the food might cause Xiaoxi to ingest something accidentally, or that the aflatoxin on the pots and utensils couldn’t be fully eliminated by high heat, so she had made her stay at school daily and rarely come home. She didn’t know if it was because of this. But she felt it was.
She didn’t regret sending Old Zhao and Old Lady Zhao away, but reflecting on it in this life, she wondered if she could have endured it a little longer, until Xiaoxi went to university?
But at that time, she couldn’t endure a moment longer. She only wanted to destroy their entire family! Even Zhao Bei… Although she had done her best to keep his bowls and chopsticks separate and wash them separately, she didn’t know if the food from the same pot affected him. The only one she had completely shielded was Xiaoxi. What had originally been a happy mood turned unhappy again because of thoughts of her past life.
She no longer felt like procrastinating. After washing the bowls and chopsticks and drying her hair, she sat in the room gently patting Xiaoxi while using the electric fan to dry her hair. You never truly know what you’re missing until you actually live there. For example, now, when Xu Huiqing was setting up the mosquito net, she discovered she had the net but no bamboo poles to support it. The room had been thoroughly cleaned today. She knew exactly whether there were any bamboo poles in the room that could support the mosquito net. Standing in the room, looking at the ceiling, which was at least two and a half meters high, and then at the empty room, she held the mosquito net, at a loss.
But not installing the mosquito net was definitely not an option. The windows had no screens, the room had no mosquito coils, and if the mosquito net wasn’t set up, she and Xiaoxi would be carried away by mosquitoes during the night. She suddenly remembered there were clothes-drying poles on the terrace, so she had to go there, take down the bamboo pole used for hanging clothes between the two side railings of the terrace, and create a makeshift conical princess-style net like those popular online in her past life, just to get through the night.
There was no light on the terrace, and the loft door was narrow and low, less than 1.7 meters high. The dim light from the loft, filtering through the small terrace door, couldn’t illuminate the entire terrace at all. Even with a flashlight in hand, in the pitch-black darkness, one end of the over three-meter-long bamboo pole still caught on the roof tiles, no matter how careful Xu Huiqing was. The sound of tiles falling from the roof startled her badly, and also gave the neighbor next door a big fright. Just as Xu Huiqing was praying she hadn’t woken the neighbors, the light from the next door came through the loft’s glass window. Soon after, Zhou Huaijin, dressed in his pajamas, came out onto the terrace. Seeing her still struggling clumsily, trying to pull back the bamboo pole now stuck in the roof and then laboriously maneuvering it through the small loft door, he couldn’t help but ask, “Need a hand?” Thinking the person opposite would refuse, he was surprised when her eyes lit up instantly. “Yes, please!”