Chapter 21: Liulang

Mei let down his sleeves in the gray of the twenty-second, before the first passengers. She did it at the stern, with her mother's sewing box open on the bench and Fish sitting on the stove lid with his arm held out as if for a splinter. The carter's jacket had a deep hem at each wrist, turned under twice and stitched, as country women always made them, so a boy could grow. Nobody had ever let it down. She picked the stitches out with the point of her knife, and shook the hem loose, and pressed the crease flat with her thumb. It came down a hand's width. Exactly to his wrist. "There," she said. "Two coppers." Fish studied his wrist with its new sleeve. He turned his arm over, and back. He looked at it as he'd looked at the first soup dumpling. "You could have done this…