Chapter 7: Her Father

On the seventh day of every month, the Bureau gave its recorder the morning off, and Ming spent it on Lantern Lane.

It was a narrow street that ran down from the temple toward the canal, so narrow that the eaves on either side nearly touched, and in the cold bright sun of a late autumn morning it smelled of fried dough and wet stone. Her father's shop was the fourth door on the left. Lin's Paper, said the board over it, in characters her grandfather had carved, and below that, smaller, in characters her father had painted himself and spelled wrong: Fine Writing Paper, Ink, and Offerings for the Departed.

She stopped across the lane and looked at it. She always did.

"You don't have to come in," she said.

"I do," said Nine, beside her. "One hundred paces. The shop is long, but not that long." He had dressed with even more care than usual, which she would not have thought possible: the gray robe brushed, the rust sash tied in a knot she had never seen before, his hair smooth. "Besides. I've never been introduced to a father. I want to see how it's done."

"He can't see you."

"He can if I let him."

She turned and looked at him. "You can do that?"

"Rule ninety. A fox who enters a man's house without letting himself be seen is a thief."

"You said there were three hundred and twelve. That's the first one you've numbered past the fifties."

"The nineties are older," Nine said. "Older rules are stricter." He smiled at her, the one-sided smile. "I'm a great many things, Recorder. I've never been a thief."

Her father was on a ladder at the back of the shop, putting bales of yellow paper on a high shelf, and he was singing. He sang badly and with enormous enjoyment. He was a round man in a brown work jacket with paper dust on both sleeves, and the bald top of his head shone in the light from the door.

"Ba," said Ming.

He looked round and nearly fell off the ladder.

"Ming! It's the seventh already? It can't be. I've lost a day somewhere. Where did I put it?" He came down two rungs at a time, which he was too old for, and then he saw Nine, standing in the door behind her, and stopped on the bottom rung with a bale of paper in his arms.

Nine bowed. It was the long bow. It had all its parts.

"Uncle," he said. "My name is Hu Jiu. I work with your daughter at the temple. I hope I don't intrude."

Her father looked at Nine. Then at Ming. Then at Nine again, at the gray silk and the rust sash and the long, handsome, entirely unsuitable face. And Ming watched an idea arrive in her father's head, and settle in, and make itself comfortable.

"Oh," said her father. "Oh."

"Ba, it's not..."

"Come in! Come in. Sit down. Don't sit there, that's the offering paper, you'll get gold leaf on your behind." He put the bale down on the counter, missed, and caught it. "Have you eaten? You haven't eaten. Nobody who works at that temple eats. Ming, why didn't you tell me you were bringing someone?"

"Because I'm not bringing someone. He's from work."

"From work," her father agreed, beaming. "Of course. Sit down, Hu Jiu. I'll make noodles."

Her father made noodles as he did everything, with great love and no method at all.

They ate them at the low table in the back room, where Ming had eaten every meal of her childhood, with the window open onto the little yard and the persimmon tree that had dropped all its leaves and kept its fruit, bright orange on the bare black branches. The noodles were too thick and the broth was too salty. Her father talked the whole time.

Nine had not touched his bowl.

He sat on his heels at the table with his hands in his lap, perfectly polite, perfectly upright, looking at the steam rising off the noodles. Ming looked at him. She remembered the bun at her desk. One does not eat in a house where one has not been invited to the table.

"Ba," she said. "Tell him to eat."

Her father blinked. "What?"

"He's very formal. He won't eat unless you ask him."

"Ask him? He's sitting at my table. Hu Jiu, eat! Eat, eat. You're too thin. You'll fall through a crack in the floor."

Nine picked up his chopsticks.

He ate the first mouthful slowly. Then he put the chopsticks down for a moment and sat looking at the bowl, and Ming saw his throat move. Then he picked them up again and ate everything. The thick noodles, the salty broth, the one egg her father had broken into it that had gone hard. He ate it all, and drank the broth from the bowl with both hands, and set the bowl down empty, and bowed to her father over it.

"Thank you, Uncle," he said. "That was very good."

"It's terrible," said her father happily. "I know it's terrible. My wife was the cook. Have some more."

It was her father who brought up the fever. He always did, sooner or later, on the seventh day.

"I was dying, you know." He said it to Nine, cheerfully, filling Nine's bowl for the third time. "Three years ago this month. The doctor came and shook his head, and my neighbor started pricing coffins."

Nine put his chopsticks down.

"Then on the twentieth I woke up and asked for congee." Her father laughed. "The week Ming started at the temple. I said, she's brought me luck."

Ming looked at her bowl.

"That's what you get," said her father, "for raising a girl who can read."

Ming stood up.

"I'll get more ink for the shop," she said. "The good cakes. They're in the back."

"They're on the shelf right behind you."

"The other ones."

She went into the storeroom behind the back room and stood among the bales of paper in the dim light, smelling the size and the dust, with her hands flat on a bale. The twentieth. He had always remembered the date. She was the one who could not stand to.

Through the paper screen she could hear them.

"She doesn't stay," her father said, lower now. "Since she moved to the temple. She comes on the seventh, she eats, she goes."

Nine said nothing.

"Three years. I thought it was the work. Maybe it's the work." A pause. "Is it the work?"

There was a silence, and for once nobody filled it with a rule.

"She has an inkstone with a crack in it," Nine said. "She grinds it too hard, and she won't replace it."

"No?"

"I offered. She looked at me as if I'd offered to replace her arm."

Her father was quiet for a moment.

"That's a cheap stone," he said. "I sold her that one myself. The day after the fever broke." He sniffed. "I could give her a good one."

"I don't think," said Nine gently, "that she wants a good one, Uncle."

Ming stood among the paper bales and did not move. Then she took two ink cakes off the shelf, the ordinary ones, because those were the ones she had come for, and went back out with her face arranged.

Her father was wiping his eyes with his paper-dusty sleeve. He said it was the pepper. There had not been any pepper in the noodles.

They walked back up Lantern Lane in the late afternoon, when the sun had gone off the street and only the tops of the eaves were still gold.

Nine was quiet. He walked a pace behind her left shoulder, the proper place, and for half the lane he said nothing, not even a rule. She found she didn't like it. The silence made her hear her own footsteps.

"He thinks you're courting me," she said.

"I know. It was very flattering. I was not aware I had so much to recommend me."

"You don't."

"No," Nine agreed. "But your father is a generous man." He walked a few more steps. "He put too much salt in the broth."

"He always does."

"It was the best meal I've had in twelve years."

She stopped walking.

He nearly walked into her, and caught himself, and stood looking down at her with the gold light going off the eaves above them. He looked, for just an instant, like someone who had dropped something valuable and heard it break.

He opened his fan before she could speak. "Foxes count in twelves. The years have animals, you know, it's convenient. Shall we go? It's getting cold."

"You said you're never cold."

"I'm cold for you," said Nine. "It's a courtesy. Come along."

She came along. Above them the last gold went off the eaves, and the lane filled with blue dusk.

She went down to the Hall of Registers that night, alone, after he had curled up under the ginkgo. She had meant to wait for her monthly check. She couldn't.

The register for Lantern Lane fell open at the right page by itself. The lamp trembled a little in her hand. She set it down on the reading table and looked at the line, as she had looked at it every month for three years.

Lin Fu, paper seller, Lantern Lane. Born in the year of the Dog. Life ends: the twentieth of the tenth month, three years ago.

Her own red strike ran through the date, heavy at the start and leaning at the end.

But tonight, for the first time, she wasn't looking at her strike. She was looking at the characters under it. All day she had been thinking about handwriting, because of him. About strokes that stood apart and strokes that leaned. And now she looked at her father's line the way Nine had looked at her petition, holding it up to the lamp like a stone he suspected of being glass.

The name was written in one hand. Lin Fu, paper seller. A clerk's plain, upright hand, the ink faded brown with age.

The date was written in another.

It was the same color. Someone had matched the ink with great care. But the strokes were different. They were finer and more formal, and the character for twentieth had a little lift at the end of the last stroke, like a man raising his cup.

She knew that lift. She had read it twice on red paper in Han's office: the surety will reach your table before the lamps are lit. The same hand. Formal, fine, and a little proud of itself.

She held the lamp closer. And under the date, so faint she had to tilt the page to catch it, there was the ghost of a seal. A small square impression, pressed into the paper and then wiped, its characters too worn to read.

It was not her seal. She had never stamped this page. She had only struck it.

Somebody had been here before her.