# Chapter 039: Aunt Lan Had Us Sell Them Again
The next day, Xiaoyezi pulled an old keyboard out of a cardboard box, and half a tangled bundle of cables came out with it.
Junzi said that when these first came in, there was barely room for them in the cabinet. After sitting there for years, they’d gotten so dusty even the dust couldn’t be bothered to settle anywhere else. Xiaoyezi wiped one of the keys with a rag and asked if they could clear them out. He didn’t answer. Instead, he peeled the old price tag off the side of the box and crumpled it in his palm.
Ye Yan picked out the power supply they still needed for testing. He tried out the rest of the items that could be sold: two keyboards, two ordinary old power supplies, and a bundle of cables. Xiaoyezi laid them out on the table and went to call over a fellow repairman from the same street. Before leaving, she’d wanted to get all the packaging together, but Junzi thought she was dawdling and said, “It’s not like we’re selling new stuff.”
The buyer took a quick look. He tapped a few keys, turned the power supply around to inspect its back, picked up the cables and shook them, then offered only 180 yuan.
“Two hundred.” Junzi leaned on the counter. “Go on, find another one that’s this complete.”
The man put the cables back and told him he needed usable secondhand parts; it didn’t matter if the lot was complete, especially since these two keyboards would need cleaning when he got them home. He didn’t use the falling coin price to drive the price down, just pointed to an old stain that wouldn’t come off. Junzi said it wouldn’t affect the keys, but kept his hand over the stain, refusing to let him look at it again.
Little Ye had thought that putting the things out on display had to be better than leaving them piled at the bottom of a box. Now that a buyer really was about to take them away, she thought 180 was too little. She bent her head and untangled the bundle of cables. Two were knotted together, and it took her ages to loosen them. Her fingernails were full of dust.
“Take them home, and you can pick out what you need today.” She wound up the cables and pushed them beside the keyboard. “We tested everything in here. Don’t take it apart and just pick out the cheap stuff. Take the whole lot.”
The buyer still offered only 180 yuan and had already picked up his bag.
Junzi looked at the newly emptied bottom of the box, then finally tossed the price tag in his palm into the wastepaper basket.
“Take it. Next time you need something, ask me first. Don’t keep making me show you everything, then going somewhere else to buy it.”
The buyer paid with two banknotes and got twenty yuan in change. Junzi pocketed the full 180. Little Ye secured the keyboard in the bag, pressed the bundle of cables down into its opening herself, and helped the buyer carry it down the steps. The bag swung by his leg, and a few minutes later he turned off down the street.
When she returned to the shop, Junzi had already put the money in an old envelope. He took the electricity bill and went out. When he came back, he tucked the stamped receipt into the expense ledger. He hadn’t brought back a single yuan of the 180.
Ye Yan was moving another box, and now there was just enough room for him to set his foot down. Little Ye crouched to wipe the floor. She saw the shallow box still inside the counter, so she gathered up all the empty packaging left from the sale and moved it outside, without stuffing anything in there.
On the afternoon of December 7, Ye Yan wrote the latest price he’d asked about in his notebook: one coin was 4,200; he wanted to sell half a coin.
When Little Ye heard “sell,” she first thought she must have said too much again the night before. Since the announcement went public, the offers she’d received had been getting lower and lower. She’d also said to sell enough to cover what they needed right now, rather than wait until it was time to pay and then run all over town looking for a buyer. But when half a coin was actually written down on paper, she still sat down beside him.
“Think it over some more. I’m not saying you have to do it today—”
“I already asked about it today,” Ye Yan said. “If it goes back up tomorrow, I’ll still have to accept today’s price. The next rent payment is fifteen hundred, and we need to have the money ready. I can’t make Chunhua cover it all by herself.”
He looked up for Wu Chunhua. She was finishing up her own accounts. Hearing him, she came over and turned the notebook the right way around. The child’s sleeves had already grown too short, she said, and her shoes were tight too. She’d been planning to buy her new ones in the next day or two.
Ye Yan worked it out with his pen: two thousand one hundred. He set aside two hundred for clothes and shoes, and left the remaining four hundred at home.
“I’m only selling this much. I’m keeping the rest.” He set down the pen. “Help me check that the price is being calculated right.”
Little Ye read the line from beginning to end. She badly wanted to say, “Wait one more day,” but knew she couldn’t come up with tomorrow’s price. In the end, she smudged the ink dot beneath “half a coin” and reminded him there’d be fees on top of that. He nodded and didn’t increase the amount.
Before closing the shop, Junzi cleared a space at the inspection station so they could use the materials they kept in shared custody. The three of them reviewed the decision. Ye Yan personally transferred his half coin, paid the fee for this transaction, and received 2,100 yuan in cash directly from the buyer. They prepared a new record of the updated holdings, returned the old disk to the shallow box, and put the test USB drive back in the locked drawer.
Little Ye watched as the money went into Ye Yan’s coat pocket. It was much thicker than the ten-yuan note from when they repaired the door years ago, and could really save him a few trips. But, annoyingly, she found herself thinking again about the amount missing from the page.
The next day, the couple paid the rent in full. When Wu Chunhua came back, she tucked the receipt into her bag. Little Ye was changing the child’s clothes. As she pulled up a sleeve, her wrist showed again, but the child paid no attention, anxiously asking whether Dad was coming.
“He has to hand over a machine first,” Wu Chunhua said. “We’ll go take a look. It’s not his feet that have to wear them.”
The child clutched her old shoes and refused to move. Little Ye took the shoes from her hands and held them up against her own feet, pretending to examine them very seriously. The child hurriedly snatched them back and finally agreed to go out.
At the stall selling clothes and shoes, she first wanted something brightly colored. But once she tried it on, she complained that the fur tickled her chin and stuck her hand down the neckline, scratching wildly. Wu Chunhua changed it for a thinner layer underneath and had her turn around twice by herself. Little Ye crouched down to take off her shoes. The toes of her socks were already fuzzy. The little foot in her palm was warm, nothing like the feet she remembered always being cold in winter.
By the time Ye Yan arrived, one of the child’s shoes was on, while the other was hidden under the stool. When she saw her dad, she immediately stuck out her foot, no longer caring about the shoe—she wanted him to hold her while she tried it on.
“Stand up and walk. How can you tell if it fits when you’re being carried?” He crouched down, took the other shoe Little Ye had found, and helped the child put it on.
The child walked across the stall, then deliberately turned back and squeezed between his arms. Little Ye was still crouching beside them. Ye Yan asked if it had felt tight just now. She looked up and answered, then saw him pressing the toe of the shoe and smoothed the child’s sock cuff flat.
They bought the warm clothes and cotton shoes for two hundred yuan. After Wu Chunhua paid, she glanced at the coat hanging nearby. The vendor invited her to try it on, but she felt the fabric and said she’d leave it for today. Once they’d left the stall, she quietly told Little Ye that she’d wanted a new one too, and had had her eye on that coat for ages, but lately every bit of pay she was short had already been spoken for.
Little Ye hugged the bag of clothes tightly and didn’t tell her that the old one was fine too.
The child took a few steps, then wanted Dad to look at her shoes. Ye Yan bent down to humor her. Turning around, he saw the black smudge on Little Ye’s hand and told her to give him the bag instead of wiping it on her face. Instinctively, she held out her hand to him, but halfway through changed course and handed him the bag. Wu Chunhua pulled a handkerchief from her bag and wiped Little Ye’s hand a few times, chiding her for getting dust even on her cuff.
The four hundred yuan didn’t go out with them. Her parents still kept it at home.
On the evening of December 11, Little Ye sat down at the dinner table. The child’s new shoes were placed by the table leg, their toes pointing toward Dad.
Ye Yan got a call from someone asking about the price. When he hung up, he smiled. The caller was willing to pay fifty-nine hundred for one today. He hadn’t agreed, and simply set the phone on the cabinet.
Wu Chunhua was serving soup. When she heard the price had gone up again, her hand paused in midair for a moment.
“You sold yours, and the price shoots up fast.” She set down the soup bowl and looked at Little Ye. “Next time you say you want to sell, should I wait a couple of days first?”
Ye Yan smiled too. He picked up a slice of vegetable with his chopsticks, but didn’t put it in his mouth for a long while. “If I’d known, I would’ve waited a few more days. You could’ve gone back to look at that coat.”
Hearing the adults laugh, the child looked over at Little Ye too, as if she’d finally been waiting for a line she could join in with.
“Auntie Lan told us to sell again!”
Little Ye had just taken a bite of rice. She’d heard that line many times. In the past, she’d always thought her parents were right, but now that it was directed at her, even that mouthful was hard to swallow. She picked up her soup bowl and took a few sips. When she put it down, the bottom of the bowl clinked louder than usual.
“Are you going to eat or not? One minute you say I know, the next you complain I don’t know it right. I might as well just focus on getting you to eat a couple more bowls.”
Wu Chunhua laughed out loud, and the child immediately held out her bowl, asking for more. Little Ye served her a little, but didn’t look up when she was done. Ye Yan ate his vegetables and told her that he’d sold that one himself, but hearing that price today still made him wince a little.
She murmured an acknowledgment, her chopsticks tapping against the rim of the bowl. No one tried to work out what that figure might become. Wu Chunhua went to the kitchen for more soup, while the child climbed onto Ye Yan’s lap and asked him to look at the little flower on the side of her shoe. When they washed her feet later, he wasn’t allowed to scrub it off.
Little Ye had thought she ought to be happy. Her father didn’t ask why she hadn’t told him sooner, yet she wanted even more to keep her distance, afraid his next words would be another joke—and afraid he might say nothing at all.
After dinner, she washed the dishes and went to look for her notebook in her bag. The child was following Ye Yan into the room, holding her new shoes, one in each hand. Their soles tapped lightly against each other.
Little Ye turned past the few price quotes she’d written down and started a new page. First, she recorded the time they repaired the door: the shop and Ye Yan each sold ten coins, and ten yuan covered the labor and materials. His five yuan had first been borrowed from the shop. Later, the old machine sold for sixty; Junzi paid him back five yuan, and the shop kept fifty-five.
She paused for a while before adding the 180 from this time, with “electricity bill” after it. The two thousand one hundred from selling half a coin: fifteen hundred for rent, two hundred for clothes and shoes, and four hundred kept at home.
“He came just as we were buying the shoes,” she added.
Her pen stopped beside that line. She wanted to write something more, to make clear that she hadn’t been entirely wrong either. After thinking for a long time, she still just put the cap back on the pen.
In the room, the child was asking Dad to find somewhere high to put the shoes so she’d see them as soon as she woke up tomorrow. Ye Yan asked if by the window would work, but she thought it was too far and was picking through one spot after another. Listening, Little Ye folded the page inward and tucked it in with the old price notes.