By custom, a bride goes back to her mother's house three days after the wedding.
I have no mother. I have a shop.
But custom is custom, and this time custom suited me perfectly.
Pei Yan came with me.
He walked, because there wasn't a horse left in the house. He walked half a pace ahead of me, listing, waving his arms, mumbling some song with both the tune and the words wrong.
At the head of Yonghe Street he stopped and turned to me and raised his voice loud enough for half the street.
"Wife! Your family keeps a pawnshop, don't they? Then your father must be a generous man!"
I ground my teeth.
Heads came out of doorways on both sides, laughing.
"Go easy, my lord, you'll have the girl in tears!"
"Old Su's about to lose the daughter and the shop!"
I took his arm and hauled him along, arranging my face into something suitably humiliated and resigned.
In my trade, if you're going to play a part, play it all the way. Half a performance gives you away faster than none.
By the time the shop door shut behind us, the smell of wine was still there — but the man beside me had a straight back, both hands clasped behind him, and his eyes went over the whole front room in the space of three breaths.
"You sing badly," I said.
"I know," he said. "I've had three years to practice."
My father sat behind the counter, running a string of cash through his fingers.
He didn't turn around. A blind man hears a footstep better than I read a face.
"Zhen'er," he said. "You've brought someone."
"I've brought my husband home."
"Your husband isn't drunk."
I stopped short.
So did Pei Yan.
My father dropped the string of coins on the counter and turned his head toward him — turned it precisely, so precisely that if you didn't see the clouded eyes you'd have sworn he was looking straight at the man.
"A drunk man's heel comes down heavy. You hear two sounds. His lordship makes one." He said it mildly. "Besides — a drunk man doesn't know where the threshold is. His lordship stopped exactly at it."
I looked at my father.
For three years I'd thought I was his eyes.
Apparently he had never needed mine very much.
I put the armor plate on the counter.
"Father. Have a look at this for me."
He held out his hands.
I watched those hands — the hands that had gone over tens of thousands of objects, nails cut short to the quick, a thin layer of callus on the fingertips, soft without being slack.
His index finger touched the broken edge first.
Then travelled along the outer face. Slow. Even.
Then turned it and swept the inside.
I waited for him to say soft iron. I waited for him to say thick lacquer. I waited for him to curse whatever apprentice had set those rivets so badly.
My father said nothing at all.
His hand stopped.
Not the pause of a man thinking. The pause of a man who has trodden on something in the dark.
"Father?"
He pulled his hand back, fast, and wiped it on the front of his robe. Twice.
"Take it away." His voice had gone hoarse. "Take it out of this shop. Burn it."
"Father—"
"Zhen'er." He raised his head. Those clouded eyes saw nothing, and I took a step back. "Listen to me once. You'll be in this trade all your life. Remember it."
"A forgery is made to fool the eye," he said. "Nobody has ever made one to fool the hand."
"I have held this thing before."
There are three chests of ledgers in the back room.
Three generations of the One Word House are in them.
I grew up with those books. Every evening after we closed, I'd pull one out, sit by the lamp, and read it aloud to my father.
That was the custom of the last three years.
He was blind; he couldn't see his own storeroom anymore; so I read. What came in, who brought it, what date, what price, redeemed or not. I read from my great-grandfather's time forward. When I reached the end I went back to the beginning and started again.
Three years.
I read until I dreamed in ledger lines.
I read until I no longer needed to open a book to know that in the winter of the twelfth year of Jinghe an old woman pawned a silver bangle for three coppers and redeemed it twenty-seven days later, four cash short on the interest, and my father let it go.
Pei Yan stood in the doorway of the back room, looking at the three chests.
"That many," he said. "How long will it take to find?"
"There's nothing to find." I pulled out the twentieth year of Jinghe. "Wangsha fell in the tenth month. To forge three thousand sets you start five or six months before. If someone kept a plate back as proof, and then went and pawned it, he pawned it before the tenth month."
I laid the book on the table and opened it.
"Sixth month. Seventh month."
I turned the page.
My hand stopped.
Between the seventh month and the ninth month there was nothing.
It was not that the eighth month was empty.
The eighth month was not there.
I ran a finger down into the spine. All that remained was a narrow strip of paper half a knuckle wide, with a clean edge.
I stood there and went cold.
Not torn.
Someone tearing is in a hurry; the edge would be ragged, fibrous, ugly. Wrench a book like that and the spine buckles.
This was cut.
Cut with a paper knife, a rule laid down, pressed hard, drawn once.
Cut the way you cut mulberry paper to bind a new ledger.
Whoever did this was not in a hurry. Whoever did this had time. Whoever did this sat at the very table I was standing at, lit the lamp, took the rule and the knife, and cut one month cleanly out of his own life.
"Father." I looked up. My throat had gone raw. "Where is the eighth month of that year?"
My father sat still.
"Silverfish," he said. "Silverfish got it. I threw it out."
I looked at him.
For three years I had sat beside him every evening and read to him. For three years I had believed I knew him the way I know an object in my own palm.
I have never misread a hairpin in my life.
But I sat there looking straight into my father's face, and I could not read a single character of it.
I carried the ledger outside and sat down on the back step, where I used to hide as a child to eat things I'd stolen.
Pei Yan sat down beside me. A little apart.
He didn't ask. He didn't comfort me either.
He just sat there and let me be.
Strangely, that was easier to bear than anything he could have said.
I opened the ledger and tilted it into the late sun.
The habit is in my hands. I've never managed to break it.
Along the surviving margin, where the knife had passed, there was a very fine impression — the print of the rule pressed down before the blade followed it.
The rule mark did not sit against the cut.
It sat to the left of it. Exactly one fen to the left.
I went rigid.
A right-handed man holds the rule with his left hand and runs the blade down the right side of it. The impression ends up on the left of the cut.
This was the other way round.
Whoever cut this page held the rule in his right hand.
I lifted my head and looked through the gap in the door, into the shop, where my father sat running that string of cash through his fingers, his thumb going back and forth over the first coin.
With his left hand.
In the whole of Yonghe Street, in three generations of the One Word House, there has only ever been one left-handed man.
