When Jiang Yeqian heard her answer, he knew that this girl was neither acknowledging nor denying anything. She just allowed the old men to continue with their blind guesses and with their amazing imagination, they definitely would have cooked up all sorts of exaggerations.
“What’s your plan after this house is built?” Jiang Yeqian pointed toward the house that was almost complete.
“What do you mean ‘what’s my plan’?” Qi Qingyao did not understand his question.
Jiang Yeqian replied, “The house is nice, but there’s not a decent piece of furniture inside. Furthermore, there are no antique furnishings to elevate the style of your house.”
“This means that…” Qi Qingyao stroked her fair chin with her slender index finger and murmured, “The money that I gave you could not buy any decent antique furniture after all!”
She heard that the calligraphy and paintings of those big shots were all worth a lot.
“Looks like I still have to make more money” Qi Qingyao sighed while looking up toward the sky.
….
The three children did not get off the carriage. They were sitting in the carriage silently, looking around outside. The village was very familiar to them, but the children in the village had not played with them much, so they did not want to get down.
Dabao and Erniu were playing a game of cat’s cradle. The two of them played for a while before realizing that Xiaobao had been staring out of the carriage window in stony silence. His gaze seemed to be locked on their mother.
Erniu put down the strings and asked, “Xiaobao, what are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.” Xiaobao retracted his gaze and looked down.
“You clearly were thinking about something.”
Erniu looked rather conflicted. She puffed up her cheeks like tiny, pink buns and said seriously, “You’ve been acting all adult-like lately. What’s that word? Right, contemplate! No…ponder? Think? Consider? Speculate? I don’t know, it basically means you’re thinking about something.”
Xiaobao raised his brows slightly, “You could tell?”
“Don’t think I’m stupid!” Erniu’s big, naive eyes were full of concern. “What are you thinking, Xiaobao?”
Dabao looked at the two of them without saying a word.
He did not understand what Xiaobao was thinking about all day. He did not think that much.
Xiaobao formed the words in his head, then said in a crisp and tender voice, “Dabao, Erniu, don’t you two think that mother is very strange?”
“Strange? What about her is strange?” Dabao was puzzled.
Erniu, on the other hand, did not understand the meaning of the sentence at all, and did not answer.
“Mother can read, can draw blueprints and is even good at gambling…also…”
Xiaobao listed down the differences as if he were counting treasures, but after saying these things, he scratched his head, somewhat vexed. “I can’t put my finger on it, but it just feels strange.”
Dabao said confidently, “It’s indeed a little strange that mother is literate. But even so, she’s still our mother.”
“Mother shouldn’t be able to read, it’s impossible. If she’s can read, then she wouldn’t be our mother.” Xiaobao’s big eyes flickered, his tone persistent.
Dabao said nothing for a while.
Erniu tilted her head, her gaze vacant, “So Mother…isn’t Mother? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know either.”
“Xiaobao, do you hear yourself? Xiaobao, you must not have eaten a good breakfast lately, that’s why your words don’t make sense. You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Dabao said single-mindedly.
Dabao and Erniu looked at him with the insistence that he had not eaten enough, which made Xiaobao mutter a little sullenly.
“I know what I’m talking about.” He paused a little, and added with a mosquito-like voice, “I just have my doubts.”
“Doubts?” Erniu said.
“I doubt that mother is our mother,” Xiaobao looked at the other two with bright eyes after he finished speaking.
The other two, “…”
