The tune was halfway through. Song Xiaobei's arms were raised in midair, shaking nonstop, and he was clenching his teeth so hard a knot stood out at his jaw.
Zhou glanced at the phone on the armrest of the bench.
Minute twenty-three.
Song Xiaobei had changed shoes today: a pair of blue plastic slippers he'd dug out from under his desk. Normally he only wore them for his lunchtime nap.
The soles didn't slip anymore, but his heels kept sliding off the backs. Every time he shifted a foot, he had to curl his toes to grab hold, and his slippers kept slapping against the tiles.
The tune moved into the next section. Time to press both hands down.
Song Xiaobei pressed his hands down, and his knees gave out right along with them. He dropped straight back and landed squarely on the bench.
His left slipper went flying, landed by a potted plant, and flipped over.
A ding sounded in Zhou's ears.
[Xiao Song held on for 23 minutes today! That's way better than yesterday!]
[Too bad he sat down partway through again, so this round still doesn't count!]
[1 day left! Push a little harder tomorrow, Elder Zhou!]
Song Xiaobei sprawled back against the bench, panting. It took several breaths before he could squeeze anything out.
"Bro Zhou, how many minutes?"
"Twenty-three."
"Yesterday was eight." He counted it off on his fingers. "That's fifteen more!"
Then he wilted again and looked down at his bare foot.
"Tomorrow... tomorrow I'm wearing sneakers."
Zhou stopped the tune, bent down to pick up the slipper, and set it by Song Xiaobei's foot.
The 1 on the panel was still hanging there.
The glass door to the roof creaked open.
Wen Yining came out with her phone to her ear and a cup of coffee in her other hand.
She didn't look their way. She walked straight to the railing and stopped with her back to them. The wind flipped the badge on her chest around backward. She left it that way and kept looking down over the railing.
The voice on the other end carried even from several steps away, one sentence piling on top of the next. He couldn't make out the words, only that it was urgent.
It went on for a good half minute. She didn't cut in once. She looked down, took a sip of coffee, and held the cup in front of her chest again.
Song Xiaobei sat on the bench not daring to make a sound, holding in even his panting.
Her whole answer was two words.
"This afternoon."
The other end was still talking when she took the phone from her ear and hung up. She turned around and saw the two of them on the bench.
At the NovelPhoenix site, the author publishes this chapter; this copy was made without permission, while the source posting supports them.
Song Xiaobei had one arm up over his head, stretching it out. It was so sore it had locked up there, and now that it was up, he couldn't get it down.
Wen Yining's eyes stayed on that arm for half a second.
"Back at your desks at one sharp."
She turned and pulled the door open.
The door swung shut behind her.
Only then did Song Xiaobei use his other hand to lower that arm. He hunched his shoulders. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
"Ms. Wen saw."
"So she saw," Zhou said.
At 12:58, the two of them were back on the seventeenth floor.
Wen Yining was already typing. There was nothing on her desk but that cup of coffee.
At three in the afternoon, the jar of chrysanthemums in the break room went down a little more.
At 5:30, he got up and left. The turnstile beeped.
A little after six, just as he came out of the subway station, a notification popped up from the delivery app: Signed for.
He tapped it open. In the Signed by field, it said Recipient.
He put the phone back in his pocket and walked all the way back to his shared apartment. It didn't ring once.
At seven-thirty, his phone started buzzing on the desk.
One word on the screen: Mom.
The moment he picked up, her voice came barreling out.
"Did you buy that blood pressure monitor? How much was it? Your dad says send it back."
"I'm not sending it back."
"I asked you how much."
"Four fifty-nine."
"Four fifty-nine!" His mom's voice went up another notch. "Is that little intern salary of yours even enough to live on? Where'd the money come from?"
He unscrewed his thermos, then screwed it back on.
"It's not my salary. There's an allowance every month. It's called a pension."
She stopped short. Then she burst out laughing.
"A pension? What kind of name did your company pick for that!"
She was still laughing when the laughter suddenly got farther away, as if someone had taken the phone out of her hand.
A cough, in the background.
After the cough, the line went quiet for two seconds.
"Wasting money."
The voice stopped there.
"Send it back."
Any other time, this was where Zhou would say fine, send it back. Father and son, one line each, and they could hang up.
He gripped the phone and didn't say anything.
What came to mind was discharge day. At the counter of the nurses' station, a nurse slid a sheet of paper across and said to take his blood pressure once a day at home and write it down.
His dad folded the sheet in half twice, tucked it into his pocket, and said he knew.
Zhou never saw him take that sheet out again.
The community clinic was two stops away. His dad said it was too much trouble to go all that way. He was fine, so what was there to measure?
He paused.
"Take your blood pressure once every morning. Send me a photo."
Nobody on the other end said anything. There wasn't even a cough.
He pressed the phone tighter to his ear. All he could hear was a woman's voice on the TV over there, giving tomorrow's weather. Cloudy, with northerly winds, force three to four.
It sounded like his dad had already walked away.
At times like this, nobody in his family ever picked up the thread. If nobody said anything soon, he'd have to add that the photos weren't necessary after all, and smooth the whole thing over.
He counted in his head.
One.
Two.
His mom cut in from off to the side. She was far from the phone, but just as loud.
"Send what back? He's been through the manual three times! He's already taken it twice just now. The first time, he said he wasn't sitting right, so he had to sit up straight and do it all over again. You press it once and there it is, and it talks, too! It calls out the numbers louder than your dad does!"
"That's enough out of you."
It was his dad, keeping his voice low, right up close to the phone.
Then the other end went quiet again.
The weather forecast on the TV ended and went to commercials.
Zhou just held the phone to his ear and didn't add a single word.
"...Mm."
A while longer went by, and then his dad spoke again.
"Over there. Much overtime?"
"I leave on time."
"Good."
The call ended.
He set the phone back on the desk. Before the screen went dark, the call timer stopped at three minutes and seven seconds.
A little after nine, he sat on the edge of the bed soaking his feet.
[Elder Zhou, foot soak right on time today, and the water's just the right temperature! Trust a retiree to know what's what!]
He ignored it and planted his feet a little more firmly on the bottom of the basin.
The phone at the head of the bed buzzed once.
He wiped his hands and picked it up.
His dad had sent a photo.
Not a single word with it.
The photo was crooked. The blood pressure monitor sat at a slant and took up most of the frame. On its screen were three rows of big numbers.
Slanting into the upper right corner was a strip of wall calendar. The one on the living room wall back home.
He stared at those three rows of numbers for a while.
Then he pressed and held the photo and tapped Save.