The moment Zhao Pinglan saw the things Zhang Suqing had brought, she instinctively frowned.
She immediately began nagging:
“You’re already a married daughter. Why are you still bringing all this stuff back home? It’s not even a holiday. If your mother-in-law finds out, she’ll think the Zhang family is terribly poor.”
Their family wasn’t like those others who constantly expected married daughters to haul things back to their parents’ house.
Without considering how difficult that might make life for the daughter in her husband’s family.
“What’s there to worry about? I’m carrying the Cheng family’s child, aren’t I?”
Zhang Suqing hated hearing such things the most.
“So what if I’m married? You and Dad still raised me. Bringing things home is only natural.”
“Besides, our family got me a job too. I earn no less than Cheng Qiang does. I don’t rely on the Cheng family to support me, so if I bring some things back to my parents, what right do they have to interfere?”
After all, she wasn’t spending the Cheng family’s money.
“And you still remember you’re pregnant?” Zhao Pinglan rolled her eyes.
“Instead of spending money like this, you should be saving it. Once the child’s born, there’ll be plenty of places to spend money. Your father and I can still manage ourselves, so stop worrying so much about us.”
“Oh, Mom, enough already. I already carried everything here. I can’t exactly carry it all back now. Hurry up and make the dough for dumplings. Dad and Hongwei will be back from work soon and can eat right away.”
Zhang Suqing impatiently cut her off and sprawled onto the heated brick bed with her seven-month pregnant belly.
Watching them, Zhang Yunqing quietly sighed.
The way the mother and daughter interacted with each other had always felt like some unreachable fantasy in the original owner’s memories.
Zhang Suqing was Zhao Pinglan’s first child, and her personality was extremely similar to her mother’s—hot-tempered and unwilling to yield to anyone since childhood.
Zhao Pinglan doted endlessly on this daughter. In her heart, even her two sons probably ranked behind her.
Because of the original owner’s personality, combined with being the third child, she had rarely shared such close mother-daughter moments with Zhao Pinglan. Naturally, their relationship had grown distant.
Take Li Jinfeng wanting to swap jobs, for example.
If the target of that proposal had been Zhang Suqing—
The suggestion never would have even reached Zhang Suqing’s ears. Zhao Pinglan would’ve shut it down mercilessly first.
Who cared whether Li Jinfeng was carrying the Zhang family’s grandchild? Trying to bully her eldest daughter was absolutely unacceptable.
Making dumplings was delicate work. After Zhang Hongbing clumsily ruined several dumplings, he was completely kicked away from the table.
Unconvinced, he sat beside the stove adding firewood while chatting with Zhang Suqing about everything that had happened at home recently.
When he mentioned how Zhang Yunqing had directly confronted Zhang Hongwei, Zhang Suqing raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“You should’ve been this tough ages ago! Before, you were like a soft little bun. Just looking at you irritated me.”
Zhang Suqing had a straightforward personality and hated weaklings the most.
She bluntly criticized:
“You suffered Hongwei’s bullying for so many years for nothing.”
The words didn’t sound pleasant, but her expression had noticeably softened.
At that moment, Zhang Yunqing finally seemed to understand why Zhang Suqing had treated the original owner so poorly before.
It wasn’t hatred.
It was frustration at uselessness. She simply couldn’t bear to watch anymore, so she chose to keep her distance.
The three women all worked efficiently. Before Zhang Junzhong and Zhang Hongwei even returned, all the dough and filling had already been wrapped into dumplings.
There was still a little filling left over, so Zhao Pinglan scooped it into a small bowl. Tomorrow, she could stir-fry it with some radish and make another meat dish.
In these times, when a large family with three strong laborers ate dumplings, there was no possibility of everyone stuffing themselves full.
So Zhao Pinglan also steamed some coarse corn buns to go with the meal.
After eating and drinking their fill, Zhang Suqing wiped her mouth.
Then she immediately directed Zhao Pinglan to prepare bathing supplies and specifically requested Zhang Yunqing accompany her to the bathhouse.
“How about Mom goes with you instead? Your sister already bathed recently, so she’s still clean. Besides, she’s clumsy—I’m worried she’ll bump into you.”
Zhao Pinglan looked uneasy. With her eldest daughter heavily pregnant, if she slipped or got hurt at the bathhouse, the Zhang family wouldn’t be able to explain themselves to the Cheng family.
But Zhang Yunqing actually really wanted to go.
Speaking of bathing, she felt deeply depressed about the whole matter.
At this time, most profitable state-owned factories had employee bathhouses.
Workers received one bath ticket every month.
Zhang Junzhong and Zhang Hongwei both worked at the machinery factory, so together they got two bath tickets monthly.
Since they were men and not particularly fussy about cleanliness, they usually just fetched water in the courtyard and wiped themselves down casually.
As a result, those two bath tickets were mostly used by the original owner and Zhao Pinglan.
Even so, they only got to bathe once a month.
Zhang Yunqing genuinely found this hard to accept.
Even when she’d grown up in the countryside under poor conditions, her grandmother would still leave out a huge basin of water under the sun every week and thoroughly wash her from head to toe.
But after coming here, bathing alone was enough to make her struggle adapting.
A few days earlier, she had used eighteen cents out of the original owner’s saved seventy-three cents to visit a public bathhouse, only for Zhao Pinglan to scold her for being overly delicate and wasteful.
And now, in the middle of summer, she could only wipe herself down every night with a towel and basin of water.
Thankfully, the printing factory was also a large enterprise and naturally had its own employee bathhouse too, likewise distributing one bath ticket each month.
Every day, Zhang Yunqing eagerly waited for the first of next month to arrive. Once she received her salary and bath ticket, she could at least maintain proper personal hygiene.
Now that Zhang Suqing was suggesting they go bathe, she would obviously be the one paying.
Zhang Yunqing couldn’t have been happier.
Zhang Suqing wasn’t stingy, especially not toward her own mother.
She immediately said:
“Then the three of us can all go together. Let Yunqing scrub my back. Mom scrubs way too hard—I can’t stand it.”
Zhao Pinglan was used to heavy labor, so her hands were extremely rough. Every time she scrubbed her daughters at the bathhouse, she practically rubbed their skin raw until tiny blood spots appeared everywhere.
As children, bathing had been what they feared most.
After growing older and gaining some strength in their own hands, the original owner and Zhang Suqing had developed their only real unspoken agreement:
They would bathe together and scrub each other’s backs instead.
The moment Zhao Pinglan heard that, she hurriedly refused.
“No way. It’s not like we have money to burn. You two sisters go yourselves. I don’t need a bath.”
One extra person meant one extra fee, and she couldn’t bear to spend it.
“Take good care of your sister once you’re inside. Don’t let anyone bump into her.”
Zhao Pinglan instructed Zhang Yunqing while pulling out a folding little stool.
“If she gets tired while washing, let her sit and rest. And absolutely don’t let her soak in the pool, understand?”
“Understood.”
Zhang Yunqing nodded. She had no intention of entering the soaking pool herself anyway.
Bathhouses at this time all had communal soaking pools. After scrubbing clean, people could soak inside to relax their tired nerves.
People from Jiang Province especially loved this habit.
Zhang Suqing herself was the type who never wanted to get out once she got in. Ever since she became pregnant, Zhao Pinglan had repeatedly warned her not to soak in the pool for fear of harming the baby.
The original owner, however, had been the same as Zhang Yunqing—both suspicious of the pool’s hygiene.
She hated the idea of everyone’s feet and butts soaking together in the same water and had disliked it since childhood.
Because of that, she’d been beaten quite a few times growing up.
Since Zhang Suqing’s body was inconvenient now, she only carried the mesh bag holding their clean clothes.
Zhang Yunqing carried the enamel washbasin in her left arm. Inside were towels, a scrubbing cloth, and a bar of soap for washing the whole body.
In her right hand, she carried the little stool Zhao Pinglan had prepared for the pregnant woman.
The two sisters then headed together toward the bathhouse.