The Rental Shop Owner

I had more confidence than I had ever had. After knowing what was most important to me, I didn’t make any more wild speculations. My face was puffy like a marshmallow so I couldn’t go to a hotel. After some consideration, I decided to go back but I could only hide out in the new den until my face could be shown around town. Binbin kept cussing out the tall guy who hit me. “That motherfucker. To think I washed his socks and made roast pork for him. Ungrateful son of a bitch. Goddammit. If I ever get my hands on him again, I swear I’m gonna bust his balls. Fuck…” He didn’t do it on purpose and he even apologized to me, which was thanks to you. But before that– “Hey, how come you’ve never washed my socks or made roast pork for me?” He glared at me and nudged the bruises on my stomach really hard. “Ah! Help! Someone’s trying to kill his Romeo!” The more I yelled the more he became worked up, and he even began to pinch my marshmallow face. I was grimacing and gasping from the pain. My little devil, my troublemaker, I’m waving the white flag, okay?  “Hey, stop. Please. Hey, I’ve already lost my good looks.” He held my cheeks between his fingers and demanded angrily, “Say that again? Who’s Romeo?” “You. You are!” Only then did he smile. He patted me a few times and snuck a few kisses. “Ge, you’re such a good boy.” Hmmph! It’s never too late for revenge. Plus, you’re Romeo and I’m Romeo too. There’s no conflict there. He really ended up cooking for me. The first bite of the sweet and sour ribs made my jaw drop. Yum! Even better than my mom’s! But then why hadn’t he done more at home? I recalled that gross bowl of instant noodles—ewwww. “Me cooking for Ding Hongmei? Maybe in her dreams.” He sure knew what I was thinking. Well, you could have cooked for yourself. Idiot. The getaway only lasted two days before I had to open the shop for business and report my current status back to the mothership. My cell phone had been getting so many calls the past two days while I had to pretend that I was in Shanghai waiting for merchandise. It was exhausting. I asked him to watch the shop for me. He didn’t say much. I supposed he gave it the a-okay? I topped twice that night. He lied on top of me limply, mumbling, “I got some money saved up. I don’t need you to provide for me.” I fondled the tender meat on his butt while he was vulnerable. “I provide for you? You wish!” “But if I watch the shop for you, your family…” He licked my nipples and then squeezed them before looking at me. “Uncle and Aunty Shen…” Uncle. Aunty. He called my pa and ma, uncle and aunty. He called his mom Ding Hongmei. “Don’t you worry.” I won’t let anyone bully you. I prepared for the worst case scenario. I rubbed his head so he would rest assured. He didn’t make a sound for a while. “Ge, we can’t let them know about us.” I know, I said to myself, let’s keep it a secret. It was just that my old lady would start to see Binbin around all the time. She wouldn’t think about homosexuality but she never liked Binbin. “Ge, how ‘bout I bring you home tomorrow?” I looked at him. The room was actually really dark but I still saw his black, shiny eyes. I held his hand. Really tightly. He and I went home together the next day. I discovered that maybe I had not really known the ma who had raised me for twenty-seven years, until that day that is. I wrote a whole script, said I got in a fight with the video merchant and even went to the police station and it was Shen Bin who saved me. That was the first time that my mom actually met Shen Bin. She didn’t say much and was even polite. Shen Bin called her aunty and he did it very sweetly. And when my old man came back from his stroll, Shen Bin called him uncle and he did it very solemnly. I’ve always been curious. He would sometimes be full of shit but other times he would be so nice and quiet that he seemed to be another person. How much of him had I not seen? But I wasn’t in a hurry. I had all the time in the world. After he left, my mom was surprised and asked me, “Was that Shen Bin?” But she spoke again before I could answer, “Doesn’t look like a murderer to me.” I had planned for the worst case scenario. I told my mom that I felt sorry for him, that he wasn’t a bad person, that he had gone through a lot, and that he was my friend, my little brother. I told her that he didn’t have any family and was alone in Shanghai so I asked him to come back and help me. My ma, she went to do my laundry without saying anything, and then she helped me change my medication. I added that the person who had been changing it was Binbin. Afterwards, before going to sleep, she said, “You’re old enough now and these friends are yours anyways. This Shen Bin guy doesn’t look like he’s up to no good. He was really good with his fists before, so no one would mess around in your shops if he’s around.” “Plus, you’ve always been introverted. I’d never seen you bring a friend home. The society’s a complicated place. It’s not bad to make friends with people from different backgrounds, but I’m just worried that the honest old you would get pushed around by others. If Shen Bin wants to be with you, then that means he got some sense in him. If our son isn’t a good person then I don’t know who is.” I knew very well that what she meant by ‘Shen Bin wants to be with you’ wasn’t in that sense, but I was still happy. I might not ever get their blessings but an ambiguous one like this wasn’t so bad either. After, she went on to saying how it was sad for him to have a mother like Ding Hongmei. It turned out that Shen Bin’s real dad died on the battlefield in Vietnam. How come I had never heard him mention it? Of course, she still told me to be careful. She had always been scared that Shen Bin came to take revenge. She said that she never thought this kid would be this sweet, and that if she knew she wouldn’t have asked that second brother for that favour. What comes around goes around. If she had not done that extra thing, I wouldn’t have my Binbin now. My pa said to me, his woman only had her baby son in her heart. Whoever was nice to her son was her family; whoever was bad to her son was her enemy. Perhaps most mothers are like this? Several months went by in peace. Shen Bin and I lived in the new place, watching the shop by day and going home by night. He went over to my house whenever he got the time. Aunty this, aunty that—he made my mom a happy woman. Sometimes I couldn’t go back, he would invite himself over. He would go grocery shopping with my mom, help her in the kitchen, chitchat about everyday gossip with her and even play mah-jong with the old ladies when they were missing a fourth player. I had never known how to display filial affection. I had always been doted on heavily by my mom. I would reach out and there would be clothes; I would open my mouth and there would be food. I even learned to talk back when I grew up. Before long, I became jealous. How come my twenty-something-year relationship with my mom couldn’t even compare to Shen Bin’s hundred-day-or-so relationship with her? I questioned the little brat, “Where did you learn to suck up like that?” The little brat retorted, “Why would I need to suck up with mom?” He lowered his head and told me that he never had a mom this good. I felt pretty guilty. I never thought my mom was that good. My mom didn’t have much education. She was naggy, stingy, biased and sometimes harsh. To which the little brat said, “Aunty is good. She is so good to me. She even makes underwear for me.” It used to be my shirt. My ma noticed that I wasn’t wearing it anymore and wanted to remake it into boxers, which I outright rejected. In the end, the little brat began to wear the shirt-turned-underwear around day in and day out, even flashing it in front of the mirror and asking me if it looked good. Hey, why don’t you just hurry to bed? If your ge gets a nose bleed, you’re going to have to pay for the dry cleaning. Thank you very much. My pa praised him, saying he who recognizes his wrongs is virtuous. I swear my pa almost changed his name to Shen Guo, middle name, Gaizhi. The little brat stood there, tall and stern—he got scared by the old tricks that my pa liked to pull. He came back saying, “Uncle is really knowledgeable. He reads these really thick books.” He told me that most of the characters he couldn’t even read and even if he did, he didn’t understand what they meant. It was just Guwen Guanzhi in traditional characters. Geez. Then, the brat started learning Classical Chinese with my pa and tested me when he came back home, “What’s the line before ‘the autumn water connected the sky at the horizon, forming a unity’?” Oh my god, let’s spend more time discussing the issue of who will be on top instead, please. I really didn’t expect it to turn out like this. Around the end of April, a shooting called the April 23rd Murder took place in Fushun, Liaoning, and shocked the entire country. The criminals acted five times in one week, killing six families, totalling twenty-two people, not even sparing the children and elderly. Complete wipe-out. Binbin said, that was the way his boss did things, quick and fierce like the lightning, never leaving loose ends. Then there was no follow-up. It was likely going to become another one of the Republic’s unsolved cases, just like the ’96 Ripper Case in City N. And I was proven wrong again. The case was solved and some reporter wrote a documentary novel based on it. The three felons were all shot on sight, including the boss who gave me a smoke. But the boss’ episode did not just end like that. Before Labour Day, I received a registered mail for Shen Bin. The letter went to my shop—thank goodness my shop was a pretty recognizable icon. It was from some real estate company in Shanghai, asking Binbin to go over and do a home inspection. We had no idea what was going on but we went anyway. The company was in Pudong. They said their development had been finished for a long time and our unit was the only one who hadn’t done an inspection yet. The lady asked us for the pre-sale contract but how could we possibly have it? But Shen Bin had his I.D. card and residence registry. He was even going to take out his certificate of discharge. The brat told a beautiful lie: the house caught on fire and it was burnt. Fortunately, the company had the contract. The lady said there were eight in total. The signature on it was Binbin’s. We paid the inspection fee of a couple hundred bucks and went to inspect the house. Three bedrooms, two living rooms, six hundred twenty-five per square. The place was across from Century Park. The lady was about to scram after giving us the keys. I called her back, “That’s it? He gets the house?” “Oh right, we will contact you regarding the property ownership certificate. There’ve been cases like yours. It’s more of a hassle but it’s not a big problem.” I stared at Binbin and Binbin stared back at me. The brat said he kind of remembers signing these papers. The boss told him to sign for insurance and he did it. “What if you signed a slave contract instead?” I fumed. The little brat was more furious than I. “I can read, you know. It’s a property contract, not a slave contract.” “Then why didn’t you say so?” “How should I remember?” His boss actually gave him a house. I got angrier; well, jealous more like it. “Brother’s a straightforward guy. I saved him twice. He’s just repaying me.” Fine, I’ll think of it like that. The man’s dead anyways.
__________________