The fat brother made sure again and again that he had not taken out the business card before handing it to Li Mengnan.
Li Mengnan took it with both hands and looked at it, only to realize that the fat brother he was quite fond of was called Zhu Fugui, which sounded a bit like the name of a coal boss in Shanxi Province, but it was incompatible with his generous figure and festive appearance.
It's also very proportional, and it's a bit like its name.
"Okay, thank you very much...I will definitely take your car if necessary."
Li Mengnan solemnly put away his business card in front of Zhu Fugui, took out the fare and handed it to Zhu Fugui. Zhu Fugui said nothing, unless Li Mengnan was slapping him in the face, Li Mengnan did not push him.
He just smiled enigmatically, said thank you, then turned around and walked into the narrow alley of this shanty town.
It wasn't until Zhu Fugui picked up the next passenger and asked for change that he discovered that there was an inexplicable extra twenty yuan in his breast pocket. However, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't figure out where the money came from. In the end, he just
I thought it was a windfall from heaven, and I had fun for a long time.
Of course, this is all for later.
Old houses are different from those new residential areas now. When they were first built, they usually just roughly drew out the homestead site, and each household was built next to each other, leaving a similar corridor in the middle. There was no clear plan.
Later, when there were more children in the family, the house was no longer enough to live in, so I just bought a truckload of bricks to build it myself. The house site was full and there was no room, so I built a shed outside. Some families also put a chicken cage around a vegetable garden or something.
Yes, decades of private construction have made the originally wide passage for cars so narrow that even a larger tricycle cannot pass through it, and the shape is even more twisted like a maze. Not all residents in this area can pass it once they enter.
Can't get out.
Li Mengnan took the address and went from door to door to check the house numbers. At first, he could check them one by one smoothly. Unfortunately, before he passed ten houses, there were constant detours. The house numbers at the back were almost completely irregular.
He was deceived.
Fortunately, there were many elderly people in the shanty town sitting at the door enjoying the cool air and chatting. Li Mengnan picked a kind-hearted white-haired old lady, walked over and knelt down and asked: "Grandma, I want to ask you something... Do you know what happened to No. 567?"
go?"
Although this white-haired old lady has a wrinkled face, all her teeth have fallen out, and her ears are not bent at all, she raised her eyes and looked at Li Mengnan, shook her head and said: "Which company is No. 567? I don't know..."
An old man who was playing chess next to him interjected: "Young man, you'd better tell me who to look for! The house numbers here are all for the postman. As long as you are an old household here, everyone can recognize the name...
"
Li Mengnan did not doubt what the old man said. It was just like in their village back then, when all the ancestors lived together, there was no house number, and no one among the hundreds of people in the village knew anyone.
"Okay... I'm looking for Xiao Hui. Do you know where she lives?"
Xiao Hui is the name of Li Mengnan's biological mother.
"Oh? Are you looking for Xiaohui?"
Li Mengnan didn't expect that his mother was quite well-known in this area. The five or six old people present all stopped what they were doing, and their slightly muddy eyes fell on Li Mengnan, feeling as if they wanted to see through his identity.
See through.
Li Mengnan suddenly recalled the first time he took X-rays in the hospital.
Probably because they felt that Li Mengnan didn't look like the kind of bad guy who committed crimes, the old people looked at him for a few times without raising any doubts. One of them picked up his crutch and pointed to the right, saying: "Follow this road."
Go down the road and look to the right. There is a pomegranate tree sticking out of the yard of a house with a red painted wooden door and a pair of door gods posted on it. That is the home of Xiao Hui you are looking for... Are you the child of her relative? Yes
Cousin, right? You look a bit like her."
Li Mengnan actually looks more like his father Li Hongming, but in any case, after all, half of his mother's blood is flowing in his body, so there will definitely be similarities with his mother.
However, Li Mengnan did not explain his true relationship with his mother Xiao Hui. Her mother has now started a new family, and his identity is rather embarrassing. He did not want any rumors to spread because of his arrival, so he smiled noncommittally, giving the impression that
By default.
"Forget it, I have nothing to do anyway, I'll take you there, just to stretch your muscles."
The old man handed over the chess playing position to another chess watcher and stood up shakily with a cane. Li Mengnan quickly stepped forward to hold the old man's arm. If he missed a step, the old man's bones would fall apart.
, he can't fight it.
The distance was not too far, but the old man beside him was not very agile, and Li Mengnan did not dare to walk too fast, so he could only follow in small steps.
The old man was quite interested, chattering to Li Mengnan along the way: "You are quite a good young man. You know how to respect your elders, and you are much better than those young boys in our area... That girl Xiaohui has been married for more than ten years.
Okay, it’s hard for a woman to raise two children. Your parents used to come to visit occasionally, but then they stopped coming... Forget it, you’re not very old, so you probably don’t know what’s going on here. In fact,
I can understand that no one can handle such a big thing..."
The old man was talking incoherently with a hammer and a stick here and there. Li Mengnan was confused, but he could tell that his mother's family was encountering some difficulties. Her relatives there had tried to persuade him to divorce, but her mother refused.
In a fit of anger, the two sides stopped communicating with each other.
However, he was afraid that his newly made up identity would be suspected, so Li Mengnan did not continue to ask more questions. He thought about it and asked, "What about the men in this family?"
"Her man?" The old man sighed and stamped his cane with a look of hatred on his face. "I won't mention it anymore. I get angry when I mention it. If I had known that boy would be like this, it would be better than before.
Let Xiaohui divorce him and live a single life..."
The old man took Li Mengnan to the place and walked back step by step on a walking stick.
Li Mengnan took a deep breath, stretched out his hand and knocked on the rusty iron door knocker on the red painted courtyard door. After a while, there was a sound of light footsteps inside.
"Who?"
It was the voice of a little girl, sweet and waxy, and it sounded gentle and pleasant.
In the past, her mother Xiao Hui wrote several letters to Li Mengnan, probably because she was concerned about his feelings, but she did not mention her remarriage partner or children.
Li Mengnan also just learned from the old man who played chess that his mother now has two children, one older and one younger, both girls.
It must have been the little one who came running to open the door in the courtyard.
But for some reason, Li Mengnan vaguely felt that he had heard this voice somewhere before.