Chapter 79 - 15_5
Even though she was barely getting by herself, she still adopted me. Whatever she ate, that’s what I ate.
She would bask in the sun with me in her arms, talk to me, recount her youth, and speak of the children’s father, that man whose face she had already forgotten.
She would talk about amusing stories of her three children when they were young, saying how her eldest son promised to spoil her in her later years, so she wouldn’t have to do anything and meals would be served while she sat in bed;
She said her second son would get her new clothes made of new fabric every season, so she wouldn’t have to wear old clothes with patches anymore;
She said her daughter would buy her gold jewelry just like the other village women, to wear every day.
Whenever she spoke of these, she seemed very happy, yet as a cat, I knew that the children and grandchildren she raised hadn’t visited her for a long time.
Later on, she fell ill.
But she was like a broken wooden wheel, no matter how many cracks it developed, it never fell apart.
People from the village came, saw her condition, and summoned her three children, demanding they support their elderly mother.
Already resentful that she had lived so long without dying, depriving them of their luck, how could her three children be willing to support her?
Indeed, they placed all the blame for their own children’s failures upon her, as if their own misfortunes and ineptitude were all her fault.