Since getting acquainted with Zhong Rong's mom, Lu Chenchen had "coincidentally" encountered her several more times, mostly on the necessary path where she walks Li Li or in the direction she goes to buy vegetables. Moreover, the encounters were quite characteristic. If Lu Chenchen was with her mother-in-law, Zhong Rong's mom would mostly just nod her head to greet them, or even bow her head pretending not to see them. However, if it was only Lu Chenchen alone, Zhong Rong's mom would enthusiastically chat with her for a while and give her small gadgets like a keychain engraved with "XX Bank" or a card holder.
Lu Chenchen laughed helplessly. Don't even mention the card holder - she was just a little nanny, where would she get so many bank cards that she needed a special holder for them? And how could she dared to openly hang a keychain with Zhong Rong's daughter's mark on the Ma family's keys? If her mother-in-law saw it, wouldn't it be a deadly sin? Although she didn't know where Zhong Rong's mom's enthusiasm and her mother-in-law's wariness came from, it did not prevent her from judging that the two families had a big grudge against each other.
In the short time since she arrived, Lu Chenchen discovered that the Ma family was also one of the most complex families she had encountered, both inside and outside. The mother and son were not like mother and son, the husband and wife did not seem like husband and wife, but if you wanted to say there were any obvious contradictions on the surface, there really wasn't any that could be seen. As if that was not enough, on the outside there was also Zhong Rong's mom who was interested in their family like a gossip reporter. It was hard to say whether Zhong Rong's mom was driven by a very simple gossip mentality or if she had some other purpose...
In short, the mystifying Ma family had a mystifying environment.
However, Lu Chenchen had no intention of resigning. During her two years as a nanny, she had dealt with either chattering elders or babbling children. Even when she occasionally met picky or harsh employers, they did not make too many waves in her plain and peaceful days. The Ma family lawyer was so interesting! She had to stimulate a lot of brain cells every day just to keep up with the rhythm of this family of young and old. Not getting fired and still being accepted was quite challenging.
Moreover, the high wages paid by elite employers, plus weekend overtime pay, made it hard to find such high income elsewhere.
Even just for the money, Lu Chenchen was reluctant to resign.
Monday was a less busy day for Lu Chenchen. She had already prepared the breakfast, done the big cleaning, and taken advantage of the weekend when the Ma family members were out to get most things done in advance. With spare time, she made a few strawberry puddings for the children.
When picking up the two kindergarten children in the afternoon, she noticed Little Ming was a little listless. After getting home, she put down her schoolbag and slumped on the sofa. She didn't even eat two bites of the pudding she usually loved the most.
Feeling her forehead, there was no fever.
Lu Chenchen suspected the child had caught a cold from the recent days of heavy winds, thunderstorms and blazing sun all coming one after another.
Abiding by the principle of timely reporting anything unusual, she called the mother-in-law out of her room.
After looking Little Ming over, the mother-in-law rubbed her hands and paced back and forth a few steps. She told Lu Chenchen to call Mrs. Mao.
Mrs. Mao sounded quite nervous on the phone, persistently asking if the child was coughing, if she had a runny nose, and why she hadn't taken the child's temperature. She also complained that the kindergarten teachers were irresponsible for not noticing something wrong with Little Ming right away.
Lu Chenchen wanted to reassure her but couldn't. Over these days, she realized that beneath Mrs. Mao's gentle appearance was actually a sensitive and suspicious soul.
She didn't trust Lu Chenchen's description. She was very worried about Little Ming, but right now she was on the way to pick up Big Mao and couldn't turn the car around. It would take at least forty minutes after she picked up Big Mao to get back.
Listening to Mrs. Mao getting more and more irritable over the phone, Lu Chenchen felt completely incredulous. She turned to look at the mother-in-law, who also had a helpless expression on her face.
With three children and three adults, how did they raise the children to this day?
"Mrs. Mao, you're driving, pay attention to safety and don't get too anxious. I have a child of my own and have taken care of other employers' children, so trust me, Little Ming just lacks energy at the moment. I assure you there is no need to go to the hospital or even take medicine. Just have her drink more warm boiled water. I'll cook some congee for her and have her eat something easy to digest, then get a good rest. There definitely won't be any issues. I assure you."
In fact, Lu Chenchen was usually a very cautious person with little guts. She really didn't know how these packaged assurances had popped out of her mouth.
Mrs. Mao probably felt she had no other choice but to believe her words. She repeatedly told Lu Chenchen to call her immediately if there were any changes.
Finally, she threatened her, "I'm not trying to scare you, but if anything happens, even selling off everything you own wouldn't be enough to compensate!"
See, this is what happens when you rashly beat your chest to make guarantees.
After hanging up the phone, Lu Chenchen coaxed Little Ming to drink a cup of warm water. She took her temperature - 36.7 degrees Celsius, normal. She asked if anywhere felt uncomfortable but the little girl listlessly shook her head, saying she wanted to sleep.
It was completely consistent with the initial symptoms of a cold.
Lu Chenchen carried her back to the bedroom to sleep, then went to the kitchen to cook congee.
When the pot of glutinous rice from Northeast China boiled into thick, smooth rice soup, Lu Chenchen heard the sound of a car driving into the garage, followed by the "clip-clop" sound of high heels striding up.
Lu Chenchen had just walked out of the kitchen and was met head-on by Mrs. Mao.
"Where's Little Ming? What are you doing? Why aren't you by her side?" Along with her heavy panting, Mrs. Mao fired questions in quick succession, leaving Lu Chenchen quite shocked.
How could there be such an intense reaction?
The mother-in-law behind called out to her in a reminding tone, "Sally!"
Mrs. Mao snorted heavily and turned to walk towards Little Ming's room.
Lu Chenchen took a deep breath and said to the mother-in-law, "The meals are ready. You and Big Mao and Second Mao should eat first. I'll go see how they are doing."
She had just gotten halfway up the stairs when the mother-in-law called her from behind. "Don't take it to heart. Sally, she..."
The mother-in-law didn't finish her sentence, but Lu Chenchen understood her meaning.
She had worked for a family by Yangcha Lake before. At first it was said to be a live-in auntie position. The husband had taken on a construction project in Yunnan and would be away for over half a year. At home it was just the mother and nine-year-old child. When Lu Chenchen went, they had actually gone through some ups and downs, mainly because of money. The wife didn't want to hire an auntie but couldn't overcome her husband's insistence. So she wouldn't budge on the wages and would only pay 80% of market rate. Lu Chenchen didn't agree at first, but later it was said that the husband privately found Boss Chen and promised to subsidize the missing 20% so Lu Chenchen took the job.
She won't elaborate how petty the wife was towards the nanny, but of course the wide world contained all kinds of people. Since Lu Chenchen chose this line of work, she naturally had to grin and bear whatever came her way, whether good meat or bitter medicine.
The key was that the wife had a sickness! Anxiety disorder or depression, or some mental illness. Lu Chenchen wasn't a professional so she didn't understand. She only saw that such a well-behaved and sensible child was often scolded and criticized by his mother for not doing well enough on his homework and needing his mom to tutor him. When he didn't do well on a test paper, she had to sign off on the bad score. It provoked the mother first to admonish and berate him, then to yell and curse, and eventually it developed into beating him. That kind of losing self-control and grabbing whatever was at hand to hit him with - if there was a stationery box she would snatch up the stationery box to hit him, if she saw a fly swatter she would use the fly swatter, without anything at all she would just take a broom to beat him.
It never failed to make Lu Chenchen's jaw drop seeing it happen. It was clearly wrong but admonishing did no good. If she tried to wrest the "weapon" from the woman's hands, she would also be beaten and cursed.
The wife also had that archetypal Wuhan sister-in-law's standard "Han cursing." The vocabulary she used to curse people was on par with the legendary ten levels of Han cursing from a certain middle school teacher. She cursed her own son, cursed the well-meaning Lu Chenchen who tried to protect her son. Her cursing brought tears to her son's eyes and made Lu Chenchen want to quit on the spot.
After calming down, the wife would also hug her son and weepingly apologize, asking for his forgiveness. At emotional breaking points she would even turn to the wall and slap her own ears until her cheeks were red and swollen but she still wouldn't stop...
In fact, Lu Chenchen still didn't know it was sickness when she left, thinking it was just a personality issue.
Around that time the Spring Festival was approaching. The husband returned early and kept Lu Chenchen from leaving. Lu Chenchen pushed up her sleeve to show him the purple and blue marks left on her from blocking the wife's blows at the child with a rolling pin. There were also marks on her legs from being kicked.
The husband was silent for a long while, then told Lu Chenchen in a muffled voice that his wife was sick. When the sickness didn't act up, she was virtuous and loving, but once it flared up, it wasn't that she stopped being virtuous and loving, but rather that she completely lost control of herself.
After telling the truth, he said that Lu Chenchen was the first nanny who got injured for his son. He used the word "plead" and pleaded with her to at least spend two hours every day cooking dinner for the child and supervising the child's homework.
"To put it bluntly, go see my son every day, see if he and she are living well," the middle-aged man said with tears in his eyes.
His face was tanned and dry from the ultraviolet rays in Yunnan. His hair was black and white in patches, he looked exhausted, and there was not a hint of vitality about him.
For some reason, Lu Chenchen thought of two lines of poetry: There are endless painting skills in the world, but one broken heart cannot be painted.
She became a hourly worker at his house, and kept working there for half a year, until the man finished his construction project in Yunnan and returned to Wuhan.
From then on, Lu Chenchen understood that those who can turn their faces in an instant, with both gentle and violent sides, are sick.
Mrs. Mao is also sick. As far as Lu Chenchen can see, her illness may not be as severe as that man from Yangcha Lake.
Of course, no matter how thoroughly Lu Chenchen sees through Mrs. Mao, at that time, she could only follow Mrs. Mao into Little Ming's room and watch her wake up the child and say she was taking her to the emergency room.
Although Lu Chenchen felt it was making a fuss over nothing, she did not have the qualifications or dare to stop it. Just in case, it's better to be safe than sorry. If something really happened, how could she, a little nanny, afford to compensate like Mrs. Mao threatened?
Also, if she sang a different tune from Mrs. Mao, would it stimulate her illness? Would she get violent when ill? She doesn't seem that ill, so she probably wouldn't hit the child. But what if she took it out on her with a beating?
No one could guarantee otherwise.
