"Mom, I sat at the wrong matchmaking table!"
Xu Nanzhi clutched her mother's memorial portrait, her voice trembling in a military-civilian joint canteen in a small city in the southwest. The man across from her was wiping the cuff of his uniform. The stars on his shoulder boards caught the redness at the corners of her eyes. He was the "man she should never marry" her mother had written about in her diary for three years.
Three months later, an official document stamped in red ink slipped into the metal mailbox at No. 18 Wutong Alley: "Comrade Xu Nanzhi's application to accompany the army is approved. Attached: the original copy of her mother's denunciation letter from thirty years ago has been transferred to the Commission for Discipline Inspection."
No one knew that this military spouse, who was always chopping chili peppers in the regiment's canteen, kept in her pocket a "time-storage box" capable of holding the entire 1990s. She could turn hard steamed buns into steaming roujiamo, transform a leaky barracks into a laundry room scented with jasmine, and use her mother's old account book to carve out a path through the business rivalry between the military and local authorities.
When Lu Chen discovered that his wife often stared blankly at his uniform late at night and cried over the glass jar filled with spent bullet casings, he finally realized that in this marriage born of absurdity, the "delicate little wife" he thought needed protecting had long since woven, with her special ability, a vast web spanning thirty-seven years of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. It ensnared the secret he had kept deep in his heart for ten years, as well as the gathering storm that threatened to topple the entire military camp.
"Staff Officer Lu, you say a soldier's duty is to defend the homeland. What is a military spouse's duty?"
Xu Nanzhi placed a freshly pickled chicken feet with chili peppers in his hand. Her fingertips brushed the calluses in his palm. "I suppose it's to make sure that when you're standing at the edge of a cliff, the storage box in my hands is there to catch you as you fall."
