Everyone in the alleys of the old city knew that Lu Ye, the shoe repairman, was extremely wild.
Half of the knuckles on his right hand were missing, and an old steel piece was embedded in his waist. He could carry a twenty-kilogram iron nail box with one hand, and he could coax a square dancing lady into laughing when she opened her mouth. The only thing she saw was Su Xiao, a new girl in a wheelchair, knocking off her shoe nails, and the tips of her ears turned red and froze in place.
The two of them had a quarrel with each other every day: she threw ten glasses of iced Americano at him, causing him to sit in a puddle; he stuffed her with scalding ginger tea and moved all the flesh on her window sill under the eaves to hide from the water.
The long-tongued woman arranged for her, and he picked up the awl and plunged it into the wooden shoe block, protecting her shortcomings so that no one in the entire alley dared to talk.
No one knows that seven years ago, he didn't keep a penny of the 220,000 yuan in settlement expenses. He spent all of it on his comrades and strangers on the lifeline. He only had a ten-square-meter shoe repair shop and half a worn notepad, and lived his life like a solid steel plate.
It wasn't until he fell down with a back injury on a rainy night, and she moved twenty meters with a walker to save her; it wasn't until he took out a polished shoe nail and put it on her ring finger. There was no diamond ring or wedding, and the two of them spread out the scars all over their bodies, and then they discovered that each other's incomplete lives were put together, just enough to create a lot of warmth.
Later, everyone in the alley saw that there was a long queue for their painting exhibition, 127 people signed the long scroll, non-slip mats were spread all over the ramps of the old city, and the No. 18 Bus always left an empty seat by the window.
Ye Ge, who had spent half his life repairing the imperfections in the world, finally found his own beam of light at the entrance of Fireworks Alley.
