Remaining Medicine

Xu Yan lived to be twenty-seven, and everyone around him left. My mother drank pesticide when she was nine years old. Cheng Yu, the only senior who had given her light in high school, died in a car accident while going to deliver soup to her with his guitar and an unsent confession card. Later, her neighbor Grandma Meng became her last resort. But Grandma Meng left too. On the day when the belongings were sorted out, Xu Yan dug out sixteen old newspaper packets from his grandmother's bedside table, arranged from the beginning of spring to the Great Cold. Each package contained five hundred yuan and a handful of dried tangerine peel candies. She suddenly remembered that many years ago, on every first day of school, her grandma would stuff such a paper bag into her schoolbag. She had never taken it apart and looked at it. Later, she gave grandma the money, but grandma never spent it - she packed it back intact, added sugar, and waited for her to come back. She came back too rarely. She opened three of the sixteen paper packages. For the remaining thirteen, she wanted to take them apart one at a time so that they could stay with her longer. The flower shop is called "Yu Yao". No one knew what it meant, and she didn't explain it.