Early this morning, Lin Yuxun came to work in this building as usual after he accompanied Danny and Cheng Hao to have breakfast at the school.
In the morning, he rushed to clean the top four floors of the building, which had ten floors, and then went to the school and had lunch with Danny and Cheng Hao, and then immediately after that, he rushed here again and started cleaning the remaining five floors.
He had almost finished cleaning the fourth floor, when he had cleaned the remaining second and third floors, he would be done for the day.
He started thinking about what to do after work.
He didn’t have much money left on hand to live on, but it was already Friday, and in two days it would be payday …… he didn’t have to be too frugal with his spending money.
He felt that tonight, he could buy a little more hot dogs. Compared to sausages, Cheng Hao seemed to prefer hot dogs.
It was also true that he bought the cheapest sausage before, which must be unpalatable to Cheng Hao.
In addition to hot dogs and bread, vegetables and fruits were also to be bought, Cheng Ho said they needed to eat nutritiously ……
As he calculated while working, he didn’t feel tired at all.
Even the thought of Danny, who would write “I love you”, and Cheng Hao, who would be waiting for him at home, made him feel full of energy.
In the past, when he came home, the house was always quiet, a dead silence, so he felt himself sink, but now it was different, now when he came home, the house was always full of laughter, so he wanted the laughter to always be there.
He liked his home now.
But, all his good mood disappeared when he saw Cheng Hao and Danny appear in front of him.
He knew how dirty and wretched he was now.
He had been working all day, his overalls were covered in dirt, he must be very ugly, would Cheng Hao feel disgusted when he saw him?
He knew Cheng Hao thought he was reading, and he wanted Cheng Hao to think that, but now, Cheng Hao saw ……
Lin Yuxun felt indescribable panic, he wanted to hide, but there was no place to hide.
When he saw that Cheng Hao’s expression became so ugly, his heart sank to the bottom of his chest.
Cheng Hao, would he dislike him? Would he leave?
He was willing to raise Cheng Hao, as long as Cheng Hao was willing to live in his place, if Cheng Hao left …… he really didn’t want to go to the previous desperate condition.
Lin Yuxun stared closely at Cheng Hao, waiting for Cheng Hao’s pronouncement.
As a result, Cheng Hao actually smiled at him and asked if he had any more rubber gloves.
Lin Yuxun suspected that he had heard wrong: “What did you say?”
Cheng Hao asked again, he noticed Lin Yuxun’s nervousness and became more gentle.
Lin Yuxun spoke, “You don’t need to help me work, I can do it by myself, I can do it quickly, it won’t take long.”
Cheng Hao replied, “The two of us can do it together, it can be a little faster.”
“This job is very dirty ……” Lin Yuxun was a little embarrassed.
“It’s okay, I’m not afraid of getting dirty.” Cheng Hao said.
Of course Cheng Hao was afraid of getting dirty. He used to clean his own room, but he had never cleaned a place like this, and there were some things here that he just saw and felt sick.
But he couldn’t let Lin Yuxun clean alone.
Lin Yuxun didn’t say anything, Cheng Hao saw this and raised his sleeves: “If you don’t have rubber gloves, I’ll just clean like this.”
Lin Yuxun hurriedly said, “There are gloves, and overalls …… I’ll go get them for you.”
Lin Yuxun ran out, and in a short while, returned with a set of overalls, and rubber gloves.
The overalls were exactly the same as Lin Yuxun’s, but Lin Yuxun looked particularly thin after wearing them, Cheng Hao wore them just right, and surprisingly wore the overalls with a straightforward and handsome look.
Cheng Hao dressed, put on the rubber gloves, when he saw Danny standing frozen next to him with an uncertain expression, he thought for a moment, then he gave Danny a broom, and showed him a demonstration of sweeping the floor, then he gave him the broom.
Danny obviously hadn’t done such work, he was very unskilled when doing it, but he did it very seriously.
Seeing this, Cheng Hao immediately gave him a thumbs up: “Danny, you’re great!”
Being praised, Danny was immediately happy, but Lin Yuxun looked a bit torn: “Danny ……”
“You work so hard, you should also let Danny know.” Cheng Hao said. He realized that, although Lin Yuxun grew up abroad, his character was like many parents in China – they, no matter how hard they worked, wouldn’t let the family, especially the children know, they also wouldn’t express their feelings.
Lin Yuxun and Danny actually had a very deep bond, but when he first arrived, the communication between the two was ridiculously low!
“I don’t work hard.” Lin Yuxun said in a hurry.
“You still call this not working hard? How old are you!” Cheng Hao said.
The way Cheng Hao spoke, it was like an elder reprimanding a junior.
Lin Yuxun was confused, Cheng Hao was only one year older than him, how could he talk to him in such a tone?
And then Cheng Hao said, “Of course, you are even better than Danny, you can support your family at such a young age.”
Lin Yuxun was stunned. He had started working a long time ago, but it was the first time someone said he was better.
Lin Yuxun was indescribably happy, and his eyes were red, so he could only lower his head.
The pressure and hardship he had felt over the past few years, it was nice to have someone know for the first time, to be understood for the first time.
When he was living with his father, Lin Yuxun didn’t have a job.
His father did the lowest level of manual labor, and his income wasn’t much, but because he didn’t smoke or drink, it was enough to maintain the lives of both father and son, and didn’t require Lin Yuxun to work extra.
He was very young at the time, and actually had no place to work.
But when he was twelve years old, his father died and after he moved in with his mother, he started working.
His mother …… was also “working” in this building.
She was a rare Chinese and had a good business, but she was also a big spender and always had no money on hand – she liked to drink and smoke marijuana.
Always drunk, she would give her two sons some money for food when she thought of it, but there were times when she wouldn’t give him and Danny a penny for a month at a time.
Although he could receive relief food and eat free lunch at school, the source of that money was so unstable that he still felt uneasy.
So he went and found a job delivering milk, getting up at 2 a.m. every morning, receiving milk and then riding his bike to deliver it to people’s homes ……
The milk delivery salary wasn’t as high as his current job, but it didn’t affect his schooling, and he didn’t need to pay rent at that time, so he was satisfied with it.
But then, his mother got drunk and never woke up.
He and Danny were separated and sent to different foster homes.
The family that took him in disliked every aspect of his life and hated him for not washing his hair or brushing his teeth. When they felt that there was just a little bit of trash in the garbage can that he didn’t take out, the family would get furious, they thought he was uneducated and beat him regularly.
In that family, whatever he did was wrong.
But he could live with it at the time, at least they gave him food and a place to live.
As for being scolded and occasionally beaten every day, he didn’t really care, after all, his mother did the same to him.
But he was worried about Danny, so he went to Danny secretly, and that was when he found out that Danny was in a worse situation than he was.
Danny couldn’t hear, couldn’t talk, couldn’t do many things, that family disliked him, and what was more, that family had other children, and those people always bullied Danny.
When he found Danny, Danny not only had injuries, he was also sick and was running a fever, but the family didn’t even notice this!
He insisted on taking Danny away and asked his mother’s friend to bring fever medicine for Danny to take, and Danny finally got better, but his foster family didn’t allow him to keep Danny, and he ended up having to live alone with him.
He used the money he had secretly saved from his previous milk deliveries to rent a house in the neighborhood.
After getting a place to live, he went to look for a job, but his original job of delivering milk had long been taken away.
He finally found a cleaning job.
The rooms in this building would be full of guests at night, there wasn’t much during the day, he would just come over to clean, although it was a lot of work, it was also very dirty, but the income was good, he was very satisfied, the only trouble was that a few of his former classmates always came to rob him.
The good thing was that he always kept some.
Lin Yuxun thought about things in his heart, but the speed of work wasn’t slow, as for Cheng Hao, he hadn’t done this kind of work before, so instead he made it messier.
After thinking about it, Cheng Hao spoke, “I’ll go to the next room to clean up.” If he and Lin Yuxun worked in the same room, not only would his inexperience make Lin Yuxun’s work less efficient, it would also make Lin Yuxun uncomfortable, so it was better to separate.
When he cleaned, he may not clean the floor as well, but it would be faster for Lin Yuxun to re-wipe the room he had cleaned than to have Lin Yuxun clean it all.
With this in mind, Cheng Hao went to the next room.
The room wasn’t big, there was only a bed and a bathroom inside, and the floor of the room, there were a lot of things on it.
There would be several pairs of people sleeping in every room here at night.
Cheng Hao cleaned up those dirty things, mopped, and then let Lin Yuxun clean again, so after their mutual cooperation, their work was done quickly.
In the past, Lin Yuxun was alone and often took more than five o’clock to finish all the work, but today at four thirty, he finished all the work. Then he took Cheng Hao to the laundry room to change his clothes and wash his face.
“In this building, are you the only one who cleans?” Cheng Hao asked.
Lin Yuxun said, “Not really, there is someone …… She is responsible for changing the sheets and washing them in the laundry room.”
“Is it very tiring?” Cheng Hao asked again.
“No, I do it skillfully now, and it’s very fast to clean.” Lin Yuxun said. When he first came here, he was slow and often had to clean until eight or nine o’clock at night to clean the whole building, but now he was much faster.
Cheng Hao asked again, “How long have you been working here?”
“Not long ……” Lin Yuxun lowered his head and refused to say more.
“Have you done other jobs before?” Cheng Hao asked again.
“I used to work as a milk delivery boy.” Lin Yuxun said.
Lin Yuxun wasn’t willing to say more, but Cheng Hao remembered Chester’s words, he could probably guess his experience.
Chester said Lin Yuxun stopped going to school after his mother died, so Lin Yuxun had been doing this job now for about a year. As for when his mother was still alive, he was probably delivering milk.
This side of the United States required milk delivery people to deliver the milk before the head of the household woke up, plus here the land was vast and sparse, many milk delivery workers needed to get up in the middle of the night to deliver the milk in the allotted time …… Lin Yuxun was only 12 or 13 years old, so it must have been very hard.
Cheng Hao knew that there was no shortage of people living in poverty in this world, but now that he had met them, he was a little shocked.
What people saw with their own eyes was always more shocking than what they heard.
When the two left the building, there were more women in those stores downstairs, in addition, there were some women standing on the street scratching their heads.
Once again, Cheng Hao told Danny not to look around and carried Danny out of the area.
When they left the area, Lin Yuxun asked, “Let’s go buy food?”
Cheng Hao nodded and walked forward with Lin Yuxun.
Lin Yuxun took Cheng Hao into a small supermarket.
The big supermarket was cheaper to buy things, but it was far from this slum, and they had no way to get there without a car, so they had to spend more money at the small supermarket.
Small supermarkets had vegetables and fruits, and bread, sausage, hot dogs and what not, and there were many kinds of bread.
Cheng Hao looked and found that the bread Lin Yuxun bought was the cheapest of all the bread.
For a moment, it became harder for him to breathe.
There were all kinds of bread, and cakes, and those delicious and expensive little things, Lin Yuxun had probably never eaten it.
When Lin Yuxun was shopping, Cheng Hao didn’t say anything, but on his way back, he took the bread and ate it, and after he ate, he said, “Lin Yuxun, I found a job as a waiter in a bar, and I’m going to work tonight.”