Early in the morning, Chen Tianlang was still woken up by Uncle Zhang's "eighth set of radio gymnastics".

Lying on the bed, Chen Tianlang pillowed his hands, looked at the ceiling, hysterical for a while, and then remembered that today was Sunday, and it seemed that he didn't have to go to school. I remembered Qin Zixuan's home visit last night, and he admired this kind of teacher who loves work, and at the same time he was also very bored.

Closing his eyes, Chen Tianlang hugged the pillow and tried to let himself sleep again, but before he could warm up the pillow he was holding, he heard his mother Liu Yuping shouting loudly: "Stinky boy, don't sleep like a dead pig, get up and do some work!"

Chen Tianlang was very reluctant to get up when he was lying on the bed, but he knew what the consequences of not getting up were, and it seemed that the military belt that enforced the family law had been held by his mother since last night.

For the sake of his body, Chen Tianlang finally took a deep breath, got up from the bed, and in the midst of his mother's life-chasing screams, he put on his clothes and looked for shoes to wear in embarrassment---

As soon as the clothes were put on, there was a snap, and a bag of things fell from the inner pocket, and Chen Tianlang remembered that he had earned the six thousand yuan, which was thickly wrapped in a paper bag.

Thinking that there were still 1,080 stealing his mother's mother in it, Chen Tianlang muttered a little, it was better to put it back quietly. So taking advantage of this, Chen Tianlang quickly took out 1,800 yuan, wrapped it in the same paper, and didn't have time to count it, and stuffed the rest of the money under his pillow. Then he sneakily touched the sewing machine in the hall, carefully picked open the belly under the sewing machine, reached out and stuffed the paper bag into it, and then took a breath.

Outside, Liu Yuping was shouting again: "Stinky boy, what are you rubbing, don't come out soon!"

Chen Tianlang hurriedly said: "I'm coming! I'll go out immediately!"

……

Although it is the weekend today, the elder sister Chen Hong has to go to the cotton mill workshop to work overtime. I heard that one of the female workers in their workshop is about to get married, and another is about to give birth, and there is a lot of work in the factory that is about to pile up, so everyone is not even allowed to be transferred, and they work overtime in the factory all day and night.

In the courtyard lay a large plastic basin with a large pile of dirty laundry. There are three of these large plastic basins in the Chen family, one is used for washing clothes, one is used for bathing, and one is broken with a big hole, leaning against the corner of the wall and sitting idle.

Speaking of these basins, Liu Yuping was angry, and the person who sold the plastic basin pushed the cart to shout and sell it door to door, and one of them even took the plastic basin and threw it to the ground, bang, no matter how hard it fell, saying how good the quality is and how hard the texture is.

Everyone saw that this pot really couldn't be broken, so you bought one, and I bought one, thinking that I had picked up a treasure. At that time, Liu Yuping's head was hot, and she actually bought three in one go, but before she could bring it into the house, one of them fell to the ground with a click, and a big hole was directly broken at the bottom of the plastic basin. I went to find the plastic pot seller again, and I ran away and disappeared.

At this moment, her mother Liu Yucui did not hold a big basin to wash clothes, but bargained with a cart pushing a rack car to sell briquettes outside the door.

Briquettes are the honeycomb coal as the saying goes, in the early nineties, in that era of energy scarcity and environmental protection, people have no new energy, no induction cooker, liquefied gas and natural gas have not yet been popularized, many people rely on coal stoves to burn briquettes for cooking, heating and boiling water, so selling briquettes is very common in many places, often a big man pulls a cart of briquettes, shouting, walking the streets, selling to those in need.

Those diligent briquette sellers can pull three or four carts of briquettes a day to sell, a briquette costs two cents, a cart is about 500 yuan, that is 10 yuan, if you can sell three carts, then you can earn 30 yuan, for these men who have no culture, only a handful of strength, it is definitely a very profitable livelihood.

Because of this, the briquettes are also divided into territories and gangs. Often, if a village or town is your territory, other people can't rush in, and if you are found to be indiscriminately breaking in to do business, it will cause a fight. In addition, in order to pursue the greatest profits, some briquettes are even united with some stealing cinders, such as steel mills, refrigeration plants, and cotton mills, etc., and there will be some "capable people" secretly doing the business of reselling cinders, and there are these briquette sellers.

It can be said that in this era of rushing to money, the briquettes who sell briquettes seem to be people living at the lowest level of society, but the two different labels of hard-working and fierce are also attached to them.

At this moment, the man standing outside the gate and bargaining with Liu Yuping belongs to this kind of person. He was a burly man, muscular, wearing a tattered I-shaped vest of indistinguishable colors and patterns, covered in dirt, with a lot of black cinders stained on his face and hair.

Behind the man, there was a rack cart parked, and the rack car was all covered with black honeycomb coal. A thin little black child of three or four years old sat in front of the rack car, with a piece of cardboard under his buttocks, wearing sandals with a Mickey Mouse pattern, holding a black dried bun in his hand and nibbling and eating, occasionally glancing at the big locust tree in the yard of Chen Tianlang's house, on which was a sparrow scratching its head and making a gesture, and the sparrow chirped at him, and he giggled at the sparrow, not noticing that his father was bargaining hard with the mistress of the house for five cents.

In the end, the man who sold briquettes gave up, and it was difficult to do business in this gradually hotter season, unlike in winter, when people rushed to buy it, when the weather was hot, there were fewer people burning coal stoves, and most of them used earthen stoves to cook, burning wheat straw and dry firewood. Of the 200 briquettes, a total of three and a half cents were sold, and if they were put into the winter, they could be sold for five yuan.

But the man doesn't want to suffer, it's okay to pay five cents less, you can move these two hundred briquettes into the house by yourself, I won't do it.

Liu Yuping was very happy, with her three-inch tongue, she was two hundred briquettes and four yuan, and she cut it into three and five, which was directly five cents less. As for the heavy work of carrying briquettes, she can't do it, so if she can't call this coal seller, can't she still call her son? So Liu Yuping raised her voice and shouted Chen Tianlang out of bed.

Knowing the cause and effect of the incident, Chen Tianlang couldn't cry or laugh, in order to save five cents, his mother called himself as a free laborer.

"You kid An'an moved the briquettes for me, and you will cook for me when I go in!" Remember, pick up the good ones, don't move those rotten ......" Liu Yuping finished telling her son, and then turned her waist and went to the kitchen to cook, leaving Chen Tianlang alone staring at the two hundred black briquettes, thinking about where to start.