Revenge12 min read
The Yellow Sweater and the Rice-Cake Promise
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I remember the yellow sweater first. It was the color of early sun and the kind of thing that hushed everyone in our yard when Lillian put it on. “I made this,” she said with the small, exact pride that belonged to her. “It suits me.” I listened and told myself not to care.
“Mom, hurry and feed the pigs!” my father called from the yard. “They’re noisy and the matchmaker’s almost here.”
“I’ll get Xiao—” Mother started and then stopped. She gestured me quieter, “I’ll put these away. You go call that girl.”
Lillian’s brow was neat, her hair tucked, and she was using matches like a fine painter. “Ugh, this is so annoying,” she muttered as a match split. She counted the pile and scolded the quiet air, then slammed open the door. “Lin, why aren’t you feeding the pigs? I told you—”
No one answered Lillian for a long second. I said nothing, because I had my own small carefulness to keep: the sweater, the careful stitches I had watched her draw out of the yarn she had bought with three days of saving. She had shown me once and then kept it closed like a secret.
“You’d better watch Xiao,” Mother told Lillian, and then turned and disappeared in a cloud of worry and plans about money. I felt the house tilt toward performance, toward the matchmaker and her questions.
“Lillian!” A woman’s voice called outside with the thin, sharp ring of a bell. The matchmaker was coming. Lillian straightened, eyes bright like a bird’s jump.
I had been keeping a secret of my own; I wasn’t only the clumsy younger daughter. I had memories that did not belong to the small room I grew up in. I remembered other hands, other names, a fall from a cliff—none of it mine, all of it folded into me like a list of survival rules. I remembered that in the life I wore now, if you did not learn how to hold on you would be stepped on.
Lillian brushed past the worn trunk where I kept what little mattered and—God—her new sleeve hooked, a snag, and the sweater pulled. “You did that on purpose!” she spat without looking back.
“You let your basket stand there,” I answered.
“You always act like I don’t deserve anything!” she cried. “You know how much I’ve been waiting to wear it today. Who do you think you are?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Lillian’s voice curdled. “You never—”
Mother came out wearing the stain of the pig feed and hands that smelled like the farm. “What happened?” she asked, and when she saw the sweater she sucked in a sound.
“She did it on purpose,” Lillian said, and then—like the first time I had learned to hold my breath—an idea shivered through me. If she wanted the sweater more than she wanted truth, she would push. She would tear.
Mother touched the pulled stitch as if a coin had been bent. “Could you—could you fix it?” she asked. “It cost so much. I sold rabbits for that yarn.”
Lillian sighed like someone given a crown, then reached out and pulled the thread, and two more loops came loose. She looked at me with a face like a judge. “There. Now she looks ragged. Do you think Wang wants a ragged girl?”
Wang—Carmen Xu, the matchmaker—smiled from a doorway where quiet manners sat like a tailor’s cloth. “Don’t worry, dear. If I was arranging for my nephew I would not see this as a problem.” She winked at Mother.
I said nothing then. I left the house and walked until my feet hurt and my ribs felt soft. I found Grandma in her kitchen, the steam from the rice cakes curling up like small ghosts. Emilia Brandt—Grandma—tossed me a smudge of flour with a wink.
“You look like you swallowed a thorn,” she said. “Help me fold these. The dough needs a soft hand.”
I learned how to press the dough into bamboo molds and how to seal it like a promise. “Why are we making so many?” I asked.
“We have a commission,” she said. “Two hundred small rice cakes for a wedding. You can help, or you can sulk.”
“I’ll help,” I said. The steam and the smell of cooked grain eased me. I forgot about Lillian for a time and concentrated on inching the dough, on counting pockets, on how Grandma’s hands never trembled.
“You should learn to be useful,” she told me later, when we walked toward market. “A girl who can make money at her hands will be safer.”
At the river market I met Alexis Buck—my friend who always smiled with half a worry on her face. “You’re early,” she said, dropping a bag of catch for her mother. “We thought you’d still be at home practicing pretty smiles for the matchmaker.”
“Matchmakers smell of money,” I said.
“You’re dramatic.” She shoved a pastry into my hands. “Eat. And watch your back by the chicken stalls. The men there will try to sell trouble.”
We walked the old path and I saw him—Gideon Estes—standing with a back basket like a small hill. He had that slow steady kind of face that did not flinch. He lifted my steam pot for me when I dropped it by accident.
“Thanks,” I said, surprised he noticed. He only nodded and looked away like a man who would not let other people’s small cruelties add up.
“Gideon helps a lot here,” Alexis said. “He can carry two steamers by himself.”
“Thank him for me,” I said. I wanted to say more, but the market noise swallowed bravery.
At the coop, I learned smaller things: how mothers can be crueler than the river, how sisters can shape your life by ripping the stitch of a sweater. Lillian, who always looked like a match flicker, found ways to shine at everyone else’s dim expenses and smiled as if she loved the sound of people reaching to her for favor.
One afternoon, Grandma and I walked back past the house and found the trunk of my old clothes chopped open. “Someone’s been here,” Grandma said, and I felt cold in my hands. Lillian’s laugh floated from the kitchen. “She’s made a scene,” Mother said. “She cried. Who would do such a thing?”
“It was the yellow sweater!” Lillian cried, clutching the sag in her chest. She put it on in front of Carmen Xu, like a prize. I stood rooted and said nothing, because the matchmaker’s breath was full of plans.
“You’re lying,” I said.
“Lying? You dare—” Lillian’s face went bright as a stove.
“You didn’t ask until people were gone,” I said. “You pulled it more.” I had to say it.
“Lillian, calm down,” Mother said.
Carmen Xu tilted her head. “What a pity,” she said. “But it’s just a sweater. Family matters—well, it can be handled. I will speak to my nephew.”
I kept my mouth shut because I knew. The truth would not be believed. People would pick the pretty one. That was how things were. Still, I memorized the faces of the women in the room, because that is how you keep a ledger of who will stand with you and who will turn.
The market days became a small map of favors. Grandma’s rice cakes sold well under the white cloth. We saved, and by a sliver of luck and the kindness of Bernabe Leroy—an uncle who introduced himself like a town’s old pulse and who paid our rent when the landlord asked for more—we had the chance to rent a small shop on the main street.
“You could run it,” Bernabe told Grandma with a laugh. “You’ve got the best rice cake in the valley, and a helper who knows how to keep hands steady.”
“Who’s the helper?” he asked and winked at me. “I think—Ivy—this is a chance.”
“How are we going to manage money?” Mother snorted on the back porch like she smelled wind. Lillian’s face was a mask of the kind that plans betrayal. “If you go up into town, what will be left at home?”
“It’s our chance,” Grandma said.
Carmen Xu stood off to the side, her eyes like a measuring cup. She was polite and sharp. “A good little shop makes a good little life,” she said. “You have my card.”
We signed the papers with hands that shook a little. Bernabe left us with a promise that sounded like both a bank and a prayer. “I’ll come down for opening day,” he said. “Bring rice cakes.”
At the shop’s first morning, steam rose like a small fog. We set up the bamboo steamer, the sign, the white cloth. People began to gather like a story building its living parts. I stood by the steamers, watching. The first customers were kind.
“Your rice cakes are as good as Grandma says,” Gideon told me when he arrived with his own pail of goods. He handed me a small paper parcel. “For luck.”
I smiled because that was better than wishes. The day curled into success, and for once my chest did not ache.
Then came the things that the market could not fix: family, greed, the rumors. Lillian showed up wearing the yellow sweater and a look that asked the world to see how wronged she had been by the small life. People murmured. Carmen Xu watched with the neat curiosity of someone who sold futures.
“See what she’s wearing?” Mother whispered. “She should thank me.”
“She’s trying to take credit,” Lillian said loud enough for the crowd. “She stole it.”
“You never had any intention of selling anything,” I said, voice small but steady. “You pulled the threads.”
“You think you can play me?” Lillian hissed.
I stepped aside from the steamer, my fingers still smelling of steam and grain. I watched the faces in the crowd looking back and forth. Then Gideon—quiet as a stone—came up and placed both hands on the edge of the counter.
“You want to know what happened to that sweater?” he asked, loud enough that the market stopped like a fish remembering water.
“Yes,” Lillian said with a voice like lightning. “It’s mine.”
“Tell them,” I said. “Tell them you pulled it.”
Lillian’s hands fluttered like a trapped bird. “I—no—” She opened her mouth and closed it like a door.
That afternoon, something else came to light. Maddox Bauer—thin-lipped and vile, a man who had the swagger of a boor and a debt like a shadow—was spotted slipping through the market. He had been loud with Alexis’ mother and with a group of card players, and his name seemed to be connected to small disappearances: a sack here, a coin purse there. People muttered. He shoved past a stall and laughed like a pebble in a puddle.
Gideon’s eyes narrowed. “He owes—” he began.
“Pays later with trouble,” someone said.
I felt that old memory mend me into a plan. You could be stepped on, or you could become a weight.
“Listen,” I said, louder than I had ever let myself be. “If he owes money, we can help him. But if he takes without shame, then the village should know.”
He laughed, Maddox did—high, careless, like rope snapping. “What will the village do? Sell my story to the next poor fool?”
“The village will watch,” I said. “The village will remember. And we will write down what you owe.”
They laughed then, until something sharp cut their faces—the thin line of truth. The market crowded around, and faces turned to Maddox. He staggered like a drunk who had called a storm.
“You can’t—” Maddox sneered, but his voice was small.
“You took wheat from Sun’s stall last month,” a woman cried.
“You took little men’s tools from the shed behind Li’s shop,” another voice said.
“You pawned carriage parts that you swore to fix,” the blacksmith spat.
A name after name collected like rain. Maddox’s face lost its color. He tried to scoff and push, tried to make fists like thunder. But when a dozen small voices name him, the sound becomes a tribunal. They circled him like a net.
I remember the way the crowd leaned, heard the clack of shoes, the small voice of Grandma calling, “Don’t let him leave.” I remember my own heartbeat like a drumbeat in my teeth. I remember the moment he fell silent like a man who reached for rope and found none.
“Write it down,” Gideon said. “Write what he took.”
A boy ran to fetch paper and pencil. The market—full of people who had been taken for granted—began to list its losses. People said names. People spat. Maddox’s face moved from smug to shock to denial.
“It’s not mine! I was paid back—I was—” his voice cracked.
“That’s a lie,” the blacksmith said, voice hard like hammer. “You pawned my son’s chisel.”
“But I didn’t—” Maddox tried.
“You took my neighbor’s pig feed,” Sun the stallholder said, and a dozen others nodded.
The crowd changed. Cameras did not exist here, but eyes were sharper than lenses. People whispered to neighbors, then shouted until the road turned into a courtroom. “Liar!” someone called. “Thief!” someone else cried. Maddox, who once felt so big with borrowed voice, reached for a corner of shame he had not known existed. He began to bargain, then beg, then shout, then stumble. I watched his bravado implode into a man reduced to smallness.
It was not enough to call him out. He had to be shown to everyone he had ever called powerful. We pulled from him the list of what he owed, and we announced his name to all who passed. Children pointed, women hissed, men turned away. He had been a blot on the market, and the market scrubbed at him with its communal glance.
He tried to raise a hand, and the blacksmith stepped forward, smelling the metal of long-held anger. “You owe us all,” he said. “You will work it off—no more gambling, no more slinking.”
“Stop,” Maddox begged. “I’ll do it. I’ll fix it. Please!”
And fix he did, because shame in public is a cruel coin; it buys labor. He worked the fields and mended fences. He repaid, and the market watched until his debt was more than a ledger—until his name hardly passed through conversation without a pause like a bad taste.
But the story wasn’t over. Lillian had another kind of crime: greed practiced like a religion. When the shop opened and the sign hung, she expected the parade, the praise, the coin. Instead I split the receipts with Grandma. I kept the accounts. People came back.
“Why do you get to run the money?” Lillian demanded one evening. “You think you deserve it?”
“Because I earned it,” I said.
“You’re still a liar,” she spat. “You said you didn’t take my sweater, but you lied.”
I looked at the ledger. “If I wanted to lie, I would have walked away years ago,” I said. “I told the truth because I am tired of being small.”
She laughed, and that laugh sounded like someone trying a key that did not fit. Her fingers moved toward a list of bills I had hidden as savings. She thought I would be baited. She thought she could ruin us with a small theft.
This time, I was ready. I had learned from the market and from the way the village kept records of wrongs and rights. I had written my days down, and I had witnesses. Bernabe came the next morning with a cartload of town friends—people who had seen the shop’s first day and our hands at work. He said, “A thief is a thief wherever she stands. The market knew a man who stole and was set right. The house must do the same.”
We called a meeting in the courtyard. Women from the market, men from the field, grandmother’s customers—half the village crowded around. Lillian did not expect this. She tried to climb the ladder of charm and fell. We read out the ledger and the witnesses told what they had seen—how Lillian had sold the sweater for extra sweets one night, how she had hidden notes of bills in her sleeve when she thought no one was watching.
Her face moved through the same stages as Maddox’s. Pride, then fury, then denial, then the look of a person whose world had been folded inside another’s palm.
“You took what you wanted,” a woman said, “and you said we were blind.” She spat the sentence like a nail.
Lillian—who had once swanned through our yard as the sun’s favorite—shrunk. People threw their hands in the air. Some patted the shoulders of the victims. Someone began to clap, not like mockery but like a seal on what had been opened.
“I didn’t—” she began, but the words were weak.
“You will return what you took,” Grandma said, steady as a balance. “You will apologize to everyone here and you will work for all that you took.”
“Work?” she scoffed.
“Yes,” Grandma said. “And everyone will watch.”
So Lillian, who had always practiced lithe charm, was set before the village. She had to kneel and stitch the sweater back under our eyes in the courtyard while neighbors watched and counted each pull. Mothers shifted their children so they could see the stitches and the shame. Children pointed and learned.
Lillian’s eyes filled with a kind of stunned, real grief. She tried to stand, to howl, to bargain, but the village remembered too many small injuries that had been hidden and traded under the table. They had tasted greed before.
She tugged at the thread and the sweater looked smaller, like a person who once strutted now reduced to patchwork. Her face moved through denial, then like wastewater in a cup: thin, then shriveled. The market people—those who had watched Maddox—began to chant a list of what she had taken, and children repeated it like rhyme. The sound was a living ledger. We watched her panic, the easy falsehoods she had practiced crumble, her hands finally still.
I did not cheer. I had not wanted revenge so much as truth. But when the world is small and everyone knows the price of every piece of work, public ruin is often the only lever. Lillian’s punishment was not a private cry. It was learning to sew in public and learning to hold her head when the village named each thing she had taken. Her friends untied themselves like rags.
Meanwhile, Maddox worked like a man who would never have his name spoken without a pause again. Both his punishment and Lillian’s were different: his was forced labor and public shunning in the market; hers was a public making and unmaking, a stitch-by-stitch accounting in front of neighbors and family. Both were done where people could see, and both had that terrible, useful sting.
Months later, with the shop open, with the ledger kept, with Grandma’s rice cakes sold under a new painted sign that read “Brandt’s Rice Cakes,” people came and bought and smiled. Gideon came sometimes, leaving a pail, sitting a while to eat. Bernabe came with letters and news of town. Alexis and her mother came with warm hands and pie. The village had a rhythm that was harder and kinder.
“Do you know how the sweater felt when Lillian put it on?” Gideon asked one night as we swept the floor.
“It looked like everyone thought she was a queen,” I said.
“You did more than sweep,” he said, and I felt the smallest part of my chest loosen like a door opening on its hinge.
One evening, as the shop closed and the last steamer hissed, I took the remaining yellow yarn—patched by Lillian in the courtyard—and I tucked it into a drawer with the ledger. “Maybe one day,” I whispered, and the sound was small but not bitter.
In town, they told stories and kept accounts. The yellow sweater story became one about a girl who kept her dignity and about a family that had to be taught how to treat their own. The rice cakes sold well and the shop became a small place where truth was an ingredient just as important as flour and heat.
When people asked how I had changed, I would shrug. “I learned how to count,” I said.
Gideon looked at me once and smiled like someone who kept secrets in his pockets. Bernabe nodded like a banker to a good investment. Grandma pinched my cheek and hummed a tune about mixing softness with heat.
I kept the ledger in my drawer, and every so often I would take it out and read the list of what the market had once named. In the margins I wrote small notes—who had helped, who had harmed, what we had learned. The yellow sweater was still fading in the drawer, mended and then mended again.
One late afternoon, when rain had just stopped and the air smelled like cooked rice and wet wood, Carmen Xu stopped by. She pressed a small sealed envelope into my hand.
“For you,” she said. “From your uncle Bernabe.”
Inside was a small sum and a note: “Keep the shop. Keep your hands clean. Keep your truth.”
I closed the drawer and put the yarn on top. I did not need to promise anyone the future. I only needed to keep the ledger and the rice cakes, and watch what truth could do when given a place to stand.
The End
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