Chapter 15 014

The last time Laura saw her father, he was still wearing the same sweater with a deer-shaped geometric pattern on it.The sweater was a bit worn so the deer looked like it had a skin disease.The sweater was bought many years ago and Laura remembers it since she was a child. "Where's that green wool cardigan of yours?" Laura asked. "The one I bought you for last Christmas." "Oh, that one?" he said. "At home." "You never wore one?" "I wore it, just—" He just changed into a deer-patterned sweater every time he visited his daughter, because he remembered her daughter's love for this sweater since she was a child.She also gave each deer a name, even though the deer looked exactly the same. "I think you like this sweater," he said.

"I like it, but it's getting old, isn't it?" And then—too badly, he actually took it off. "Dad, don't do this." "It's okay," he stood there in his shirt shirt, sweater crumpled in his hands, "what shall we have for lunch?" They were at Beishan Shopping Plaza at the time.Before that, Laura took the elevator down first and met him in front of the chocolate shop. "My namesake," Laura said with a smile, "do you remember?" "What?" He looked a little distracted. "Laura Secord, the diva on the box of chocolates. You told me you named me after her. You also said you won your mother over with a box of Laura Secord chocolate assortments heart."

"Huh? Not by Secord's name, but by your great-aunt's name, Laura Ida, not Chocolate, it was just a joke." "Yes, Dad, I know. I'm just—what do you want? Chinese? Greek?" They've come to the food court. "Italian?" she asked. "Thai? Or Mexican?" "Oh, I don't know. What do you recommend?" "I went to Oppa yesterday," Laura said. "Today I wasn't even interested in Japanese love. Come to think of it, there's Taco Bell, Manchurian Hotpot, Seoul Fast Food. How about Seoul Fast Food? It's Korea vegetable."

"Isn't it spicy? I don't like spicy food." "I know, but this shop is not bad, and their kimchi is lighter." So they found a table and ordered mixed vegetables and light kimchi.But the content of their chats seemed odd and incoherent.My father was always distracted and then suddenly back again, sometimes straying from the subject. "You'll be fine," he said suddenly at one point, "your mother is always worried about you, and you'll be fine." "Mom is worried about me, why?" "She thinks you should go out more and interact with people more."

Laura smiled, "Mothers are like this, always worrying about their children." "But I don't worry about you," he said. "Laura, you have a strength in you that Warren lacks, a tenacity. You got it from your mother, not from me." Dad, you're trying to get praise for saying that. "Come on," she said, "you have all sorts of powers." "No," he said, "I don't. I think I do, but I don't. You're not like me, and I've always been proud of you." When she left home to go to college that year, her father sent her there.He drove a rented car across the vast prairie towards an invisible destination ahead.Laura, on the other hand, wears headphones and immerses herself in the music.The setting sun shines on the vast wilderness, and a shining city stands in the middle.As they entered the city along the ring road, my father said, "People call it a stake."

During her freshman year, she lived on campus, and her father drove over from home to visit her during Thanksgiving."Your mom has the best wishes for you, and these pumpkin pies," he said. The pumpkin pies were store bought.Laura's mother had classes that day and couldn't come to see her, and she didn't have time to make pumpkin pie.But after all Dad came and spent Thanksgiving with her.He slept on a sofa in the school common room that night and drove home across the prairie alone the next day. Laura was wrestling with a philosophy paper.Her attempt to link Kant's absolutist moral philosophy with the emotive prose of post-Romanticism and Plato's cave metaphor ended in a mess.When her father returned, Laura found that he had added a line to his notebook.She once wrote an old saying in her notebook: Even if the sky falls, justice must be done!For emphasis, she also specially underlined it.Now there is an extra line of small words under this line: "Let the sky follow the way, even if justice falls."

She was very confused about this, why did her father reverse heaven and justice, love and hate, tolerance and revenge?Is it just playing with words?He never plays with words.Let heaven have its way, even when justice perverts.Such a deep expression of father is one of the few in Laura's memory (if he is really deep).It was so unnatural that Laura still remembers it clearly.The incident seemed to give her a peek into something that lay beneath what she called "Daddy's behavior." Laura never finished the thesis, and the tutor gave her an evaluation of "incomplete".In her opinion, this evaluation is more embarrassing than failure.That assessment still weighs heavily on her memory: incomplete.

Laura called home every Sunday, sometimes in a mock-happy tone, sometimes moaning.She ramblingly described to her mother every detail of college life: the professors she disliked and tolerated, the study load, the daily failures and small victories.The content of the chat with my father was relatively monotonous: first a stylized greeting, and then a guarantee, telling him that he had done a good job and began to calm down and study hard.While it was always the mother who listened to the minutiae of her life, it was often the father who said goodbye in the end. "I'm Dad," he'd say, before ending the conversation with an "I love you.""In this way, 'love' is the last word you hear before you go to sleep," he explained.

Laura teased him, "It's 'you', not 'love'." "I?" "You. The last word I heard was 'you'. If you want to use the word 'love' at the end of a sentence, you have to reverse the word order." It later became a regular running joke between their father and daughter.Whenever she called home, her father ended up saying to her, "You, I love you." It was a joy they had shared during her wandering years, and it had been a long, long time since she had heard the expression.As the years passed, it was forgotten.But when Laura was about to turn away after they said goodbye at lunch that day in the food court, her father stopped her and said, "Laura?"

"What's the matter, Dad?" "You, I love you." Why did he do this?