Chapter 33
The Sunday phone calls between Marcus and his mother changed in character when they were finally in the same city. They became Sunday visits: Marcus walking across the yard to the familiar door, knocking always knocking, because his mother believed in the basic courtesy of knocking and being let in to the kitchen where she was always in some stage of cooking.
He would sit at the same small table by the same window and they would talk the way they had always talked: directly, without performance, about the real things.
She told him about the factory. It was slower now there had been changes in management and the floor was less orderly than it had been for years. She was thinking about her future. She was forty-five and the body was beginning to speak to her about ironing at speed for seven hours a day in ways it had not spoken before.
'I could' Marcus began.
'You have only just started,' she said, with a look that foreclosed the conversation.
He respected that. He understood that her independence was not stubbornness but dignity, and dignity was not something you overrode with someone else's generosity, however well-meant.
But he also began, quietly, to think about it. He had his salary. He had no debts. He lived simply. He could afford things he had not been able to afford before and he was going to have to learn, carefully, how to offer help in ways she could accept.
They talked about the neighbors. New families had come to the yard. Children who had grown up and gone. The mango tree, she reported, had a new split in one of the lower branches not dangerous yet, but there.
'Don't tell me the mango tree is dying,' Marcus said.
'It's not dying,' his mother said, with the particular patience she reserved for things that did not require drama. 'It's old. Old isn't dying.'
He sat in the mango tree that Sunday afternoon too large for it, technically, as he had been at seventeen, but the third branch still held him and looked out over the familiar rooftops and thought about old things that were not dying, about everything that endured.
He wrote in his journal that evening: 'I am home. It took twenty-one years and I am completely, irreversibly home. Not because I am in the same place but because I am the right version of myself in it. That is the difference.