Chapter 37
His mother left the factory in the March of Marcus's second year of teaching. She did not tell him she was planning to. She handed in her notice on a Monday twenty-two years of steady presence on that ironing floor, and then she picked up her bag and walked out into the Spanish Town Road sunlight and did not go back.
She told him on Sunday. She sat across the table from him with the notebook open and a cup of tea and said, with no preamble: 'I left the factory.'
He looked at her. 'When?'
'Monday.'
'Mama.' He calculated. 'That was six days ago.'
'Yes.'
'You didn't tell me.'
'I was telling myself first,' she said. 'Getting used to it. Making sure it was real before I said it out loud.'
He sat with this. He understood the logic.
'What are you going to do?' he asked.
'I have savings,' she said. 'I've been putting money away for twenty years. Not much at once, but continuously. I have enough to be all right for a while.' She paused. 'I want to do something with the sewing.'
For years she had sewn at home alterations, repairs, occasionally pieces for neighbors and coworkers who had learned to trust her precision. She had never treated it as a business, just as a service she provided to people she knew.
'What kind of something?' Marcus asked.
'Alterations and small custom work,' she said. 'From here. The table in the front room is big enough. I have the machine. I have the clients already they just haven't been paying me properly.'
She looked at him with the particular expression she used when she was waiting to see if he was going to argue. He had inherited this expression, he was fairly certain, and had been on the receiving end of it from his students more than once.
'I'll help you build a list,' he said. 'And Patrick knows a photographer, if you want proper photographs for a card.'
She looked briefly surprised not that he was supporting her, but that his first response was practical.
Then she nodded. 'Good,' she said. 'That's useful.'
He wrote in his journal: 'She spent twenty-two years doing the work that kept us alive. Now she gets to choose. I am going to do whatever it takes to make sure she can keep choosing.