Chapter 88
He did not know it was the last Sunday when it happened. He would not know until the Tuesday that followed, when his mother did not wake up in the morning, quietly and in her own bed at eighty-eight, in the room she had shared with him as a child and which she had kept all her life.
The Sunday was ordinary in the way the last of things sometimes is indistinguishable from the hundreds before it except in retrospect.
He had come at ten in the morning. She was at the small table by the window, the ninth notebook in front of her. She was not writing, just holding it.
He made tea and they sat together. They talked about Elise's new project a community centre in Spanish Town that was in planning. They talked about Joseph's cooperative, which was celebrating its tenth year. They talked about Thomas, who was seven and who had, according to Elise, recently announced that he wanted to be a teacher.
His mother had smiled at that.
'From the beginning,' she said. 'Some things run in the soil.'
They ate he had brought food from the market, the things she liked and then they sat in the afternoon light and were quiet together, in the way they had always been quiet together, which was not an absence of things to say but a fullness of comfortable presence.
He left at four.
At the door she held his face in both hands those hands that had made him and raised him and written toward him and worked all those years and looked at him with the full unguarded attention that was her gift and her nature.
'You are exactly what I hoped for,' she said. 'Everything I hoped for. You know that?'
'I know,' he said.
'Good,' she said. 'Then I've said it.'
He kissed her on the forehead the same forehead Mama Vie had kissed at nine years old to seal something in.
'Sunday,' she said. 'Same time.'
'Same time,' he said.
He walked across the yard. He did not look back, not because he was not moved but because they had always been people who did not make theater of the ordinary. The ordinary was the point. The ordinary was everything.
He did not know it was the last Sunday.
He was grateful, afterward, that it had been an ordinary one.