Chapter 2 - The Things She Stopped Noticing

Two weeks had passed and I had stopped counting the things he'd fixed.

After the outside tap it was the squeak in the front gate. A neighbour's child was the first to notice — Mama Lindiwe's grandson Tshepo, who came through the gate Wednesday to drop off a school uniform for his school dance. "Mama, your gate doesn't make that sound anymore." I looked at him. I looked at the gate. He was right. The squeak that had been there since the year — the year I wouldn't name — was gone. Oiled. Hinges tight.

It was the broken bulb in the outside loo, the one I'd been leaving in the dark for so long I'd stopped noticing the dark. One evening I walked out with a torch like always and there was a soft warm light coming through the slats. New bulb. The chain pull worked.

It was the wobble in the kitchen tap. The drawer that wouldn't close. The cracked tile by the back door that had been catching my plakkies for a year. The fence post leaning toward Mama Sithole's yard that I'd accepted as gravity's choice.

He didn't say anything. Just did them. I'd come into the kitchen and the drawer would close properly and I'd know.

Some of the things he fixed I didn't even know were broken. I'd just learned to live around them. To step over the cracked tile without thinking. To pull the drawer twice. He's noticing things I stopped noticing, I thought one night, lying on my back staring at the ceiling. And what does that mean about a person, neh? What does it mean about me?