Mr. Persad had made his decision. He would buy at least one more station. It was time to tell Dolly. As he contemplated how to make his announcement, he watched her and played with a slice of bread she had warmed and buttered for him. He thought that she was, indeed, a businessman’s wife. When he told her that after all these years of being in business, because of her support he had finally developed courage, her response surprised and hurt him a little. She pursed her lips, got up, and busied herself at the sink immediately, uttering only, “Hm.” She sent up a pout that lasted a week. When he wasn’t around to hear but her son was, she ranted and wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t understand why this man should want more than the one gas station at the foot of the hill in Marion. Her son recognized in the purchase of another property the opportunity to rise in the eyes of all the Sanghas, Bihars, and Busbys of the island. He did his best to impart his enthusiasm to his mother. If he might have explained this keenness, she didn’t give him the chance.
She turned on him and asked, “Why? What making you say so? Since when you interested in gas station? Your head too full of wanting to show off, yes. Is not business you interested in one bit. It is that Sangha family that have you stupid-stupid. And another thing, when will you learn, child, that it is not the girl you interested in but her father and that boy in your class who like to taunt you so? If I really believe you so interested in business for business self, I would pay you some mind, but what you know? Eh?”
At first some semblance of truth in her words slapped him in his face harder than if she had employed a pot spoon. But he convinced himself that his mother had truly misunderstood him, and she had even misunderstood Mr. Persad.
For a good while after, the house felt heavy. Mr. Persad spent more time down the hill in the station. And the boy, feeling insulted and misunderstood by the one person he felt knew him best, sulked and at the same time made determinations to show that he was as capable as anyone else of being business-minded and competent. His mother muttered about the house, using any opportunity even if it wasn’t warranted, to state that she wasn’t no big shot and didn’t want people mentioning her name behind her back, saying she or her son came to Marion to climb ladder.
Then suddenly, the day before Mr. Persad was to close the deal on the first of two stations he had bid on, he suffered a heart attack. In the hospital he suffered two more, one after the other, in quick succession. It was a miracle, the doctors said, that he had not succumbed to them.
When Mr. Persad returned home, he was too weak to go down to the station. After school the boy went directly there. He took cash, did his homework at the desk in the office. His mother surprised him; she knew how to use the cash register and to make simple entries in the station’s journal. Somehow, over time, she had learned the basics of the business. Her pouting had come to a halt. On the contrary, she took charge of the overall running of the station and with an acumen her son had never witnessed. His well-meaning compliments offended her. To them she retorted gruffly that she was not stupid, she just had not had any opportunities before. Thinking back, the boy realized that he had often seen her and Mr. Persad bent over the business log-books, and he had heard Mr. Persad mumble things to her about the figures, but he hadn’t understood what attention she was paying, or that Mr. Persad might have been instructing her, or that she was even capable.
Mr. Persad arose to a quiet house in the mornings; he would be on the verandah in his pajamas, rocking in his chair, while Dolly his wife already would have gone down to begin work. She did everything there was to do in running such a business, and left only the accounting for her son to check and finalize at the end of the day, before bringing the books up to the house for her husband to check. They fell into a comfortable pattern where, after work and before dinner, she and the boy would sit with him and together discuss what had taken place down the hill that day, what went well, who did what, and who was not working up to standard. What products needed to be ordered, what deliveries came in, what cash came in, and what went out. Mr. Persad was pleased to find that besides the products he normally sold in the shop—engine oils, batteries, jacks for changing tires, cigarettes, and cigarette lighters—Dolly had taken it in her own hands to bring in a small assortment of chocolate bars, bottles of soda water, packages of nuts, and assorted scents of car fresheners in the form of ornaments that were meant to be hung from rear-view mirrors. Mr. Persad began to relax when he realized that the woman he had married and her son were able to run his business as well as he. She and Mr. Persad seemed to grow closer. On a few occasions the boy was present when she rubbed Mr. Persad’s head with Limacol, and several times he came upon her sitting quietly in the chair beside his bed as he lay sleeping.
As if to remind them, and to keep his spirits high, Mr. Persad spoke urgently and incessantly of his plans to expand once he was strong enough to meet with a lawyer and his bank manager. They conferred about the boy going abroad to study business at university right after the final school exams.
The boy lay awake after the lights in the house and in most of Marion had been turned off, when everything was still and quiet, and only the moon slid in and out of clouds across the frame of his window. He remembered the words of Mrs. Sangha’s servant, Patsy: “Once a servant son, always a servant son.”
His entrance into the last year of high school coincided with an unpleasant turn of circumstances: Mr. Persad developed complications and was hospitalized. Schooling suffered as the boy worried about Mr. Persad and about his mother being left alone yet again by a husband. As Mr. Persad became weaker, the boy tried to encourage his mother to hurry the purchase of that second station so Mr. Persad might feel that he had realized his dream, but she was ever more decidedly against such expansion.
And then, the week before the exams began, Mr. Persad passed away. The boy knew in his heart that he could not leave his mother. He would not go abroad to study business, or anything else, for that matter.