My mother kept coins in a knotted handkerchief, and the knot was the sound of my childhood. Every morning she untied it by feel in the dark, counted my matatu fare into my palm, retied it. Forty shillings. Always forty, even the year prices rose and she began walking to the market so the numbers would still work.
The matatu to school was called Blessings, painted purple, loud with a music that shook the windows. I was ashamed of the fare arriving warm from my mother's hand, ashamed of the way she pressed it twice as if the second press was a blessing of her own. I wanted to be a girl whose money came from nowhere, cool and endless, the way it seemed to for the town children.
The conductor knew us all. He let the small ones ride for less and looked away when a uniform had no coins at all, tapping the roof, muttering just go, just go, as if generosity were a thing to be embarrassed about.
I paid my mother back the way you do — by leaving. University, then a job with a lanyard, then a salary that arrived from nowhere, cool and endless. I sent money home in amounts that made the old forty shillings laughable. She never mentioned it. She only asked if I was eating.
When she died I went through her things and found the handkerchief, still knotted. Inside, not savings. Bus fare. Forty shillings in old coins, some no longer spent anywhere, kept ready for a journey she must have imagined I might still need to make — home, the last leg, the one nobody has change for.
I took Blessings back to the village for the funeral, though I could have hired a car. The purple was faded. A young conductor tapped the roof for a girl in a uniform with empty hands. Just go, he said. I paid her fare before I understood I was doing it, and pressed the coins twice, and heard, somewhere, a knot being tied.