The Caretaker

For his first thirty-five years, Joseph Saleeby's mother makes his bed and each of his meals; every morning she makes him read a column of the English dictionary, selected at random, before he is allowed to set foot outside. They live in a small, collapsing house in the hills outside Monrovia in Liberia, West Africa. Joseph is tall and quiet and often sick; behind the lenses of his oversized eyeglasses, the whites of his eyes are a pale yellow. His mother is tiny and vigorous; twice a week she stacks two baskets of vegetables on her head and hikes six miles to sell them in her stall at the market in Mazien Town. When the neighbors come to compliment her garden, she smiles and offers them Coca-Cola.