options. She sat down at her easel. She had run out of canvases and had
begun painting on plywood, so she picked up a piece of wood, got out her
palette, squeezed some paints onto it, and selected a brush.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm thinking," she said.
Mom worked quickly, automatically, as if she knew exactly what it was
she wanted to paint. A figure took shape in the middle of the board. It
was a woman from the waist up, with her arms raised. Blue concentric
circles appeared around the waist. The blue was water. Mom was
painting a picture of a woman drowning in a stormy lake. When she was
finished, she sat for a long time in silence, staring at the picture.
"So what are we going to do?" I finally asked.
"Jeannette, you're so focused it's scary."
"You didn't answer my question," I said.
"I'll get a job, Jeannette," she snapped. She threw her paintbrush into the
jar that held her turpentine and sat there looking at the drowning woman.
QUALIFIED TEACHERS were so scarce in McDowell County that two
of the teachers I'd have at Welch High School had never been to college.
Mom was able to land a job by the end of the week. We spent those days
frantically trying to clean the house in anticipation of the return of the
child-welfare man. It was a hopeless task, given all the stacks of Mom's
junk and the hole in the ceiling and the disgusting yellow bucket in the
kitchen. However, for some reason he never came back.
Mom's job was teaching remedial reading in an elementary school in