I Washed Thirty-One Cars to Buy My Mother a Birthday Present

Every Year It Was a Card From the Garage

My mother turned forty-five on the fourteenth of September this year. For as long as I can remember, her birthday has gone like this. My little sister makes her a card at school with glitter that gets everywhere for a month. I go to the Engen on the corner the night before and buy a card with a flower on it and a slab of Bar-One, and I write "Happy birthday Ma, love Sipho" inside, and she says thank you and puts it on the fridge.

She never complains. She is a nurse at Livingstone Hospital and she works twelve-hour shifts, sometimes nights, and when she gets home she cooks and checks our homework and falls asleep in front of the TV with her shoes still on. My father passed away when I was nine, so it is just the three of us in our house in Walmer, and she does everything.

This year, in July, I watched her try to fix the strap on her handbag with a stapler. It was the same handbag she had used since I was in primary school. The stapler did not work. She put the bag down on the kitchen table and just looked at it for a while, and then she laughed and said, "Well, it had a good life." But I saw her face before she laughed.

I decided that for her birthday I was going to buy her something real. With my own money. The only problem was that I did not have any money.

The Business Plan Was a Bucket

My friend Lwazi's uncle runs a car wash at a shopping centre, so Lwazi thinks he knows everything about business. He told me the trick was to go where the cars are and the people are too lazy to go to a car wash. That meant our street and the two streets around it on Saturday mornings.

I had a bucket, a sponge, and an old towel. I borrowed a hosepipe from Mrs Bezuidenhout next door, who made me promise to bring it back coiled properly, which I learned is a very serious thing to her. I made a sign on a piece of cardboard that said CAR WASH R50 SATURDAY and stuck it on our gate.

On the first Saturday I washed two cars. One was our neighbour across the road, Mr Daniels, who I think felt sorry for me. The other was a lady I did not know who stopped because she saw me standing with a bucket looking hopeful.

It took me nearly an hour per car because I did not know what I was doing. I washed the roof last, so dirty water ran down over the parts I had already done. Mr Daniels came out and showed me, without saying much, that you always start at the top. He tipped me twenty rand extra for the lesson, which seemed backwards, but I did not argue.

Saturdays Through August

By August I had a system. Top to bottom. Wheels last with a different sponge. Dry with a chamois before the sun leaves spots. Lwazi joined me for two weekends and we split the money, but then he got bored and went back to playing FIFA, so it was mostly me.

The wind in Gqeberha is a real enemy when you are washing cars. Some Saturdays it blew so hard that the dust from the road landed on the car before I had finished drying it, and I had to start again. One Saturday it rained, which I thought would be a disaster, but three people came anyway because they said their cars were full of mud.

I did not tell my mother what the money was for. I told her I was saving for new takkies. She was so proud of me for working that it made me feel a bit guilty about lying, but I decided it was the good kind of lying.

By the end of August I had washed thirty-one cars and had one thousand, two hundred and forty rand in an envelope in my school bag. I had never held that much money that was mine.

Not Knowing What Women Actually Want

Then I had a new problem. I had no idea what to buy.

I knew she needed a handbag. But when I looked at handbags in the shops at Greenacres, I panicked. There were hundreds. Some were three thousand rand. Some looked like something my granny would carry. I did not know what was nice and what was ugly, and I could not exactly ask my mother.

I tried asking my sister, who is eleven. She said, "Get her a unicorn." That was not helpful.

So one night, in bed, I looked up gifts for her on my phone, because I honestly did not know where else to start. I scrolled for a long time. It was the first time I had properly thought about my mother as a person who might like things, instead of just my mother. What colours does she wear? Does she like smelly stuff? Does she wear jewellery to work, or is she not allowed? I realised I did not know the answers to a lot of these questions, and that bothered me more than I expected.

Asking the Right Person

I ended up asking Sister Makhaya, who works with my mother and is also our neighbour two houses down. I made her promise not to tell. She took this very seriously and said she had not kept a secret this exciting since her own wedding.

She told me things I did not know. That my mother liked a particular dark green colour. That she always said she wanted a bag with a zip because the nurses' room at the hospital was not safe for open bags. That she had once admired a small silver bracelet another sister wore, but would never buy something like that for herself because it was "not necessary".

I went back online that night and looked at lists of birthday gifts ideas for a mother, which helped me think about putting a small thing with a bigger thing, so it felt like a real present and not just a replacement for something broken.

The Box Arrived on a Thursday

I could not afford a fancy bag and a bracelet, but I found a dark green handbag with a proper zip at a shop in the mall for eight hundred rand, after checking it three times and asking the lady to show me the inside pockets. For the rest, Sister Makhaya helped me order a small silver bracelet from an online gift shop using her card, and I gave her the cash. It came in a box to her house on the Thursday before the birthday, and she hid it in her linen cupboard.

I had sixty rand left. I spent it on a proper card, not from the garage, and a bunch of flowers from the lady at the robots on Heugh Road.

The Morning of the Fourteenth

My mother had a day shift on her birthday, so we had to do it early. My sister and I woke up at five, which has never happened before in history. We made her tea and toast, the way she likes it, with too much butter. We put the bag and the little box on the kitchen table next to the glitter card and the flowers.

She came into the kitchen in her uniform, half asleep, and saw the table, and stopped.

She opened the card first. Inside I had written, "Happy birthday Ma. I washed 31 cars for this. Mr Daniels says I am now a professional." Then she opened the bag. She ran the zip open and closed about five times. Then she opened the little box and saw the bracelet and put her hand over her mouth.

She asked me where I had got the money. I told her about the takkies lie. She laughed and cried at the same time, which I did not know was possible, and then she hugged me so hard my tea spilled.

What I Did Not Expect

She was late for work. She has never been late for work. She put the bracelet on and wore it to the hospital, and that evening she told me that she had shown it to every single person on her ward, including two patients.

The green bag hangs on the hook behind the kitchen door now. The old one, with the stapler, is in the bin. Mr Daniels still gets his car washed by me every second Saturday, and he still tips me extra, and I still do not argue.