And one afternoon she held up a hundred-dollar bill she had just earned, and she said, “Do you know what I love most about this, Daniel?” and I said, “What, Mom?” and she said: “I can go to the market and buy a basket of fresh strawberries, and I never have to explain to a single soul why I spent the money.” I smiled, and my eyes filled, because it was the smallest freedom in the world and she had waited thirty-four years for it.

I have thought a hundred times about why it was the strawberries, of all things, that undid me — not the divorce, not the sewing business, not the private gate I built with my own hands, but a woman holding up a hundred-dollar bill and talking about fruit.

And I think it is because the strawberries were so small.

If my mother had said she felt free because she had escaped a cruel man, or reclaimed her half of a property, I would have understood it and been glad, but I would not have wept.

What broke me open was the scale of what she had been denied.

For thirty-four years, a grown woman — intelligent, capable, the one who had managed every dollar in that house — had not been able to buy a basket of strawberries at the market without preparing, somewhere in the back of her mind, to account for it, to justify the small indulgence to a man who held the money and therefore held her.