Four Years Ago

Osi, Kwara State.

The scissors were the good ones, with orange ring handles. Her mother had bought them in Ilorin and she had carried them home wrapped in a piece of old cloth. She had kept them in the left drawer of the wardrobe so that no one would touch them.

Yetunde was touching them now.

It was past midnight and the compound was quiet, the kerosene lamp was throwing its small circle of light across the kitchen floor where she sat with her back against the wall and her mother’s wrappers on her lap. They were the old ones. The ones too worn for Sunday but too loved for rags, the ones that still smelled of black soap if you pressed your face into them, which she had done, twice, before she picked up the scissors.

She did not know what she was going to make but she cut anyway.

Her hands made the decision. They opened the scissors and cut as the fabric gave way cleanly, the way good fabric does when the grain is right. She cut again and the piece took a shape she had not planned but her hands said: ‘yes, keep going.’ She did not question them. She had learned, in the three months since her mother died, that her hands knew things her mind was still catching up to.

Yetunde sewed by hand. Needle and thread from her mother’s tin, the one with faded rose pattern on the lid and had sat on the shelf above the machine for as long as she could remember. In and out, in and out, the stitches small and even the way her mother had shown her, sitting together on this same floor on a Saturday afternoon that felt now like it had happened to someone else.

Her mother had said: “Don’t rush the stitch. A rushed stitch lies.”

She had been talking about sewing. She had also not been talking about sewing.

Yetunde kept the stitches slow.

By the time the lamp began to gutter, she had a blouse. She put it on over her nightclothes and stood in the dark kitchen, unable to see much of it. Yet she wore it to Alara market the following Saturday.

She was at the tomato stall, sorting through the ones that still had a day left in them, when a woman appeared at her elbow. She did not know her. A market woman, middle-aged, with a basket over one arm. She looked at Yetunde with the frank assessment of someone who sees cloth the way a doctor sees a body.

“Where did you buy that top?”

Yetunde looked at her.

“That blouse.” The woman gestured. “Where did you get it? The gathering at the front, I have not seen that style before. Is it from Lagos?”

“I made it,” Yetunde said.

The woman looked at her again. A different look this time, the recalibration, the new estimation.

“You made it yourself?”

“Yes, ma.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

The woman looked at the blouse once more, then at Yetunde’s face, then back at the blouse. She opened her mouth and then closed it. Then she said: “You have something. Don’t waste it,” and walked away into the market crowd and was gone.

Yetunde stood at the tomato stall with a bruised tomato in each hand.

Later that night, she sat on the kitchen floor and looked at her own hands for a long time.

Then she picked up the scissors again.

——————————————————————————————————————-

Her mother’s name was Feyi. Oluwafeyisara, which means God has done me good, which was the kind of name you gave a child when you have been waiting and something finally came through. She was the first wife and the most educated, having gone to secondary school in Ilorin before she married. She was the one who checked homework and wrote letters to the school and kept the house accounts in a notebook with a blue cover. She was small in the way that certain women were small, not fragile, but concentrated, as though everything she was had been pressed into a form that took up less space but weighed the same. She smelled of the black soap she used and of the shea butter she put in her hair on Sundays and of something else underneath both of those. Something warm and specific that Yetunde had never needed to name, because it was simply the smell of her mother. The smell of safety.

She died coming back from Omun Aran on a Wednesday afternoon in March.

The bus had a tyre that should have been changed but wasn’t. That was the detail that stayed with Yetunde, that small negligence, that ordinary failure of maintenance allowed to become a catastrophe. The road had a curve. Her mother had been sitting by the window. She always sat by the window on that road because she said the light on the leaves in the late afternoon, the way the sun came through the bush at that angle, was too beautiful to ignore. She did not believe in ignoring beautiful things when they were available to you.

She had died looking at beautiful light and Yetunde had decided to believe that was mercy.

The market women who knew her mother by name collected money among themselves and sent it with their condolences. The church women came and sat with the body and sang through the night, their voices going in shifts. Yetunde sat among them not singing, because she could not find her voice and no one had compelled her to sing. Her father had not cried in front of anyone. He had gone into the room he shared with her mother and closed the door and did not come out until the following morning. When he came out, he was the version of himself that he remained from that point forward—present in body, absent in some essential way, as though the thing that had animated him had followed her mother into the ground.

Yetunde had just turned seventeen. She finished her final year of school with her mother’s death still fresh in her. She sat in the examination hall and wrote her papers with a focus that was partly discipline and partly the absence of anything else to do. Grief, she had discovered, did not prevent you from functioning. It just made everything happen slightly behind glass.

But WAEC she did not write. There was no money. She asked her father once. She chose the moment carefully, a Sunday morning when he was in a good mood, when the compound was quiet and he was sitting in his chair with his tea.

She stood in front of him. “Baba, I want to write WAEC. I need the registration money.”

He looked at her over the rim of his cup. He set it down slowly on the arm of the chair. He looked out at the compound.

“We will see,” he said.

She waited. He picked up his cup again and the conversation was over.

She never asked again. She had learned the grammar of her father’s evasions early enough to know that “we will see” was a full stop wearing the clothes of a comma.

She became, without anyone saying so, the house’s extra pair of hands. Her stepmother, Mama Kike, her father’s second wife, was a practical woman who managed her own children with efficiency. She had never been unkind to Yetunde exactly, just indifferent in the way you are indifferent to a thing that is not your direct concern. She directed her without directing her, through the arrangement of tasks that were clearly waiting to be done.

One morning Mama Kike came into the kitchen while Yetunde was tending the pot and stood in the doorway with her arms folded.

“The compound needs sweeping before your father wakes up.”

“I will do it after the stew.”

“Do it now. The stew can wait.”

Yetunde looked at the stew, which could not wait, which was at the exact point where leaving it would ruin it. She looked at Mama Kike, then the broom, and decided not to argue. Her step-siblings, Kike and Mayowa, both younger, were doing nothing. Yet, she had to find a way to do both.

This was how it went. She cooked in the morning before her father went to the farm, she swept the compound, she fetched water when the taps were dry, which was often. She grounded pepper on the grinding stone when the woman who usually came was unavailable. She did these things because she had inherited from her mother the inability to watch a thing need doing and not do it. At night, when the compound slept, she returned to the fabric.

——————————————————————————————————————

The church her mother had attended was called Calvary Assembly. They met in a yellow building two streets from their compound, a building that had started as a classroom and become a sanctuary and retained the qualities of both—the concrete floor, the wooden benches worn smooth from years of use, the ceiling with its corrugated iron that turned rain into something that required you to raise your voice. It smelled of old wood and candle wax and the particular layered perfume of women who had been coming to the same place for decades, their individual scents combining into something collective and specific that Yetunde associated with God.

She had been going since she was three years old, first in her mother’s arms, then holding her mother’s hand, then sitting beside her with her own small Bible, the cover pink and already worn at the corners. After her mother died she kept going. Nobody asked her to, her father did not attend but Yetunde went, because the church was the last place that still smelled like her mother and the first place where the thing in her chest could be set down briefly without requiring an explanation.

She prayed specifically. She asked exactly: “Lord, I need to write my WAEC. Lord, I need school. Lord, you can see what is happening in this house and I need a way that is not this.”

She prayed these prayers for two years.

One evening, she was on her knees beside the bed when Mama Kike passed in the corridor and stopped.

“You are still praying for school?”

Yetunde did not open her eyes. “Yes, ma.”

She could feel Mama Kike in the doorway, the quality of her silence.

“Prayer is good,” Mama Kike said finally. “But your father has said what he has said. You should be thinking about what is in front of you, not what is not.”

She left. Yetunde stayed on her knees.

“Lord,” she said quietly, to the floor, to the listening she had staked everything on. “You heard her. You can see what is in front of me. I am asking you to change it.”

****************************************************************************

It was a Wednesday evening in August, the kind that comes at the end of a hot day when the air is thick and doesn’t move and everything smells slightly of its own effort. She had cooked that afternoon, a pot of egusi with pounded yam that Mayowa had joined her to make, and she was tired in a way that lived in her lower back and the back of her knees.

She almost didn’t attend midweek service.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, her wrapper still on from the afternoon, when her younger stepsister, Kike appeared in the doorway.

“Aunty Yetunde, are you going to church?”

“I don’t know.”

Kike considered this. She was eight years old and took things literally. “But you always go.”

“I am tired today.”

“Mama says tiredness is not a reason not to do what you like doing.”

“Your mama says many things.”

Kike stood there a moment longer, bare feet on the concrete, looking at her with the open assessment of a child who had not yet learned to disguise her observations. Then she said: “Will you tie my hair before you go? The one Mama tied is falling.”

Yetunde looked at her. At the lopsided hair bun and the small serious face underneath it.

She got up, tied the headtie then picked up her Bible and went to church.

—————————————————————————————————————–

Church was half full, which was how midweek service always was, only the faithful ones attended. The ones who did not need the Sunday crowd to sustain their practice, the women mostly, and a few men, usually titled church leaders in their usual front seats to the right of the aisle. The praise was shorter than Sunday, somehow deeper, with less performance. Yetunde sat in the third row and let it move over her.

Pastor Gbenga was not a dramatic man. He did not shout. He did not run the aisles or work the congregation into fervour. He read the Bible the way a man reads a letter from someone he knows, with familiarity and attention, occasionally pausing to remark on something that struck him, as if he and the text had been in an ongoing conversation and that was simply the latest instalment.

He was preaching from Ecclesiastes. She had not expected Ecclesiastes on a Wednesday night, she had expected something about harvest or open doors or the God who makes a way. She half-listened, her mind was on a collar she had been trying to sow.

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Pastor Gbenga read, and stopped.

He looked up from the Bible, at the half-full room, at the tired women and the few men, and was quiet for a moment in the particular way he was quiet when he was not preparing words but waiting for them.

Then he said: “This is not a verse about success. This is not a verse about the thing you are waiting for God to put in your hand. It is a verse about the thing that is already there.” He paused. “Whatever your hand can reach right now, whatever is available to you today, in this season, in this village, in the house you are living in, with this body you have, do that. Do it with everything you have. Do it as if God himself assigned it because He did.”

Yetunde heard it.

Not the way you hear something with your ears but the way you hear something that was already in you, that someone has now found the words for.

After the service, the women gathered outside the way they always did and sister Risi found her near the gate.

“You were quiet tonight, more than usual.”

“I think God gave me a word today,” Yetunde said.

Sister Risi looked at her sideways. She was forty and had known Yetunde’s mother and treated Yetunde with the particular gentleness reserved for motherless girls. “Something caught you?”

“The scripture: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do.”

Sister Risi was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “Your mother used to love that verse.”

Yetunde looked at her. “She did?”

“This is not the first time Pastor Gbenga is preaching it. Your mother used to say God does not waste a willing hand.” Sister Risi adjusted her headtie and looked out at the dark road, patted Yetunde on the back, then left.

Yetunde stood at the church gate with the night around her and her mother’s words landing hard, landing in the exact place where words become a motivation for action.

She walked home on the dark road with the frogs loud in the drainage, the sound of a running  generator, and the smell of night-blooming something she could never identify. What was in her hand? It wasn’t school, she couldn’t afford it. What was in her hand was a pair of scissors, her mother’s thread and the knowledge, still small and untested, that her hands could make things that did not previously exist.

She went home but she did not sleep. She sat on the kitchen floor with the kerosene lamp and she cut. Not as comfort this time, or as grief, this time she did it like an assignment. As the thing God had put in her hand and was now asking her to do with her might.

In the morning, she went to find Iya Bimpe.

——————————————————————————————————————-

Iya Bimpe’s shop was behind the market, between the man who repaired shoes and the woman who sold smoked fish. You smelled it before you saw it, the particular smell of fabric and machine oil and something burnt where an iron had been left too long, a smell that Yetunde would spend the rest of her life associating with the beginning of things.

It was a wooden structure, not large, and with a corrugated iron roof that made the heat inside something you had to negotiate with your body. Three machines lined along one wall, they were the good ones, the industrial kind that could eat through four layers of lace without slowing. The walls were covered, every available surface, with pages torn from magazines and catalogues, fashion photographs going back twenty years, women in geles and bubas and agbadas and ankara suits, some of them yellowed and curling at the corners, a full history of what Nigerian women had wanted to look like from decade to decade. Above the door, a handwritten sign: NO CREDIT. DON’T ASK.

Iya Bimpe herself was sitting in front of the middle machine when Yetunde arrived, feeding fabric through with both hands, not looking up.

She was fifty or thereabouts, the kind of woman whose age had stopped registering itself in the usual ways. She was not young and she was not old, she was simply settled, a person who had been exactly herself for so long that she had become solid with it. She wore a plain housecoat and a headtie she had tied once in the morning and not touched since. Her hands on the fabric were the hands of someone who had been doing this for over thirty years, certain, economical, making no unnecessary motion.

She did not look up.

Yetunde stood at the entrance and waited. The machine ran. Outside, the market was in full voice, the price negotiations, the motorcycles, someone selling groundnuts with the particular rhythm that groundnut sellers had, as if the words were a song and the song was the selling.

The machine stopped.

Iya Bimpe looked up. She looked at Yetunde the way she would look at the length of a fabric she was assessing, completely, without haste, taking inventory.

“What do you want?”

Her voice was not unkind. It was simply direct, the voice of a woman who had learned that directness saved everyone time.

Yetunde said: “I want to learn. I have no money to pay. but I will work for whatever you need, sweeping, buying food, carrying anything. I just want to learn.”

Iya Bimpe looked at her for a long time. Long enough that Yetunde became aware of her own hands, which she had clasped in front of her, and unclasped them.

“You have made something before?”

“Yes, ma. By hand, from my mother’s old wrappers.”

“Bring it.”

She went home and came back with the blouse, the one the market woman had stopped her about, the one with the gathered front. She held it out. Iya Bimpe took it and turned it over, examining the seams, pulling at the fabric to see how it gave, checking the hand stitching. She did not say anything for a long time.

Then she said: “You can start Monday.”

That was all. She turned back to her machine. Yetunde thanked her and left. She did not let herself feel the fullness of what had just happened until she was back on the road. Then she stopped walking and pressed both hands against her mouth and looked at the sky, which was blue and enormous and doing nothing remarkable.

“Thank you,” she said. To the sky. To God. To whatever was listening. “Thank you.”

——————————————————————————————————————–

Yetunde spent a year in that shop.

She learned the machines, not quickly, because the machines did not allow for quickly. The industrial machine had a personality, a particular resistance in the bobbin housing that meant you loaded it with a specific pressure or it jammed, a tendency to run fast that you had to hold against with your body weight. She broke thread more times than she could count in the first month. Iya Bimpe said nothing each time except “again” when she had rethreaded and was ready to continue.

She learned to cut. This was the thing she had not known she did not know, that cutting was not simply the application of scissors to fabric, that it was a form of reading. Every fabric had a grain and the grain had a direction and if you cut against it the garment would never lie correctly. It would always have that slight wrongness that customers could not name but would feel as dissatisfaction. Iya Bimpe taught her this without explaining it. She would watch Yetunde cut and say “turn it” or “not there,” and over time Yetunde’s hands learned what her mind was being taught.

She swept the shop every morning. She bought Iya Bimpe’s lunch from the woman who sold rice by the market gate. She carried bolts of fabric from the wholesale market when the order came in, learning to balance the weight across her shoulders. She did all of these without complaint because complaining was not available to her. She had asked for this.

What she had not expected was what happened in the seventh month.

Iya Bimpe had a customer, a difficult one, a woman who wanted an iro and buba for her son’s graduation, who had changed her mind about the embroidery twice and was now saying she wanted to add a panel at the back. Iya Bimpe was listening with the patience of a woman who has heard every possible variation of indecision and has made her peace with it. The customer was describing the panel. She wanted it to be different, she said, not the usual type, something that would make people look.

Yetunde, who was sweeping the corner, said, without planning to: “If you add a panel, it should echo the neckline. Otherwise it will read as two separate decisions instead of one.”

The customer looked at her.

Iya Bimpe looked at her.

Yetunde looked at the broom in her hand.

“What do you mean?” the customer said.

She put down the broom. She picked up a piece of chalk from the cutting table and showed the customer on the board, quickly, the sketch she could see in her head. The panel that repeated the curve of the neckline, just displaced to the back hem. The way it would make the garment feel considered, intentional, as if every part of it knew about every other part.

“Yes,” the customer said. “That. Do that.”

Iya Bimpe said nothing that day but the following Monday, she gave Yetunde a machine. Not the old one she had been practising on, the good one, the middle one. She said: “Sit here now.”

That was all. Yetunde sat at the good machine, she got to work and understood that she had been seen, which was the only recognition that had ever mattered to her.

By the end of the year she could originate. She could look at a woman and see the garment that did not yet exist, not what the woman was asking for, but what she actually wanted, the thing underneath the asking. This was a different skill from executing, and it was not one she had been taught.

She went to Iya Bimpe and said she would like to be employed now. As a stylist. She had finished learning.

“You still have plenty to learn,” Iya Bimpe said, with the tone of a person who knew you were worth more, that you were making them more money than they could make alone, but was determined to keep using you for free because they knew that they could. And so Yetunde knew that it was time to leave.

She prayed about this for three weeks. Then Christmas began.

——————————————————————————————————————-

Christmas in Osi was a season that changed the town’s texture the way rain changes the smell of dry earth, suddenly, completely, in a way that made you forget the dry season had been going on for months. The people who lived in the cities came around and the streets became unfamiliar with their own inhabitants. Cars that did not usually live there appeared outside compounds. Women who were usually in wrappers appeared in lace, chiffon and ankara of the new patterns, the ones from Lagos, the ones that arrived in the markets in October in anticipation of the season. There was a particular energy, competitive and celebratory at once, the performance of a community showing itself how far it had come, measuring the year in prosperity and display.

Yetunde attended the Christmas service in what she had made herself, a blouse from the green ankara she had bought with tips she got from Iya Bimpe’s customers. The collar stood exactly as she had wanted it to stand after three attempts.

Mrs. Adebiyi was three rows ahead.

Yetunde did not know her. She noticed her the way you notice certain women, not from beauty exactly but from bearing, the quality of someone who occupies their space without apology. She was in her sixties, compact and upright, in a cream lace that had been made by someone who understood construction. She sang with the confidence of a woman whose voice had been given to God regularly for decades.

After service, in the compound, she saw Yetunde.

She stopped walking. Completely stopped, in the middle of the yard, while the people moving around her reorganised to pass. She looked at Yetunde with an expression that was private, processing something, the look of someone who has seen a face that belongs to another face.

Then she said: “Are you not Feyi’s daughter?”

And there was her mother’s name. In a stranger’s mouth, on a Sunday morning, three years after the accident on the road. Her mother’s name, said with the familiarity of someone who had known the living woman and not merely the story of her death.

“Yes, ma,” Yetunde said.

“You look so much like her.” The woman’s face moved, something passing through it, not quite grief, something quieter and older than grief, the feeling you have about a person who has been dead long enough that the loss has become part of the landscape. “She was a good woman. Your mother was a very good woman.”

Then she reached into her bag and pressed something into Yetunde’s palm. Folded notes. Yetunde felt the texture of them before she saw them. 

“Take care of yourself”, she said

Yetunde thanked her. The woman moved away, returning to the pastor’s wife, and Yetunde stood in the compound yard with the money in her hand and her mother’s name still in the air around her.

She walked home. She was almost at the gate of their compound when something stopped her feet on the road.

She turned back to the church, praying that Mrs. Adebiyi would still be there.

The groundnut sellers were dismantling their spots. The church yard was thinning out, but she found Mrs. Adebiyi near the entrance, still talking to the pastor’s wife, and she stood to the side and waited.

The pastor’s wife noticed her. Then Mrs. Adebiyi noticed her. She turned, and her face arranged itself into a question.

“Ma, I’m sorry to disturb you.” Yetunde held out the folded notes. “Thank you for this money but I need something else. I need help. I don’t know what kind of help, I just know that you knew my mother and I know she will want those who knew her to help her daughter. If there is anything you can do to help me, if there is any way, any way at all—”

She stopped. She had come back without knowing what she was asking for, and now she was standing in a church yard asking a woman she did not know for something she could not name. It required a different kind of courage than she had needed before, not the courage to work hard, which she had, but the courage to be seen in her need, which cost more.

Mrs. Adebiyi looked at her.

“Did you finish school?”

“Secondary school, ma but I did not write my WAEC.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I sew dresses. At Iya Bimpe’s shop.”

The pastor’s wife looked hopeful but did not speak, as though understanding that this was not her conversation. The yard had emptied further around them and somewhere a car started.

“Let me think,” Mrs. Adebiyi said. “I will come and see your father before I leave.”

—————————————————————————————————————–

She came four days later, on the twenty-eighth of December.

She came in the late morning, dressed simply, in a plain ankara of good quality. She greeted Yetunde’s father with the respect of someone who had known the family before its diminishment, someone who was addressing not only the man in front of her but the man he had been. She accepted the water Yetunde brought, then sat to discuss with her father.

Yetunde sat in the doorway between the parlour and the kitchen, where she could hear without being directly in the room. This was a position she knew well, the threshold position, present but not summoned, available but not included.

Mrs. Adebiyi said that her son Emmanuel and his new wife were in Lagos, just married, setting up their home. They needed someone for the house, someone trustworthy, someone who could be relied on. She had been looking and had not found the right person. She had seen Yetunde in church and believed she might be the right person.

“My daughter cannot be a housemaid,” her father said.

He said it with the dignity of a man who has a principle. Yetunde heard it and understood that the principle was real even if the application of it had not been, that some part of her father knew he owed her better than what he had given her.

Mrs. Adebiyi named the salary.

She said she would send half directly to him every month.

His face changed. Not dramatically, he was not a dramatic man. But the principle rearranged itself in his expression, made room for the number, measured the number against itself and found the principle suddenly flexible.

He agreed before she had finished speaking.

Yetunde sat in the doorway and watched this happen and felt two things at once, cleanly, without confusion: gratitude toward Mrs. Adebiyi, who had come when she asked and brought what she had available; and grief toward her father, who had sold the principle for a monthly transfer, who had made the decision without consulting her because in his accounting, her labour was his.

She would carry this for years. She would forgive it in prayer, repeatedly, the way you do a thing you mean. She just would never find the moment to say so to his face.

Mrs. Adebiyi left with the arrangements made. Yetunde’s father called her from the doorway. “You will go to Lagos at the beginning of January.”

She went to her room.

She pulled the curtain and sat on the bed in the dark and argued with God, not in the language of church. She argued in the language she used when she was most herself.

“This is not what I asked for.” She said it to the ceiling, which was water-stained and familiar. “You know it is not what I asked for. I asked for a door and you are showing me a kitchen. I asked for school and you are giving me someone else’s house to clean. Is this what I have been praying for?”

She stayed in the dark for a long time.

Then she heard a whisper to her spirit. Whatever your hand can reach right now, do that. Do it as if God himself assigned it.

A housemaid’s hands reached cleaning, cooking, carrying and caring for other people’s lives. She pondered this, then postured her heart to obey, because in this world of nothing, God was all she had. She would do this work thoroughly, so completely, with such total attention, that God would have to do something with her. She did not know what doing this well would mean, but she had learned, from her mother, from the church yard, from Iya Bimpe’s machine, that the doing was the part that belonged to her. The outcome was the part that belonged to God.

She packed one bag with her clothes, her mother’s scissors, the orange-handled ones, wrapped in a headscarf, and her Bible. Then she took the photograph of her mother from under the floorboard, from the tin where her mother used to keep the savings, and put it in her small handbag.

——————————————————————————————————————–

She went to Tunde’s house before she finished packing.

She had not told many people about Tunde. He was not a secret exactly, but he was not yet publicly known with her, the way new relationships were not yet public, still tender, still finding their shape. He had been asking her for two years and she had said no for two years, not because she did not like him but because she had learned to be careful with her ‘yes’. She had watched women in Osi give their yes too quickly and spend years managing the consequences.

Then something shifted. One evening she had looked at him across the compound and seen a man who had waited without pressure, who had continued to be her friend when she said no, who had not punished her for the no or used it to negotiate. And she had thought: this one is patient.

She had said yes one month ago.

He was sitting in the parlour when she arrived, and when she told him about Lagos his face did the thing she had been expecting it to do. Not anger exactly, but something that lived beside anger, the tight expression of a man receiving news he had not been consulted about.

“Lagos,” he said.

“Mrs. Adebiyi arranged it. That big woman that comes to the village every Christmas.”

“How long?”

Yetunde kept her voice steady. “I don’t know exactly.”

He was quiet. Then: “You just said yes to me one month ago.”

“I know.”

“And now you are going to Lagos.”

“Tunde.” She kept her voice level. “This is work. This is my life. I have to figure out a way to make it.”

He looked at her with the expression she had not yet learned to read fully, the one that sat between concern and something more possessive. “Your life,” he said.

“Or your ambition.”

She did not answer that. She had heard the distinction he was making and she did not agree with it but she was leaving tomorrow and she was not going to begin an argument she could not finish.

“You will meet people,” he said finally.

“I will meet people everywhere,” she said. “I meet people in the market.”

“You know what I mean.”

She did. She sat beside him and took his hand, which was something she was still learning to do, the easy physical language of a person who is yours and whose hand you can take. “Tunde, I am going to work. I am going to save and open a shop where I can make dresses. That is the whole of it.”

He looked at her hand in his, then at her face. Something in him settled, the way it always settled when she was direct with him, when she spoke plainly and left no room for interpretation. This was what she had come to understand about Tunde: he needed to know where things stood. When he knew, he was fine.

“When I have something to offer,” he said, “when I have land and something to stand on, I am going to come and marry you and bring you back here. I want you to know that so you know where this is going.”

‘Come and marry you and bring you back here.’ Not where are you going, not what are you building, not what does your future look like. A picture already drawn, already decided, her place in it already marked.

She heard it. She filed it somewhere she could not yet examine.

“I know where it is going,” she said.

 She went home and finished packing.

 She was twenty years old.

She left Osi in January and did not know what the future held, except that whatsoever her hand finds doing, she would do it well.