Everything Good Will Come (43 page)

Gnarled and plump people, the Francos, I thought. The old and young. I could well be jealous of them. When did we ever have family in our home? My mother's family was her church. My father avoided his because they were always trying to extort money from him. “Big Foot,” I said.

It was Niyi's youngest brother, the tallest and skinniest.

“Yep?” he answered.

“Gerrin here,” I said.

He walked toward me looking like some sort of willow tree. Big Foot was my favorite—clumsy, and his feet were size fourteen.

“We need help in here,” I said.

“Who needs help?”

“Your mother, who gave birth to you, needs help.”

“Doing what?”

“Serving food.”

He frowned. “I don't know how to do that.”

“No one knows how to do that. They learn. So you better gerrin here or else those girls you keep bringing around here, trying to impress, I will start talking.”

“You won't do that.”

“Just ask your brother what a wicked woman I can be.”

“You women's liberation-nalists,” he mumbled.

He tackled his mother for the bowl. “Relax woman,” he told her.

She sat by the kitchen table watching him. “Big Foot knows how to do this? Big Foot? You know how to do this? I thought you were useless, like the rest of my sons.”

Big Foot spilled stew on his shirt and yelled.

That evening, I found a dress in my wardrobe. It was not one of mine. It was made from tie-dyed fabric and newly sewn. I thought I'd stumbled on infidelity.

“What is this?”

I held it up. Niyi was lying on our bed.

“I can't even have a girlfriend in this place,” he muttered.

“Whose is it?”

“You were not supposed to see it. It's yours.”

I lifted it. “Mine?”

“For Easter.”

“You've never given me a present for Easter before. Who made it?”

I placed it against my body.

“Your seamstress,” he said.

“You went to my seamstress?” I leaned forward. “You went to my seamstress?”

He nodded. “Now I know where our money goes. That woman has a bigger fan than ours in that shack of hers.”

Niyi called me Jackie O. I ran to my seamstress more than any other woman he knew, for all my principles. Well, he was a big fat liar, but it was true that new clothes could make me salivate. I sniffed the dress. I could still smell the sweat of my seamstress' fingers on the cloth.

“Thank you,” I said, using the dress as a shield.

“You too,” he said. “You did a lot today.”

“I know,” I said.

I also clipped his toe nails before we slept. I always did because he wouldn't and he would end up scratching my legs. As I wrestled with three months' nail growth, I was finally able to tell him about meeting my brother.

“These men,” he said. “I don't know how they do it. I didn't choose to have two families and most days I feel like half a man.”

“Since when did you feel like half a man?”

“Watch what you're doing.”

“What will I do with half a man? I want you to be double man. How many years now, and we've been fighting. I want you to be my greatest ally.”

“I am.”

“You're not.”

“Here we go.”

“Keep still,” I said.

“Don't amputate my foot!”

He wasn't kicking me and I was cutting him up. We were talking again.

“My love for you is much,” he said. “You just don't know.”

Baba came to collect his monthly salary the next day. He was still tending my father's garden on Sundays, and on Saturdays worked at a house nearby.

“Compliments of the season,” I said. “How are you?”

I spoke to him in Yoruba, addressing him by the formal you, because he was an elder. He responded with the same formality because I was his employer. Yoruba is a language that doesn't recognize gender—he the same as she, him the same as her—but respect is always important. “We are fine,” he said. “Hope all is well with you. Have you heard from your father?”

“No word yet.”

“I will be there to work tomorrow.”

“Please excuse me,” I said.

He waited by the kitchen door as I went to get his money. When I returned, I felt a slight breeze through the mosquito netting. I handed the money to him.

“It's cold,” I said.

“It's going to rain,” he said.

“Rain? So early? The rain is strange these days.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You'd better not get caught in it,” I said.

“I will hurry.”

I rubbed my arms as goose bumps appeared. Walking upstairs, I imagined Baba trudging to the nearest bus stop in the rain. He had withered so much, it was hard to believe he was the same person who had chased me round the garden when I was small. I told Niyi I would give him a lift, then visit my mother. “She hasn't been well,” I said.

“Again?” he said.

“It's not her fault,” I said. “She prefers to be well.”

He, who listened to his father's self-praise without yawning. I'd asked him to stop finding every excuse to leave home whenever my mother visited. Mostly, he said he had to go to the office. She worried that he was overworked.

I found Baba by the gates of our estate, and drove him to the nearest bus stop. We passed a marketplace. The sky had turned gray and the market women were clearing up in anticipation of the rain. They placed plastic sheets over their wooden stalls and secured them with rocks. Children scurried with full trays perched on their heads. Some were giddier than the wind with excitement. Their trays were colorful with tomatoes, cherry peppers, purple onions, okras, and bananas. A sign post on a shack caught my eye.

We specialies in

Gonerea

Sifilis

AID

Watery sperm

“I didn't know you lived on the mainland,” I said.

“I moved,” Baba explained. “Ten years now. I used to live in Maroko. They drove us away and flattened our homes. Your father let me stay in the quarters, until we found a new place.”

“I didn't know.”

“You were with your mother. They came to us that day with coffins, and told us that if we didn't leave, we would end up inside them.”

When Baba said “they,” he meant anyone in uniform: the army, the police, traffic conductors. He would have seen different rulers under the British, First and Second Republics, and military governments.

I slowed for a group of hawker women to cross the road.

“Did you vote at the elections?”

“Yes. They told me to put an “X,” I put an “X.” Now they're telling me my “X” is nothing. I don't understand.”

He said “hex” instead of “X.”

“They're following their predecessors,” I said.

“These ones?” he said. “They have surpassed their predecessors. For the first time, I'm looking at them, and saying, it is as if... ”

Baba took time to finish his sentences. I waited until he was ready.

“It's as if they hate us,” he said.

I dropped him at the bus stop. It began to rain as he boarded his bus. The rain coursed down on my windscreen; the wipers barely cleared my view. I drove slow and noticed the sign post on the shack again.

We specialies in

Gonerea

Sifilis

AID

Watery sperm

My face was wet and steamy. The gutter in front of my mother's house flowed like a muddy river. My mother didn't come to her door when I rang her bell, so I rushed to the back door to check if it was open. It was. I walked upstairs cleaning the rain from my arms, knocked on her bedroom door.

I smelled her death before I saw her.

“Mummy!” I screamed.

She was lying on the floor, before an empty candle holder. I reached for her shoulder and shook, bent to listen to her heart. There wasn't a sound. I ran out of her house and swallowed rain.

On the front porch of Mrs. Williams' house, Shalewa stuck her toe into a puddle. She took one look at me and froze.

I rattled the gate. “Shalewa, where is your mother?”

“Upstairs.”

“Please. Open the gates.”

Shalewa ran into the rain.

“Tell her it's Enitan from next door. Tell her I need to see her. Please.”

She unlocked the gates and I followed her indoors.

Mrs. Williams didn't think it was wise to call an ambulance. “They may come, they may not come,” she said as though discussing the month's profit margins. “We will have to carry her to hospital in my van. Shalewa?”

“Yes, Mummy.”

“Get me my phone, my sweet.”

“Yes, Mummy.”

She'd been skirting around, trying to hear our whispers. As her mother made phone calls in the dining room, I sat in the living room with her. She moved a place mat around a side table, and sang a pop song; not one I recognized, “Treat me like a woman,” occasionally peeping at me. She knew I'd been crying.

Mrs. Williams returned to the living room.

“I've found help,” she said. “I'd better call the hospital now. You stay here and I will come for you when we're ready.”

Who would carry my mother? I thought. Her arms, her legs. They would have to carry her with care, as if she were sleeping, as if she could wake.

Once her mother left, Shalewa resumed her game with the place mat. I wanted to tell her not to worry, but children knew when they were being lied to and she would think she was responsible for my sadness regardless. She continued her song. “Treat me like no other... ”

Her mother returned.

“Shalewa,” she said. “You want to go to Temisan's house?”

Shalewa nodded.

“That's my girl. Go upstairs and get your shoes. Her mummy is coming for you.”

Shalewa ran upstairs, half-smiling. She tripped on a stair and exaggerated her limp.

“Will she be okay?” I asked.

Her mother nodded. “I'll explain to her later. We'd better go.”