Lesley Nneka Arimah

creature who had no doubt inherited a vein of insanity from one of his yeye ancestors. I was his problem to solve.

“You know, they told me to beat you.”

“Who?”

“Everybody. They said since you were being raised without a father and in America of all places, if I didn’t beat you, you would go wild. And I didn’t listen.”

“That’s nice. Maybe she will be a good influence on you.”

“Uh, doubt it, what with the baby by her married boyfriend.”

My mother paused.

“Single women with children aren’t bad people.”

“Did you like my surprise?”

“I’m wearing one of your surprises right now. I look like a whore.”

“Chineke, Ada, don’t make me choke on my food.” She was laughing. “It’s just that you are so used to walking around dressed like a boy. You will soon like it.”

When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts.

They survived a sex talk, birthed by a careless joke an uncle had made at a wedding, about the bride taking a cup of palm wine to her husband and leaving with a cup of, well, and the girl had questions he might as well answer before she asked someone who could take it as an invitation to demonstrate. They survived the crime scene of the girl’s first period, where she proved to be as heavy a bleeder as she was a sleeper, the red seeping all the way through to the other side of the mattress. They survived the girl discovering this would happen every month.

The girl is in trouble for sending the boy a note and it is not the first time. Enebeli has seen the boy and, even after putting himself in the shoes of a fourteen-year-old girl, doesn’t see the appeal. The boy is a little on the short side. The boy has one ear that is significantly larger than the other. It’s noticeable. One can see the difference. Whoever cuts
the boy’s hair often misses a spot, so that it sticks up in uneven tufts. The only thing that saves the boy from Enebeli is that he seems as confused about the girl’s attention as everyone else.

“Buki, I love you. I will give you many sons,” and it takes everything Enebeli has not to guffaw. Where does the girl get all this? Not from her mother, whose personality and humor are of a quieter sort, and not from him, who would be perfectly content sitting by a river, watching the water swirl by. He promises to chastise the girl, assures the headmaster that it will not happen again. It happens two more times before the girl learns to pass notes better. And he should chastise the girl, he knows that, but she is his brightest ember and he would not have her dimmed.

Ignore all this because my mother has been dead for eight years.

My father and I have never spoken of the state he found me in, Alabama, to which I had run away, home to The Ex I’d promised never to see again. Nor have we spoken of the state he found me in, catatonic after a handful of pills, curled in a moon of vomit. But when I came to, I was in a hospital and he was there and I just knew things had to get better. I was twenty-two.