After a few more minutes catching up, Auntie Ugo went to finish making dinner, pointing me to the guest room upstairs. Along the staircase were pictures of Chinyere as a child, alone, with her parents, with me on the last visit I’d made when I was thirteen. The pictures stopped a couple of years after that, and there were no images of the baby.
In my room, I found Chinyere rifling through my suitcase, pulling out tops and dresses and holding them to her.
“They’re all new. Did you go shopping just for this visit?”
I looked at the suitcase. Not a scrap of flannel or denim in sight. No doubt my shirts and jeans were being sorted at a thrift shop right that minute, or possibly aflame in our backyard fire pit.
“Ugh, my mom must have. I don’t dress like this.” I traced the beaded edge of a black jersey top that managed to accommodate folds and layers and creases. It was so lovely I resented it. “You can have it if you want.”
“I have my own clothes.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Auntie Ugo called us.
In the kitchen, she manned several pots while giving instructions to the housekeeper, Madeline, on what to buy, mentioning foods she remembered as my favorites even after all these years. Madeline bounced the baby on her hip and he pulled at her buttons.
“Chi-Chi, why don’t you take care of your brother,” Auntie Ugo said, and the cadence of the request carried the rhythm of one uttered many times. The boy was a year old, bug-eyed and cute. My mother had warned me I was to go along with the pretense in public, but I hadn’t expected that even in the privacy of their home we were to act as if the boy wasn’t Chinyere’s son. Madeline handed him to Chinyere and they both left the room, leaving me alone with my aunt. I didn’t know how to fill the silence after her casual malice. She was more than up to it.
“You know, we did everything for that girl, everything. The best schools, the best everything.” She tasted the soup and added Maggi, shaking the bottle so vigorously I resigned myself to dinner being a little salty. “But you children, you don’t know anything.”
She sounded just like my mother, and I knew that if I didn’t interrupt, the lecture would escalate until I wanted to slit my wrists just to give her something to mop so she would. Stop. Talking.
“I’m tired,” I said.
“Oh, sorry, my dear, go and lie down. Chinyere will get you when the food is ready.”
Instead of escaping to the guest room, I went to Chinyere’s, where I found her lying on her bed while the boy toddled around waving a comb in the air. She looked up when I walked in, then went back to tempting him with an unlit candle. When he released the comb, she snatched it up and slipped it under her pillow. He grabbed the candle and jabbed the air with it before offering it to me, grinning.
“Don’t take it, or he will come looking for the comb again,” she said.
The boy grew bored waiting for me to accept his gift and leaned over to tug at the neon-yellow straps of my flip-flops.
“He likes you.” She didn’t sound like she liked that. Or me.
“What can I say, I have a way with handsome young men. And aren’t you handsome? Aren’t you deliciously handsome?” The boy squealed and giggled as I picked him up and pretended to snack on his arms and belly. When I stopped, he settled his head into my neck.
“He must be tired,” Chinyere said. “Let me take him.”
She got up, pulled him out of my arms, and settled him in the hollow of the mattress she’d just vacated. A week ago you couldn’t have told me I would enjoy the weight of a child or feel intense satisfaction when he gripped my shirt as his mother removed him. I’d always thought of babies as blobby entities, sometimes powder scented, sometimes poo scented, that I wouldn’t need to concern myself with for another decade. But Chinyere had given birth when she was around the age I was now.
“My mom’s mad at me too, you know,” I said, looking for common ground.
“Her mom”—she imitated my pronunciation, poorly—“gets angry with her and buys her clothes.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Oh? What’s it like?”
I didn’t feel like explaining—where would I even begin—so I went to my room. I dug through the suitcase looking for anything that was mine, but even the pajamas were new. I picked up the beaded black shirt and put it on. It was as lovely as I’d imagined it would be. I rummaged through my purse and found my phone.
My cousin is a bitch, I typed, then sent to Leila. A few minutes later she responded.
Yeah, I heard your mom sent you back to Africa. Text me some topless women!
I laughed. Derek Colvin and the guys on the soccer team had taken to calling Leila the Lebanese Lesbian because she refused to date any of them. And being Leila, she sort of ran with it.
This is a $10 text telling you you’re an idiot. I don’t want to stay here. I’m going to try and guilt my mom into getting me a hotel.
And as though following perfectly timed stage directions, my phone woofed. It was the ringtone I’d programmed for my mother when I was angry with her—a dog barking.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Your auntie said you arrived almost an hour ago. You should have called me, or at least texted so I could call you.”
“I’m sorry, I just got to catching up with Chinyere and lost track of time.”
“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.”
I sat up, chastened.
“I’m sorry.” Requesting a hotel was out of the question now.
“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.”
I hadn’t realized how angry I’d been with her until suddenly I wasn’t. I wanted to tell her about Auntie Ugo and Chinyere, how it seemed they would come to blows any minute, and how even at our most contentious we had never been like that.
“Thank you.”
“Aha, I was waiting for that. I also put a package in there for your auntie Ugo and your uncle. There’s some perfume for Chinyere and a little something for the housekeeper. I’m sure your auntie will find you girls something nice to do.”
—
The event my aunt secured us an invitation to was a fund-raiser for a private primary school whose student body consisted mostly of the spawn of the local elite. It was hardly the carousing I had been promised, but it was a way out of the house that met Auntie Ugo’s requirement that no one get pregnant. We could only go if we took a phone—mine—and promised to answer it by the second ring. Or else. The invitation promised entertainment and refreshment, and that seemed to be enough for Chinyere. She dressed in a shortish black dress and applied makeup so expertly she looked like a different, glamorous person. I picked a blue dress from the collection my mother had packed and had to admit that when it came to clothing, my mother knew what she was doing. After watching me struggle with a tube of caked mascara, Chinyere went and retrieved an arsenal of tubes and brushes, sat me at the foot of the bed, and went to work. She said nothing except to direct me—close your eyes, smack your lips—and was done not ten minutes after she began. The mirror showed that nice young woman my mother was always hoping for. I looked like a promise fulfilled.
“Can you take a picture for me?” It was all the compliment Chinyere needed on her handiwork, and she smirked as she snapped a picture with my phone. I let her hold on to it, because I didn’t like to carry a purse, and I figured she’d want to make another clandestine call once we’d left the house. But she wasn’t done with favors.
“You have to do something for me. Ask my mum if we can borrow her car.” She rushed over my response. “I used to borrow it all the time, before. I can drive it, I just need you to ask or else she’ll say no.”
The request seemed harmless enough.
“Okay. But that makes us even.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”