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Another flight arrival was a
The children stood up and the father asked them to sit down and then stood up himself. The grandmother clutched her handbag to her belly. Ola
Ola
"Mama!" the father said.
'Why does it not stop?" The grandmother asked, both hands placed on her head in despair. "Chi ml My God! I am in trouble! Where is it taking my son now? Have you people deceived me?"
"Mama, it will stop," Ola
She didn't let go until the plane stopped and the grandmother slipped her hand away and muttered something about foolish people who could not build planes well. Ola
Her flight was bumpy. The man seated next to her was eating bitter kola, crunching loudly, and when he turned to make conversation she slowly shifted away until she was pressed against the airplane wall.
"I just have to tell you, you are so beautiful," he said.
She smiled and said thank you and kept her eyes on her newspaper. Odenigbo would be amused when she told him about this man, the way he always laughed at her admirers, with his unquestioning confidence. It was what had first attracted her to him that June day two years ago in Ibadan, the kind of rainy day that wore the indigo color of dusk although it was only noon. She was home on holiday from England. She was in a serious relationship with Mohammed. She did not notice Odenigbo at first, standing ahead of her in line to buy a ticket outside the university theater. She might never have noticed him if a white man with silver hair had not stood behind her and if the ticket seller had not signaled to the white man to come forward. "Let me help you here, sir," the ticket seller said, in that comically contrived "white" accent that uneducated people liked to put on.
Ola
Ola
"I'm Ola
When she finally felt that desire, she was surprised above everything else. She did not know that a man's thrusts could suspend memory, that it was possible to be poised in a place where she could not think or remember but only feel. The intensity had not abated after two years, nor had her awe at his self-assured eccentricities and his fierce moralities. But she feared that this was because theirs was a relationship consumed in sips: She saw him when she came home on holiday; they wrote to each other; they talked on the phone. Now that she was back in Nigeria they would live together, and she did not understand how he could not show some uncertainty. He was too sure.
She looked out at the clouds outside her window, smoky thickets drifting by, and thought how fragile they were.
Ola
Now, Ola
"Thank you, Maxwell," she said.
"Yes, aunty," Maxwell mumbled, and moved on with his tray.
Ola
"This is the best avocado I have tasted in a long time," Chief Okonji said.
"It is from one of our farms," her mother said. "The one near Asaba."
"I'll have the steward put some in a bag for you," her father said.
"Excellent," Chief Okonji said. "Ola
"It's very good." Ola
"I hope you've thought about coming to join us at the ministry, Ola
"How many people get offered jobs personally from the finance minister," her mother said, to nobody in particular, and her smile lit up the oval dark-ski
Ola
She saw the way her father tightened his lips. Her mother left her hand suspended in the air for a moment, as if the news were too tragic to continue sprinkling salt. "I thought you had not made up your mind," her mother said.
"I can't waste too much time or they will offer it to somebody else," Ola
"Nsukka? Is that right? You've decided to move to Nsukka?" Chief Okonji asked.
"Yes. I applied for a job as instructor in the Department of Sociology and I just got it," Ola
"Oh. So you're leaving us in Lagos," Chief Okonji said. His face seemed to melt, folding in on itself. Then he turned and asked, too brightly, 'And what about you, Kainene?"