What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(13)

SECOND CHANCES




Ignore for a moment that two years out of grad school I’m old enough to buy my own bed and shouldn’t ask my father to chip in on a mattress, so that he shows up with my mother, who looks like she’s stepped out of a photograph, and she tries to charm the salesman, something she was never good at, but it somehow works this time and he takes off 20 percent. Ignore for a moment that she is wearing an outfit I haven’t seen in eighteen years, not since Nigeria, when she was pregnant with my younger sister, though not yet showing, and fell down the concrete steps to our house, ripping the dress from hem to thigh. Ignore that she flits from bed to bed, bouncing on each one like she hasn’t sat on a mattress in a while, and the salesman follows her around like he’d like to crawl in with her. Ignore all this because my mother has been dead for eight years.

My father avoids the look I give him and I’m glad there are beds around because I collapse onto one, unable to stand. When I grab my father’s wrist—I cannot at this juncture imagine touching her—he twists away from me. I follow him but he refuses to be cornered, so I walk up to my mother and ask, “What the hell are you doing here?”

The salesman looks at me like I kicked her and my mother looks pained, like I might as well have. But shock leaves very little room for guilt.

“Your daddy and I are buying you a bed, didn’t you say you wanted a bed?”

The gentle chiding is something I never thought I’d hear again and my knees almost buckle, but something about the casual way she’s correcting me, like she’s got any right, angers me.

“Why are you here? You’re supposed to be—”

My father interrupts this. “Do you want the bed or not?”

Both of them stare at me expectantly. I want to press the issue, but I also really, really need the bed. I nod and the salesman hesitates like he doesn’t want to give the discount if it’s for me, then walks away to ring it up. My mother is digging through her purse and I know it’s not to pay because she never does when my dad is around. But maybe she’s different now. Then she sighs and says, “Ike, darling, have you seen my sunglasses?”

—

The photo my mother has stepped out of was taken in 1982. She is wearing a green ankara-print caftan belted at the waist and it billows becomingly. There is a red patina on the photo that has developed over time. As she stands in the kitchen now, humming as she checks the cupboards, I see that the red tint is on her, starker against the white of the cabinets than at the store. The edges of her face are soft, as though she’s kept the slight blur of the photo as well. Slung over her shoulder is the tan raffia purse. All that’s missing are her red sunglasses. In the picture, they are tucked into the V at her neck, awaiting the Enugu sun. My father putters around her, and he is grayer, paunchier, slower than the last time I saw them together, but they move the same way, a tender, familiar dance. Every time I take a breath to say something, my father glances at me and his delight shuts me up. When they bend their heads together and begin to whisper, I slip away from the counter and into my father’s room. I have to find the photo.

It’s missing from the dressing table that, even after all this time, still holds my mother’s jewelry and perfumes, glittering bottles that range from Avon to Armani. The jewelry is just as varied, but most of it is costume, loud, baubly pieces crusted with bling. My mother wore no jewelry in the photo, not even a ring, as she and my father weren’t wed at the time but brave young lovers with, as my mother used to say, nothing to prove. There are other pictures of her on the dressing table. One when she was a child, stiff between her parents, long dead. Pictures of her at my high school graduation, on my dad’s fiftieth birthday, and my favorite, the one where she’s fluffing my baby sister’s frilly white pantaloons and my dad snaps just when Udoma kisses the top of Mom’s head. Udoma. I hear the front door open and she calls out in that Lucy-I’m-home way of hers and I rush to warn her before it’s too late.

When Udoma walks in, she pauses for a stunned moment and my father holds his arms out like ta-da! and she does what I should have done when I first saw my mother: she runs to her and holds her so tight about the waist it’s a wonder Mom can breathe, her sobs shaking them both.

—

There’s no way I’m going back to my apartment. I call in to work and leave a message punctuated by unconvincing coughs. It’s my thirteenth strike, but I don’t care. Udoma is practically in Mom’s lap, telling her every stupid thing she’s ever wanted to tell her and then some. Like my dad, she has simply accepted my mother’s presence like it’s nothing. I sit off to the side while the three of them are pressed close. Udoma stops and stares at Mom’s face and I wait for her to say something about it, but she just moves to the floor and snuggles her head into Mom’s stomach. She was ten when our mother died and just off the plane from Lagos for summer vacation. She’s filling Mom in on that trip and then on every trip after that, eight years of miles. My dad occasionally interrupts to update my mother on who is where now, and it is the first time he acknowledges that she’s been gone.

“And what about you, Uche, what have you been doing?”

They wait to see if I’ll play along.

“I’ve been getting over you. You know, because you’re dead.”