What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky(41)

“And this is the young madam,” Mrs. Ajayi teased at me, and Mayowa’s curtsy was even more reluctant. Understandable, as we were the same age, but my mother wasn’t having it.

“See this one. Nancy, you are going to have trouble with her,” my mother said, adding, “You are too kind,” when Mrs. Ajayi explained that Mayowa was the child of a third cousin who couldn’t afford to send her to school. As though to confirm my mother’s predictions, Mayowa raised her bowed head and met my mother’s eyes straight on.

“So bold. And look at that.” She waved a hand to indicate Mayowa’s backside. Mayowa was small for her age, with a compact muscular frame that promised to blossom into something interesting.

“This one will be bringing boys around soon, if she hasn’t started already,” my mother said, calling Mayowa’s virtue into question. The answer arrived the next day, wrapped in the contested results of last week’s election.

Grace, our house girl, who had to clean up the mess, took to sneering whenever she saw Mayowa or heard her name. Grace was nineteen, far older than what my mother considered prime house girl age, and prettier than my mother would have liked, but my father was long gone, so she kept her. When anyone asked where my father was, my mother would say he was traveling, which was true if traveling meant “I prefer my mistress’s cooking, so I’m going to live with her now.”

—

I began to spend most of my time outside, knocking lemons out of the tree, swirling the dirt on my mother’s car, shading with the lizards. When the Ajayis’ gate creaked, I’d run to our gate and peek through a crack in the metal. Sometimes it was the husband or wife leaving, sometimes it was the man who cared for their dogs, but most of the time it was Mayowa, strutting on her way to school or the market or just down the road to the pharmacy. She walked as though the earth spun to match her gait. I liked to think that if she’d known I was there, she’d have turned around and waved.

Mrs. Ajayi was very old, creeping on that age when life begins to lose all meaning, fifty, I think. I would go and sit with her because everyone knows how old people enjoy the company of young people. They suck at us like vampires, or wilting flowers that require the sunshine of our youth. Whenever Mrs. Ajayi saw me she sighed, and it wasn’t till I was much older that I realized it wasn’t a sigh of relief.

She fed me Fanta and chinchin and listened to me talk and talk and talk. Sometimes, greased by loneliness, her secrets would slip out and she would mention things she shouldn’t have, like how her oldest son couldn’t find a job and how Mr. Ajayi was getting tired of lending him money. I was her young confidante, the daughter she never had, except for the two daughters she did have, who came by every few Sundays with their young children.

I wasn’t worried about Mayowa replacing me. She wasn’t the sort of girl who could sit and listen to old women and their problems. In fact, she seemed like the sort of girl who would hide an old woman’s medication and watch the trembling in the woman’s hands increase till she was too incapacitated to stop Mayowa from cleaning out her purse. I liked her a lot.

And so I stepped up my visits to Mrs. Ajayi, my sometimes biweekly calls multiplying to weekly, then near daily, as I found any reason to stop by.

“Mrs. Ajayi, my mother needs the pot she borrowed you six months ago.”

“Mrs. Ajayi, can I have the ripe guava from your tree?”

“Mrs. Ajayi, there is a string hanging from my dress, can you fix it?”

And when she called Mayowa to fetch the pot or the scissors or the old mop handle to knock the tallest fruits, I stared, trying to figure out what aspect of this girl made her brave enough to throw shit at my mother. Her hair was cropped short, barely enough left to cover her scalp, and did nothing to enhance the squat ordinariness of her face. That’s all she is, I told myself, an ordinary girl. And yet.

My visits to Mrs. Ajayi steadied at twice a week, once when Mayowa was there—I’d ask for something that needed fetching so I could watch her, study the boldness of her movements—and once when she wasn’t, so Mrs. Ajayi could talk freely.

Mrs. Ajayi would ask after my mother and sometimes, tentatively, my father, in between the recitation of her week so far and its most exciting aspects. This usually meant hearing about something Mayowa had done.

I picked these stories out of the trash of Mrs. Ajayi’s boring day, her lazy son, Mr. Ajayi’s intestinal distress. There was the time Mayowa held down one of the students at her school, pinned the girl’s head between her knees, and scraped off half her cornrows with a razor blade before an adult intervened. And the day she taunted the dogs so much, leaving their bowls just out of reach, that they growled and bit their caretaker for the first time since they were untrained pups. Or how she served Mr. Ajayi far more meat than his old gut could handle, so she could feast on his leftovers. When I came across these morsels of Mayowa, I shelved them in my memory, where I could reimagine them over and over till I’d convinced myself I was there. I liked to think she would have wanted me to be.

—

Church meant my mother dressing me in frills too young for my years, sweating the starch out of said frills in the un-air-conditioned building, and seeing the woman my father left us for. She came every few Sundays, when the weighty sin of fornicating with a married man became too heavy to bear. My mother didn’t know that I knew who she was and understood why my mother never clapped when the woman gave a testimony of God’s goodness. She always wore yellow, and she looked pretty in it. Not abandon-your-only-legitimate-child pretty, but you could see what a man would see in her. I imagined throwing something at her house, something hard, something that would hurt a man kissing her a distracted good-bye, his back turned so he doesn’t see the rock sailing his way.