The Sensible One

Her mother arrived on a Saturday with a bag of ogiri, two wraps of unripe plantain, and opinions about the wedding colours that she had been saving since the last phone call.

Nneka made tea and let her settle.

Her mother, Adaeze Okafor, was a small woman who occupied spaces like someone twice her size. She sat at Nneka’s kitchen table and arranged her opinions the way she arranged everything, in order of importance, starting with the most important and never quite finishing before moving to the next one.

“The gold and burgundy is fine,” she said, wrapping both hands around her mug. “But I want to see the fabric before anything is cut. Your Auntie Ngozi used a tailor who nearly ruined her daughter’s introduction and I will not have that story repeated in this family.”

“I’ll send you the fabric samples this week,” Nneka said.

“And the caterer. Has Damilare spoken to his mother about the caterer? Because Funke has people she trusts and it is better to use people who have been trusted before than to start experimenting on your wedding day.”

“They’re discussing it.”

“Discussion is not confirmation.” Her mother looked at her over the mug. “You need to push these things, Nneka. Nobody will care about your wedding the way you care about your wedding.”

That is the problem, Nneka thought. I am not sure I care about it the way I am supposed to.

She said nothing.

Her mother talked about the programme of events, about the MC her cousin had recommended, about the small matter of Nneka’s brother Emeka who had still not confirmed whether he was bringing a guest and whose casual relationship with confirmation was a source of ongoing maternal suffering.

Nneka listened and responded and refilled the tea and was, for an hour, the daughter her mother had always needed her to be.

Then her mother said, as she sometimes said things, without announcement, dropping them into the conversation like stones into still water: “You have always made the sensible choice, Nneka. That is what I am most proud of. Not the degree, not the job. The fact that when it mattered, you chose sense.”

The kitchen went quiet inside Nneka’s head.

She knew what her mother meant. Her mother meant Damilare. She meant the engagement and the house in Lekki and the future assembling itself correctly. She meant all of it.

But Nneka heard something else.

She heard a different Saturday, four years ago, sitting in this same kitchen, her mother’s voice measured and certain, explaining why Kelechi was not suitable. Not from a bad family, her mother had said carefully, just not from the right kind of family. Not the kind of background that built the kind of future Nneka deserved. Her mother had said it with love. She had meant it with love.

And Nneka had listened.

She had called Kelechi that evening and said the things she had prepared to say and listened to the silence on his end of the phone and told herself she was being mature. She was being sensible. She was choosing the life that made sense over the feeling that made everything else feel insufficient.

She had not spoken his name out loud in three years.

She looked at her mother now, this small woman who loved her completely and had never once asked what the love was costing her.

“Thank you, Mum,” she said.

Her mother reached across the table and patted her hand once, firm and warm, the specific touch that meant: I see you and I am proud of you and this is enough, this is everything.

Nneka kept her hand still under her mother’s and felt the weight of every sensible choice she had ever made pressing down on her chest like something she had been carrying so long she had stopped noticing it was heavy.

After her mother left she sat at the kitchen table for a long time.

She thought about Kelechi, which she had trained herself not to do. She thought about the phone call and the silence and the way he had said her name once, just her name, before she ended the call. She thought about the months afterward when she had been very busy and very productive and had not allowed herself to be still long enough to feel what she had done.

She thought about a garden in Ikoyi with bougainvillea on the wall.

She thought about a question she had been asked on a balcony in Gbagada.

She went to bed early and lay in the dark and for the first time in a very long time allowed herself to ask the question she had been most afraid of.

What if sensible and right are not the same thing?

She did not answer it.

But she did not push it away either.

To be continued…