What She Told Her Mother

Somto knew before Nneka said anything.

She opened the door on Friday evening and looked at Nneka’s face and stepped back to let her in without a word, the specific silence of a friend who had been waiting for this visit and had prepared for it by making tea and saying nothing about having prepared for it.

They sat in Somto’s small sitting room with the fan on low and the television off and Nneka told her everything.

All of it. Not the edited version. Not the brand strategy answer. Tobi. The venue in Ikoyi. The balcony. The phone call. The office on Wednesday. What was said. What it meant. What she felt and had been feeling and had spent months constructing careful architecture around to avoid examining directly.

Somto listened without interrupting.

When Nneka finished Somto was quiet for a long moment, her tea cooling in her hands, her expression carrying the particular weight of someone absorbing information they had suspected and are still surprised by now that it is confirmed.

“Okay,” she said finally.

“Okay?”

“I knew something was there,” Somto said. “I asked you twice. You said no both times.” She was not accusatory. Simply stating the record. “I knew you would tell me when you were ready.”

“I was afraid of what saying it would make it,” Nneka said.

“I know.” Somto set down her tea. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. I know I cannot marry Damilare the way things are. I know that much.” She paused. “I don’t know what that means for everything else.”

“Everything else meaning Tobi.”

“Everything else meaning my mother,” Nneka said. “My father. Both families. The wedding that is four weeks away. The deposits that have been paid. The fabric that has been cut.” She stopped. “Tobi is the least complicated part of this.”

Somto looked at her with the expression that meant she disagreed but was choosing her moment. “The man you have feelings for is the least complicated part.”

“Because nothing has happened between us. Because I don’t know what would happen between us outside of this situation. Because I cannot make a decision about Damilare based on Tobi and call it honest.” Nneka’s voice was steady, thinking out loud rather than performing certainty. “If I end the engagement it has to be because it is the right thing for its own reasons. Not because someone else exists.”

Somto was quiet for a moment. “That is either very wise or very painful.”

“Both,” Nneka said. “It is both.”

She stayed at Somto’s until midnight. They talked about other things eventually, the way people did when the heavy thing had been set down and needed to breathe beside them rather than be examined further. Somto made noodles at ten o’clock and they ate them in front of a film neither of them paid attention to and it was the most normal Nneka had felt in weeks.

In the morning she called her mother.

She did not plan exactly what she would say. She had learned, in recent weeks, that planning what to say was another form of editing, and she had decided to try something different.

Her mother answered on the third ring, her voice carrying the alert energy of a woman who was already doing three things before nine o’clock on a Saturday morning.

“Nneka. Are you alright?”

“I need to talk to you,” Nneka said. “Can I come today?”

A pause. Her mother recalibrating. “I’ll be here. Come for lunch.”

The house in Surulere where Nneka had grown up looked exactly as it always looked, the bougainvillea her father had planted along the fence now thick and unruly, the blue gate with the small dent that nobody had ever repaired, the sound of her mother’s radio playing from the kitchen before she was fully through the door.

Her mother made ofe onugbu and set it on the table with confidence, the specific confidence of a woman who knew that a good meal created the conditions for difficult conversations.

They ate first. Her mother talked about a neighbour’s situation, about her church women’s group, about Emeka’s continuing failure to behave like a man who understood that his mother had limited patience. Nneka listened and responded and ate and let the ordinary rhythms of her mother’s house settle around her.

Then she set down her spoon.

“I am not sure I can go through with the wedding,” she said.

Her mother’s hand stilled over her plate.

The kitchen radio played on. A presenter’s voice, cheerful and distant, filling the silence around the edges.

“Tell me,” her mother said. Her voice was even. Not the reaction Nneka had expected. Not the reaction she had been afraid of.

So Nneka told her. Not about Tobi. Not yet. She told her about Reena, about what she saw in Onikan, about the conversation with Damilare and the admission he had made about safer choices. She told her about the performance, the two of them performing a relationship for a year, good at it, convincing, neither of them asking the question that mattered.

Her mother listened the way she had not expected her mother to listen, without interruption, without the careful redirection toward what was salvageable, without the voice Nneka had been braced for, the one that weighed options against outcomes and called the calculation wisdom.

When Nneka finished her mother was quiet for a long time.

“I want to tell you something,” her mother said finally. Her voice had a different quality now, something underneath the composure that Nneka had never heard before. “I have been carrying it for a long time and I think I have been wrong to carry it alone.”

Nneka looked at her.

“Kelechi called me,” her mother said. “Three months after you ended things. He called and he asked me directly if I had said something to you. I told him no.” She paused. “That was a lie.”

The kitchen settled into a deep quiet.

“Mum.”

“I told myself I was protecting you,” her mother said. “I told myself his family background would create problems you could not see from inside the feeling. I told myself sensible was the same as right.” She looked at her daughter directly, this woman who had arranged Nneka’s life with such careful love and such thorough blindness. “I have watched you for four years making choices I approved of and being less alive with each one and I have told myself it was maturity.” Her voice was steady but her hands were not. “It was not maturity. I was afraid. I am sorry.”

Nneka looked at her mother’s hands trembling slightly against the table and felt something shift in her chest, something old and load-bearing, loosening.

“Why are you telling me now?” she asked.

“Because you came here to tell me the truth,” her mother said. “And I cannot receive your truth while sitting on mine.”

The radio presenter laughed at something in the distance.

Nneka reached across the table and covered her mother’s hands with her own.

They sat that way for a long time, mother and daughter in the kitchen that had shaped so many of Nneka’s silences, finally in the same place at the same time, telling each other true things.

“What do I do?” Nneka asked. The question she had been asking everyone. The question she was beginning to understand that only she could answer.

Her mother squeezed her hands once, firm and warm.

“You do what is true,” she said. “Whatever that is. You do what is true and I will be here.”

To be continued…