August 2019

Nna let out a faint gasp at the sight of the woman in the kitchen. He took in everything – the small head, the big eyes, the pursed lips, the slender neck, the ankle beads, the measured steps, and the dull thumping of a heart, his heart, against a spindly cage. He rubbed his eyes and licked the bits of peeling skin on his lips. He wiped the soles of his Oxford mules on the welcome mat at the entrance to the brick-red mansion on a quiet street in Sugar Land, Texas.

The house was a four-bedroom single family residence built in the early nineties. His parents, Agbala and Eke, took great pride in it as it was the only house they’d ever owned in America. Over the years, they’d hacked at its vestigial parts like the glass block wall that once stood in the foyer till the house bore the brassy gleam of modernity.

Standing by the entrance to his parents’ house, Nna wished he’d listened to his mother, Agbala, who often reminded him to comb his hair. As the dusty black Toyota Camry that dropped him at the house began to pull out of the driveway, Nna fished in his pockets for his handy afro pick.

The woman was clad in a thin beach towel that threatened to fall to the ground. He could make out the outline of her buttocks (small, firm). The dull thumping in his chest increased its volume. She was what Agbala – his hurricane of a mother – would fondly call a yellow pawpaw, to be shielded from the sun at all costs.

But she was more than color, she was melody.

She hummed an old Bright Chimezie number, one Agbala often hummed as she chopped bell peppers in the airy open-concept kitchen of the Nwosu family house. But Agbala did not hum the song like the woman in the kitchen. Agbala was not melody. Nna opened his mouth to introduce himself. A warm draft of stale air tickled his lips as he lowered his eyes to his torso. The Old Navy flannel shirt hung off his body like it didn’t ask to be there. It was not entirely his fault. Fridays were jeans day at his white-shoe law firm in Philadelphia, and the wrinkled shirt was the first thing his eyes, weary from reviewing the organizational structure charts of his clients, had seen that morning.

Nna tore his eyes away from the woman’s buttocks and tiptoed up the stairs with his suitcase, past the ledge in the upstairs hallway with a framed photograph of himself and his parents from his college graduation, past the upper-level living room, past the master bedroom, past the room his mother slept in whenever she got into a fight with his father, and into his bedroom.

His bedroom – cornflower-blue walls, fraying posters of Kobe Bryant, thumbprints from years of his mother’s egusi dinners – smelled of old spice, teenage angst, and balled socks. He pictured his mother Agbala, her hunched back curved like a sickle as she straightened his pillows and sniffed the air for dust.

His palms dove past the blur of Bob Marley tees and khakis in his closet and reached for a washed black tee with a blown-up image of the Jonas Brothers. A month ago, he’d woken up in his Philadelphia row house to a call from his mother. He’d ignored the headache forming across his temple as she complained that he lived too far from Sugar Land, and didn’t he know the long distance was taking a toll on her health? He’d refused to concede to her demand that he leave his corporate job in Philadelphia for a boutique oil and gas law firm in Houston. With his mother, it was important to stand one’s ground, trembling knees and all – or risk becoming his father Eke. The poor man sought his wife’s stamp of approval for everything, down to the number of fried plantains he could have with his jollof.