"The Man My Mother Made"

Even a small funeral has a sound system.

One speaker, borrowed, set on a plastic chair, feeding back every time the MC leaned in. A choir of six sharing four hymnals. The MC kept things moving---announcements, tributes, offering, interment---because the canopies were rented by the hour and everybody knew it.

They buried Kene a month after he passed. Fast, for our people. The mortuary bill had been climbing for a month. Nobody in that family was pretending otherwise.

A great musician, buried small.

Nobody to hold your phone at the graveside. Nobody to tell the ushers you're with somebody. Nobody to nudge you when the line moves---a stranger nudged me, once, because I had been standing still too long. At the gate I bought my own water from a hawker. At funerals, somebody usually hands you water. You don't know that until nobody does.

The family gave me a seat in the second row. Second row is for people who matter and came with no one.

A man I didn't know gripped my shoulder and said ndo. I nodded. He'd already turned away.

Felicia sat where widows sit, held up by aunties working in shifts. When the coffin went down, the young pastor said Ekene was a lover of God and of music. He had never met him. They closed with a chorus. Not one of his.

Afterward, in the reception canopy, a television stood on a crate for whoever had finished crying. Rice was moving in one direction, soft drinks and alcohol in the other. An awards rerun played under the noise of serving spoons.

My fingers started the count on my thigh before I knew why. Under the montage, a beat keeping strict time. Over the beat, a few bars my ear followed toward something it did not want to reach.

Then the face. Sunglasses indoors. A gold statue held like a phone. The name strip at the bottom of the screen: ZUBBY SOUNDS.

I found the remote among the soft drink bottles and set it down face-first. The screen went dark.

Nobody protested. It was a funeral.

The bus back to Enugu took two hours. I looked out the window the whole way and saw none of it.

⁂

I smelled the oha from the gate.

Inside, the radio was talking to itself in the kitchen and the pot was still warm on the stove, which meant she had timed me. Pounded yam sat under a waterproof bag. Soup for more than two people. She pointed her chin at the basin, and I washed my hands, and I sat, and I ate.

She moved around me while I did. Refilled the water without being asked. Shifted the pot lid a finger's width. She did not talk and she did not watch me directly, and I finished the first ball and started the second before either of us spent a word.

"How was the place?" she said, finally.

"Small. Fast."

"Mm." She turned her cup a half-turn. "Fast is what people can afford now. When your father's people buried Nnamdi, we cooked for nine days. Now---" She waved the rest of it toward the window.

"They served rice. It finished before the second row."

"You were in the second row?"

"Second row."

She clucked her tongue.

"His mother?"

"They carried her in. They carried her out."

"And Felicia."

"Standing. The aunties took turns."

"Good aunties." She put a piece of meat on my plate from the pot, not asking. "Did anybody ask of me?"

"Aunty Ngozi."

"Which Ngozi. The one with the shop, or the one that borrowed my grinding---" She stopped herself. "It doesn't matter. Greet her for me."

"You said it doesn't matter."

"Greet her anyway. We don't fight at funerals."

I ate. The radio moved from talk to music, some old highlife, horns bright against the little speaker. I got up, crossed to the kitchen doorway, and turned it down.

When I came back she was looking at me.

"You used to complain that radio was too low," she said.

I picked up the soup.

"Who preached?" she said, after a while.

"A young one. He didn't know him. He said Ekene was a lover of God and of music."

"Mm."

"They closed with a chorus. Not his own. He wrote forty songs I know of, and they sang somebody else's."

She went quiet at that. Her quiet is not a thing that happens by accident. The cup turned. Turned back.

Then she reached for the pot to add to my plate, and I put my hand over the bowl.

"It's enough."

"You've eaten nothing since morning."

"Keep it," I said. "Give it to somebody that's going somewhere."

The ladle went down. It didn't go gently, nor hard. Just exactly.

"You were not first," she said.

"Mama."

"You were not first." She smoothed her wrapper over her knees, and I knew the chair I was in had become the second plastic chair, even at the table. "Three came before you. Boys. All of them finished---ten fingers, your father's people's face on every one. None of them cried."

She did not say their names. She has never spent their names on conversation.

"The last one, the nurse did not even show me. They had stopped showing me." Her hand folded a pleat into the wrapper. Unfolded it. "Your father stopped coming to the ward early. Not because he was wicked. Because he could not carry his face where I would see it."

The radio played low. She let it.

"Then you came. Shouting before your legs were even out. The nurse said, ah, this one is quarrelling with the world already. Your father wanted to give you one of those soft names. Thanking God. Begging God. I refused."

"You named me Man."

"I named you what I saw." Her chin came up. "I did not birth a boy that morning. I birthed the man who stayed."

Somewhere in me a ledger took that down, and took it down wrong.

"So." She picked the ladle back up and pointed it at me the way other people point fingers. "When you sit in front of my soup and tell me to feed somebody that is going somewhere---I have been feeding him. Thirty-three years. And he is sitting in my house wasting my meat."

I looked at the plate.

"Nsukka is where I buried your brothers---where our people are from," she said, and this was the other voice, the one with nothing extra in it. "It will not bury you. And this compound will not bury you either---small small, one meter reading at a time. That is also burying. It is just slower and you pay for it monthly."

"Mama---"

"The night bus leaves at nine. I told Ekwueme to keep you a window."

She had told Ekwueme. Before I came home. Before the soup. Before I had said the word Lagos, which I had not said, which I could not remember even thinking.

She pulled at the knot in her wrapper and brought out money folded small, pressed flat and warm from being kept close to her body, and set it beside my plate.

"From where?" I said.

"From patience."

"I can't take your---"

"Alright."

The word did what it does in this family. It ended the matter without settling it.

⁂

The bag was on my bed. Packed, zipped, my good jeans folded on top. She had done it while I was in Nsukka burying my friend. Everything I owned that mattered was on the desk, and she had packed everything except the desk.

The laptop had not moved in three years. The charging cable was still in the wall socket. I don't know who we thought was coming to charge it.

On the lid, a strip of masking tape gone yellow, Kene's block capitals still holding their line: HANDS OFF. HITS INSIDE.

I picked it up. Under the dust, the lid was still smooth. I put it back on the desk, zipped the bag without it, and got as far as the door.

The tape said what it said.

I went back, took the blue shirt out of the bag, wrapped the laptop in it, and made room. Fela watched the whole operation from the wall, curling at the corners, unsurprised.

The notebooks stayed.

At the gate she straightened my collar with two fingers, once, and stepped back.

"Onye kwe, chi ya ekwe," she said. "When a person says yes, his chi says yes with him. So go and say yes."

"Ekwego m," I said.

It was the second one that month.

She went inside before the keke moved. She has never once watched me leave.

⁂

At the park, Ekwueme took my bag from my hand and put it in the boot himself.

"Oga producer," he said. "Welcome back."

I hadn't gone anywhere yet.

The benches near the ticket window were the same benches Kene and I sat on thirteen years ago, the first time this park sent me to Lagos, back when the promise was new and both of us were alive to keep it.

At nine exactly, the bus pulled out, the only thing in Enugu that runs on time. I put my head against the window with the laptop flat on my knees, and kept my eyes on the road ahead of the headlights, where there was nothing yet to see.