‘Who is he?’ Nkechi asked on our way home, her eyes alert. We were in the backseat of a bus we’d been lucky to come across on our trek home.
‘Where did you meet him?’ her twin added.
‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled, hoping my mother wouldn’t notice.
‘Who?’ my mother asked, turning her head.
‘No one,’ I blurted, and she smiled that motherly smile of knowledge, but didn’t poke any further.
The following Sunday, Emeka and I sat in a corner where the ushers had stacked the used chairs at the end of service, to talk.
‘For the record, I didn’t run away. I just want to make that clear,’ he told me.
‘Are you sure? The way you disappeared, I thought you were a ghost,’ I said.
He laughed. Then we talked and talked – he hadn’t meant to dance that day, but he’d seen me seated, looking lost and out of place and he’d been compelled to ask me to dance.
‘So, you ask every girl you see sitting alone to dance?’
‘I did not say that. You love putting words in people’s mouths, do you know that?’
We were both students at the same university, I would discover, but he was in the Computer Science department.
‘So, if my mother hadn’t come here to share her testimony, what would have happened?’ I asked, hoping I didn’t sound too eager.
‘We would have met eventually, I’m sure of it,’ he said, his eyes settled with certainty. And I believed it, because he did.
With Emeka came expectations – of character and behaviour.
‘My father was not always a pastor, you know,’ Emeka said to me much later. We’d known each other for a few weeks at this point, and I could now read his facial expressions – the way his brow arched when he was unimpressed, how they flattened when he was annoyed. This expression was new, and I filed it in my mind to put a label to it later.
‘Really? How come?’
He slouched further down in his seat. The seats beside the stack of chairs at the back of church had become our spot.
‘When I was five, he was a banker, then he quit his job to start a marble importation business. The business was doing very well, at least we lived well enough. Then one day he said he’d received a calling from God. He went to a mountain to pray for forty days and forty nights. When he returned, he was haggard and thin. He visited a pastor friend that he considers his mentor, spent a few days there, and next thing you know, our lives had to change.’
It was hard to imagine Emeka’s father – with his hulky towering frame, platyrrhine nose and hard jawline, the man who stood on the pulpit every Sunday to command the congregation – being so easily influenced.
‘That must have been hard,’ I said, knowing what it was to have life upended by a singular event.
‘You have no idea!’ He chuckled and adjusted in his seat, bringing his eyes to my level. ‘So, are you finally going to tell me about yourself?
‘You make me feel short,’ I said, deflecting, pushing at his shoulder.
He rolled his eyes. ‘Please madam, you are short.’
‘I’m taller than most guys.’ It was true. I was even taller than my mother, whom many considered tall.
‘Well, you’re short to me,’ he said and patted the top of my head like an uncle.
‘You should play basketball.’
‘Nwakaego, stop dodging the question.’
It was the way he called my name, with such authority, the way he held my eyes, daring me to lie.
‘I’ve told you about myself,’ I said. ‘What else is there to know?’
‘You know what I mean.’ He took my hand and rolled a finger over the surface. ‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you won’t say anything about your family. It’s all very top level with you. I want to know you.’ I would always think of those words whenever I thought of him – I want to know you – and how no one had ever said that to me before.
I couldn’t seem to hold back after that. He knew the questions to ask, astute and probing without ever seeming intrusive.
He’d heard of my father, read about him in passing in a magazine, but never thought he’d be seated at the back of a church with his eldest daughter; he wanted to know how that had come to be. And I told him, rubbing at the scar cushioned between my braids.
When I was done, I waited for him to withdraw, to run and never look back. Instead, it seemed to remove the final barrier between us, and he shared even more: his struggles with his own father, the knee injury that had prevented him from playing basketball, his plans to become a programmer. Perhaps it was because he was a pastor’s child that he did not run away; he’d seen and heard the worst of society and nothing shook him anymore.
He reached out and stilled the fingers moving restlessly against my scalp. ‘You do that a lot.’
‘Oh, I didn’t realise,’ I said, immediately self-conscious. I tried to move my fingers but his hand had covered them.
We stared at each other in silence, and I thought we were going to kiss. Then he smiled, his teeth white and large. ‘Stop looking at me like that, we’re in church.’
It rained the day he met my mother. He arrived at our door soaked through, and I was afraid my mother wouldn’t like him. He’d been the one to suggest meeting her so we could spend time together outside of church activities. I’d been reluctant but he’d insisted.
‘So, this is the reason you’re going to church every day of the week?’ my mother said, her smile teasing.
She laughed and Emeka joined her, and they laughed together like they shared a secret about me.
