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Obiora visited almost every month, the first two years, and she and the children went home at Christmas. Then, when he finally got the huge government contract, he decided he would visit only in the summer. For two months. He couldn’t travel that often anymore, he didn’t want to risk losing those government contracts. They kept coming, too, those contracts. He got listed as one of Fifty Influential Nigerian Businessmen and sent her the photocopied pages from Newswatch, and she kept them clipped together in a file.

Nkem sighs, runs her hand through her hair. It feels too thick, too old. She has planned to get a relaxer touch-up tomorrow, have her hair set in a flip that would rest around her neck the way Obiora likes. And she has planned, on Friday, to wax her pubic hair into a thin line, the way Obiora likes. She walks out into the hallway, up the wide stairs, then back downstairs and into the kitchen. She used to walk like this throughout the house in Lagos, every day of the three weeks she and the children spent at Christmas. She would smell Obiora’s closet, run her hand over his cologne bottles, and push suspicions from her mind. One Christmas Eve, the phone rang and the caller hung up when Nkem answered. Obiora laughed and said, “Some young prankster.” And Nkem told herself that it probably was a young prankster, or better yet, a sincere wrong number.

. . .

Nkem walks back upstairs and into the bathroom, smells the pungent Lysol that Amaechi has just used to clean the tiles. She stares at her face in the mirror; her right eye looks smaller than the left. “Mermaid eyes,” Obiora calls them. He thinks that mermaids, not angels, are the most beautiful creatures. Her face has always made people talk—how perfectly oval it is, how flawless the dark skin—but Obiora’s calling her eyes mermaid eyes used to make her feel newly beautiful, as though the compliment gave her another set of eyes.

She picks up the scissors, the one she uses to cut Adanna’s ribbons into neater bits, and raises it to her head. She pulls up clumps of hair and cuts close to the scalp, leaving hair about the length of her thumbnail, just enough to tighten into curls with a texturizer. She watches the hair float down, like brown cotton wisps falling on the white sink. She cuts more. Tufts of hair float down, like scorched wings of moths. She wades in further. More hair falls. Some gets into her eyes and itches. She sneezes. She smells the Pink Oil moisturizer she smoothed on this morning and thinks about the Nigerian woman she met once—Ifeyinwa or Ifeoma, she cannot remember now—at a wedding in Delaware, whose husband lived in Nigeria, too, and who had short hair, although hers was natural, no relaxer or texturizer.

The woman had complained, saying “our men,” familiarly, as though Nkem’s husband and hers were somehow related to each other. Our men like to keep us here, she had told Nkem. They visit for business and vacations, they leave us and the children with big houses and cars, they get us housegirls from Nigeria who we don’t have to pay any outrageous American wages, and they say business is better in Nigeria and all that. But you know why they won’t move here, even if business were better here? Because America does not recognize Big Men. Nobody says “Sir! Sir!” to them in America. Nobody rushes to dust their seats before they sit down.

Nkem had asked the woman if she planned to move back and the woman turned, her eyes round, as though Nkem had just betrayed her. But how can I live in Nigeria again? she said. When you’ve been here so long, you’re not the same, you’re not like the people there. How can my children blend in? And Nkem, although she disliked the woman’s severely shaved eyebrows, had understood.

Nkem lays the scissors down and calls Amaechi to clean up the hair.

“Madam!” Amaechi screams. “Chim o! Why did you cut your hair? What happened?”

“Does something have to happen before I cut my hair? Clean up the hair!”

Nkem walks into her room. She stares at the