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“What people?”

“The people who had to kill for their king. I’m sure they wished they could change the way things were, they couldn’t have been happy.”

Obiora’s head is tilted to the side as he stares at her. “Well, maybe nine hundred years ago they didn’t define ‘happy’ like you do now.”

She puts the bronze head down; she wants to ask him how he defines “happy.”

“Why did you cut your hair?” Obiora asks.

“Don’t you like it?”

“I loved your long hair.”

“You don’t like short hair?”

“Why did you cut it? Is it the new fashion trend in America?” He laughs, taking his shirt off to get in the shower.

His belly looks different. Rounder and riper. She wonders how girls in their twenties can stand that blatant sign of self-indulgent middle age. She tries to remember the married men she had dated. Had they ripe bellies like Obiora? She can’t recall. Suddenly, she can’t remember anything, can’t remember where her life has gone.

“I thought you would like it,” she says.

“Anything will look good with your lovely face, darling, but I liked your long hair better. You should grow it back. Long hair is more graceful on a Big Man’s wife.” He makes a face when he says “Big Man,” and laughs.

He is naked now; he stretches and she watches the way his belly bobs up and down. In the early years, she would shower with him, sink down to her knees and take him in her mouth, excited by him and by the steam enclosing them. But now, things are different. She has softened like his belly, become pliable, accepting. She watches him walk into the bathroom.

“Can we cram a year’s worth of marriage into two months in the summer and three weeks in December?” she asks. “Can we compress marriage?”

Obiora flushes the toilet, door open. “What?”

“Rapuba. Nothing.”

“Shower with me.”

She turns the TV on and pretends she has not heard him. She wonders about the girl with the short curly hair, if she showers with Obiora. She tries, but she cannot visualize the shower in the house in Lagos. A lot of gold trimmings—but she might be confusing it with a hotel bathroom.

“Darling? Shower with me,” Obiora says, peeking out of the bathroom. He has not asked in a couple of years. She starts to undress.

In the shower, as she soaps his back, she says, “We have to find a school for Adanna and Okey in Lagos.” She had not planned to say it, but it seems right, it is what she has always wanted to say.

Obiora turns to stare at her. “What?”

“We are moving back at the end of the school year. We are moving back to live in Lagos. We are moving back.” She speaks slowly, to convince him, to convince herself as well. Obiora continues to stare at her and she knows that he has never heard her speak up, never heard her take a stand. She wonders vaguely if that is what attracted him to her in the first place, that she deferred to him, that she let him speak for both of them.

“We can spend holidays here, together,” she says. She stresses the “we.”

“What … ? Why?” Obiora asks.

“I want to know when a new houseboy is hired in my house,” Nkem says. “And the children need you.”

“If that is what you want,” Obiora says finally. “We’ll talk about it.”

She gently turns him around and continues to soap his back. There is nothing left to talk about, Nkem knows; it is done.

A PRIVATE EXPERIENCE

Chika climbs in through the store window first and then holds the shutter as the woman climbs in after her. The store looks as if it was deserted long before the riots started; the empty rows of wooden shelves are covered in yellow dust, as are the metal containers stacked in a corner. The store is small, smaller than Chika’s walk-in closet back home. The woman climbs in and the window shutters squeak as Chika lets go of them. Chika’s hands are trembling, her calves burning after the unsteady run from the market in her high-heeled sandals. She wants to thank the woman, for stopping her as she dashed past, for saying “No run that way!” and for leading her, instead, to this empty store where they could hide.