and there he was, lighter-skinned, chubby, laughing. It had been six years. They clung to each other. In the car, he told her that he had sorted his papers as a single person and so they would marry again in America and he would file for her green card. He took off his shoes when they got to the apartment and she looked at his toes, dark against the milk-colored linoleum of the kitchen floor, and noticed that they had sprouted hair. She did not remember his toes with hair. She stared at him as he spoke, his Igbo interspersed with English that had an ungainly American accent: “Amah go” for “I will go.” He had not spoken like that on the phone. Or had he, and she had not noticed? Was it simply that seeing him was different and that it was the Tobechi of university that she had expected to find? He excavated memories and aired them, rejoiced in them: Do you remember the night we bought suya in the rain? She remembered. She remembered that there had been a crackling thunderstorm and the electric bulbs were blinking and they had eaten the soggy grilled meat with raw onions that made their eyes water. She remembered how they had woken up the next morning with onions heavy on their breath. She remembered, too, how their relationship had been filled with an effortless ease. Now, their silences were awkward, but she told herself that things would get better, they had been apart a long time, after all. In bed, she felt nothing except for the rubbery friction of skin against skin and she clearly remembered the way it used to be between them, he silent and gentle and firm, she loud and grasping and writhing. Now, she wondered if it was even the same Tobechi, this person who seemed so eager, so theatrical, and who, most worrying of all, had begun to talk in that false accent that made her want to slap his face. I wanna fuck you. I’m gonna fuck you. The first weekend he took her out to see Philadelphia, they walked up and down Old City until she was exhausted and he asked her to sit on a bench while he went and bought her a bottle of water. As he walked back toward her in his slightly baggy jeans and a T-shirt, the tangerine-colored sun behind him, she thought for a moment that he was somebody she did not know at all. He would come home from his new job as a manager at Burger King bearing a little gift: the latest Essence magazine, Maltina from the African store, a chocolate bar. On the day they went to a courthouse to exchange vows in front of an impatient-looking woman, he whistled happily as he knotted his tie and she watched him with a kind of desperate sadness, wanting so much to feel his delight. There were emotions she wanted to hold in the palm of her hand that were simply no longer there.
While he was at work, she would pace the apartment and watch TV and eat everything in the fridge, even spoonfuls of margarine after she had finished the bread. Her clothes pinched her waist and armpits, and so she took to walking around with only her abada wrapper tied loosely around her and knotted under her arm. She was finally with Tobechi in America, finally with her good man, and the feeling was one of flatness. It was only Chinwe she felt she could really talk to. Chinwe was the friend who had never told her she was foolish to wait for Tobechi, and if she told Chinwe how she did not like her bed but did not want to get up from it in the morning, Chinwe would understand her bewilderment.
She called Chinwe and Chinwe began to cry after the first hello and kedu. Another woman was pregnant for Chinwe’s husband and he was going to pay her bride price because Chinwe had two daughters and the woman came from a family of many sons. Kamara tried to soothe Chinwe, raged about the useless husband, and then hung up without saying a word about her new life; she could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.
With her mother on the phone, she said everything was fine. “We will hear the patter of little feet soon,” her mother said, and she said “Ise!” to show that she seconded the blessing. And she did: she