The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [59]
“I knew my God would deliver! I have been praying in my heart for God to keep him safe,” Chinedu said, rubbing her back.
Later, after she had asked Chinedu to stay for lunch and as she heated up some stew in the microwave, she asked him, “If you say God is responsible for keeping Udenna safe, then it means God is responsible for the people who died, because God could have kept them safe, too. Does it mean God prefers some people to others?”
“God’s ways are not our ways.” Chinedu took off his sneakers and placed them by the bookshelf.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“God always makes sense but not always a human kind of sense,” Chinedu said, looking at the photos on her bookshelf. It was the kind of question she asked Father Patrick, although Father Patrick would agree that God did not always make sense, with that shrug of his, as he did the first time she met him, on that late summer day Udenna told her it was over. She and Udenna had been inside Thomas Sweet, drinking strawberry and banana smoothies, their Sunday ritual after grocery shopping, and Udenna had slurped his noisily before he told her that their relationship had been over for a long time, that they were together only out of habit, and she looked at him and waited for a laugh, although it was not his style to joke like that. “Staid” was the word he had used. There was nobody else, but the relationship had become staid. Staid, and yet she had been arranging her life around his for three years. Staid, and yet she had begun to bother her uncle, a senator, about finding her a job in Abuja after she graduated because Udenna wanted to move back when he finished graduate school and start building up what he called “political capital” for his run for Anambra State governor. Staid, and yet she cooked her stews with hot peppers now, the way he liked. Staid, and yet they had spoken often about the children they would have, a boy and a girl whose conception she had taken for granted, the girl to be named Ulari and the boy Udoka, all their first names to be U-names. She left Thomas Sweet and began to walk aimlessly all the way up Nassau Street and then back down again until she passed the gray stone church and she wandered in and told the man wearing a white collar and just about to climb into his Subaru that life did not make sense. He told her his name was Father Patrick and that life did not make sense but we all had to have faith nonetheless. Have faith. “Have faith” was like saying be tall and shapely. She wanted to be tall and shapely but of course she was not; she was short and her behind was flat and that stubborn soft bit of her lower belly bulged, even when she wore her Spanx body-shaper, with its tightly restraining fabric. When she said this, Father Patrick laughed.
“‘Have faith’ is not really like saying be tall and shapely. It’s more like saying be okay with the bulge and with having to wear Spanx,” he said. And she had laughed, too, surprised that this plump white man with silver hair knew what Spanx was.
Ukamaka dished out some stew beside the already warmed rice on Chinedu’s plate. “If God prefers some people to others, it doesn’t make sense that it would be Udenna who would be spared. Udenna could not have been the nicest or kindest person who was booked on that flight,” she said.
“You can’t use human reasoning for God.” Chinedu held up the fork she had placed on his plate. “Please give me a spoon.”
She handed him one. Udenna would have been amused by Chinedu, would have said how very bush it was to eat rice with a spoon the way Chinedu did, gripping it with all his fingers—Udenna with his ability to glance at people and know, from their posture and their shoes, what kind of childhood they had had.
“That’s Udenna, right?” Chinedu gestured toward the photo in the wicker frame, Udenna’s arm draped around her shoulders, both