Africa39 Read Free Page B

was still standing by the door in the kitchen.
    ‘My name is Chinedu,’ he said.
    ‘I’m Ukamaka,’ she said.
    ‘This plane crash is terrible,’ he said. ‘Very terrible.’
    ‘Yes.’ She did not tell him that Udenna might have been in the crash. She wished he would leave, now that they had prayed, but he moved across into the living room and sat down on the couch and began to talk about how he had heard of the plane crash as if she had asked him to stay. He told her he did not realise initially that there were two separate incidents – the first lady had died in Spain shortly after a tummy-tuck surgery in preparation for her sixtieth birthday party, while the plane had crashed in Lagos minutes after it left for Abuja.
    ‘I know somebody who was on the flight,’ she said. ‘Who might have been on the flight.’
    ‘Jehovah God!’
    ‘My boyfriend Udenna. My ex-boyfriend, actually. He was doing an MBA at Wharton and went to Nigeria last week for his cousin’s wedding.’ It was after she spoke that she realised she had used the past tense.
    ‘You have not heard anything for sure?’ Chinedu asked.
    ‘No. He doesn’t have a cell phone in Nigeria and I can’t get through to his sister’s phone. Maybe she was with him. The wedding is supposed to be tomorrow in Abuja.’
    ‘God is faithful. God is faithful!’ Chinedu raised his voice. ‘God is faithful. Do you hear me?’
    A little alarmed, Ukamaka said, ‘Yes.’
    The phone rang. Ukamaka stared at it, the black cordless phone she had placed next to her laptop, afraid to pick it up.
    Chinedu got up and made to reach for it and she said ‘No!’ and took it and walked to the window. ‘Hello? Hello?’ She wanted whomever it was to tell her right away, not to start with any pre­­­ambles. It was her mother.
    ‘ Nne, Udenna is fine. Chikaodili just called me to say they missed the flight. He is fine. They were supposed to be on that flight but they missed it, thank God.’
    Ukamaka put the phone down on the window ledge and began to weep. First, Chinedu gripped her shoulders, then he took her in his arms. She quieted herself long enough to tell him Udenna was fine and then went back into his embrace, surprised by the familiar comfort of it, certain that he instinctively understood her crying from the relief of what had not happened and from the melancholy of what could have happened and from the anger of what remained unresolved since Udenna told her, in an ice-cream shop on Nassau Street, that the relationship was over.
    ‘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