THE ROMANCE COACH

Homework

She gave him the assignment at the end of the third session, the way a teacher might give a student a book he had been avoiding.

"I would like you to stop teaching for a week," said Miriam.

"I'm sorry?"

"Stop teaching, and notice." She was already folding her cardigan sleeve over the pincushion. "That is all. Watch people. Real ones. Not the ones in your book. Come back on Tuesday and tell me what you saw."

"That's not a method."

"No," she said. "It is homework."

Daniel almost argued. He had a method for everything, after all. He had a method for how long to wait before texting, and a method for forgiveness, and a method for the first kiss. But she had that look again, the one that went right through the laminate, and he heard himself say, "Fine. A week."

"Good." She stood. "And Mr. Okafor?"

"Yes?"

"Do not write it down. If you write it down, it becomes a worksheet."

---

For the first two days, he saw nothing.

This was a humiliating discovery. He sat in a restaurant in Surulere, a loud, cheerful buka with plastic chairs and a television bolted to the wall, and he watched the couples around him with the sharp eye of a professional, and he saw only categories. *Anxious attachment.* *Avoidant.* *Love language: acts of service.* He had spent so long labeling people that he had forgotten how to look at one.

On the third day, he put his phone in his jacket pocket and left it there.

He took a danfo from Yaba to Oshodi, which he had not done in a decade, and sat squeezed beside a young woman holding a plastic bag of oranges. Across the aisle, an elderly man in a faded agbada was dozing, his head tipped back, his hand resting on a woman's knee. The woman, who might have been his wife, did not look at him. She was watching the road, and every time the bus lurched, her free hand drifted over, without a pause, to steady his head against the seat.

She never looked down. She did not need to.

Daniel watched it happen six times between Yaba and Oshodi, and by the sixth he was unreasonably close to tears.

*That*, he thought. *That is the thing. And nobody has ever put it in a book.*

---

On the fourth day, he went to a wedding he had not been invited to.

That was not strictly true. The groom was the cousin of a former client, and Daniel had been told, vaguely, to *drop by if you're in the area*. He stood at the back of a hall near Ikeja in his best suit, holding a plate of jollof he did not want, and watched the couple dance.

They were not good dancers. The groom kept stepping on his bride's hem. She kept laughing and hitching it up with one hand and pulling him back with the other. At some point the music changed to something faster and they both stopped, mid-step, and simply stood there, grinning at each other, out of breath and uncoordinated and entirely unobserved by each other, because each was looking only at the other.

Daniel looked around the room. Nobody else was paying attention. They were eating, talking, and checking their phones, and the most romantic thing he had seen all week was happening in a corner of the dance floor, and it would be gone in thirty seconds.

He understood, standing there with cold jollof going stiff on his plate, that he had spent his whole career teaching people to make a moment *visible*. To stage it, to perform it, to hand it to the other person with a bow on it.

But the real thing did not want to be seen. It just wanted to happen.

---

On the sixth day, he called his mother.

He did not call her often. She lived in Enugu, in the same house where he'd grown up, and their conversations tended to follow the shape of a well-worn path: his health, the weather, whether he was eating, whether he had *met anyone*. He usually deflected the last one with a joke.

This time, he said, "Mama, what did Papa do? When were you married?"

There was a long pause on the line. In the background he could hear the radio, and a pot lid rattling.

"What kind of question is that?"

"I'm trying to remember."

"Hmm." She sounded suspicious, and then, slowly, something in her voice relaxed. "Every morning. Before he went to work. He made me a pap. He could not cook anything else, you know. Not even rice. But he made pap, with the sugar and the milk, and he put it on the table by my side of the bed so it would be warm when I woke up."

Daniel sat down on the arm of his sofa. "Every morning?"

"Thirty-one years. Even when we were quarreling. *Especially* when we were quarreling." She laughed, a little wet. "He would put it down and say nothing and go. And I would be so angry, because how can you fight a man who has made you pap?"

"What did he say when he gave it to you?"

"Nothing. That is what I'm telling you. He did not say anything." She sniffed. "Why are you asking me this at this time?"

"I'm doing some research."

"Research." The word came out in her most skeptical register. "Daniel, my son. You are forty-one years old. When are you going to stop *researching* and go and fall in love like a human being?"

He opened his mouth to make the joke. The one that always worked.

"I think I'm trying to," he said instead.

The line went very quiet.

"Good," said his mother, finally, in a different voice entirely. "Eat something."

He laughed, helplessly, with his hand over his eyes, and could not explain why.

---

On Tuesday, Miriam was five minutes early. She sat down, and looked at him, and said nothing at all.

He had prepared a speech. Three pages, with headings. He left it in the folder.

"A woman on a bus," he said. "Put her hand out every time it jolted, to keep her husband's head from knocking against the window. She never looked. She just knew where it was."

Miriam's pen stopped moving.

"And a man in Enugu who made pap for thirty-one years and never said a word about it." He was speaking slowly now, finding the sentences as he went. "And a groom who stepped on his bride's dress, and she laughed instead of being angry, and I don't think either of them knew it was the best thing in the room."

He stopped. His hands were open on the desk. They were not holding anything.

"I don't have a story of my own," he said. "That's what I found. I had a hundred stories about other people, and when I went looking for mine, there was nothing there. There's just a very clean kitchen."

Miriam looked at him for a long time. Outside, the generator coughed and settled.

"That," she said, quite gently, "is the first true thing you have said to me."

She closed her notebook. She had written nothing in it all.

"Same time on Friday," she said. "Bring your own chair."