Yetunde Says Yes
1033 Words
The message came on a Friday evening.
Adunola was in the upstairs study reviewing quarterly projections when her phone lit up on the desk beside her laptop. She had a system. Personal messages stayed face down until she finished the section she was working on. Yetunde was an exception to that system. Had always been an exception to every system she had tried to build around her.
She picked up the phone.
Yetunde: I need to tell you something. Can you call me tonight.
She looked at the message for a moment.
She finished the paragraph she was on. Then she closed the laptop.
She called.
Yetunde picked up after two rings. Her voice had a particular quality to it. Not bad exactly. Not distressed. Something that was sitting in between things. Finding its position.
“Talk to me,” Adunola said.
“I have been seeing someone,” Yetunde said.
The study was very quiet.
“Tell me,” Adunola said.
“Her name is Sade,” Yetunde said. “She is a photographer. We met three months ago at a friend’s exhibition. She is.” A pause. “She is uncomplicated in ways that I have not had access to in a very long time.”
Adunola said nothing.
“I am not telling you this to hurt you,” Yetunde said. “I need you to know that. I am telling you because you are still the person I tell things to. Even the things that are about us. Even the things that are complicated.”
“I know,” Adunola said.
“Are you alright,” Yetunde asked.
The question landed with the specific weight of someone who loved you enough to ask even when the answer was inconvenient for everyone.
“I am working on it,” Adunola said.
Yetunde made a small sound. Recognition. “That is what I said to you once.”
“I know,” Adunola said. “It was the right answer then too.”
They were quiet together for a moment. The particular silence of two people who had shared too much to perform comfort and too much history to pretend the conversation was simple.
“She makes you happy,” Adunola said.
“She makes me present,” Yetunde said. “Which I think I needed more than happy right now.”
“Yes,” Adunola said. “Yes I think you did.”
“Ada.”
“I am here.”
“I did not stop,” Yetunde said. “Loving you. I want you to know that. It did not stop. I just.” She paused. “I could not keep waiting at a door that was not going to open. It was not your fault the door was closed. But I could not keep standing at it.”
Adunola closed her eyes.
“I know,” she said. “I know that. And I am sorry. Not for the arrangement. For the years before it when I had no excuse except fear and I let fear cost you things it should not have cost you.”
“You were surviving,” Yetunde said gently.
“So were you,” Adunola said. “And your survival should have mattered as much to me as mine did.”
The silence after that was different from the earlier ones. Softer. The kind of silence that happened after something true had finally been said and the air around it had shifted.
“Be happy, Ada,” Yetunde said. “Whatever that looks like. However it arrives. Let it.”
“You too,” Adunola said. “Tell Sade she has excellent taste.”
Yetunde laughed. Small and real. The laugh Adunola had loved for three years.
“Goodnight Ada.”
“Goodnight.”
She sat with the phone in her hand after the call ended.
She sat for a long time.
She did not cry. She was her mother’s daughter. But something in her chest did something complicated and slow and she let it because there was nobody watching and the study was hers for this moment and she had earned the right to feel things in private.
After a while she became aware of sound downstairs.
She went down.
Kola was in the kitchen. He had come home while she was on the call. He had not announced himself. He was standing at the counter eating something cold directly from the container which was the most undignified she had ever seen him and she would not have described it as endearing except that it was.
He looked up.
He read her face the way he had learned to read it over weeks of proximity. He did not ask what happened. He opened the cabinet. He took out a glass. He poured her water and placed it on the counter in front of the second stool.
She sat.
She drank.
He continued eating from the container.
“Yetunde,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. Not a question.
“She is with someone new.”
He put the container down. He looked at her.
“Are you alright,” he said.
“She told me to be happy,” Adunola said. “Whatever that looks like.”
He was quiet.
“That is generous,” he said.
“She is a generous person,” Adunola said. “She always was. I was not always careful with that.”
He nodded slowly.
They sat in the kitchen in the quiet of a house that had become, without either of them planning it, a place where true things could be said without requiring performance.
“Emeka said something similar,” Kola said after a while. “When he left. He said. Find out what you actually want. Not what the name requires. Not what the will requires. What you want.”
She looked at him.
He was looking at the counter.
“Did you,” she said. “Find out.”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“I am finding out,” he said.
She nodded.
The kitchen clock moved.
Lagos hummed outside.
Neither of them moved to go to bed.
- Writer
