Her Last Breath of Love

The morning had started the way most mornings in Umuleke village started — with the sound of a rooster that had clearly lost all sense of time, a neighbor burning something that smelled like trouble, and Teacher Favour standing in front of her small cracked mirror, pressing down the edges of her wig with the kind of focused determination usually reserved for brain surgeons and bomb disposal experts. The wig in question was a shoulder-length, honey-brown piece that Favour had purchased from Mama Chisom's stall in the market approximately fourteen months ago. It had arrived in what Favour still described to anyone willing to listen as "pristine, glorious condition." A fresh stock item. A wig so fine that Mama Chisom had practically wept when she handed it over. Favour had paid four thousand, five hundred naira for it — a sum that had required three weeks of careful budgeting, the skipping of two Sunday afternoon pepper soups, and the deliberate avoidance of her neighbor Deborah, who had a supernatural ability to show up whenever money changed hands. The wig had seen better days since then, yes. The gel was finished. The edges had begun to make their own decisions. But to Favour, it remained a crown. And every morning, she placed it on her head with the quiet dignity of a woman who knew her own worth, even when the world around her seemed determined to debate it. She smoothed down the front one last time, picked up her worn leather handbag, tucked her lesson notes under her arm, and stepped out into the early morning air of Umuleke. The road from her compound to Hippo High School was a forty-minute walk if she moved with purpose, fifty if she stopped to argue with anyone — which happened more often than she liked to admit. The road was unpaved in most places, red laterite dust rising with every footstep, and lined on both sides with small shops just beginning to open their shutters, women arranging vegetables on wooden tables, and children in rumpled school uniforms eating breakfast on the move. Favour walked with her chin up. She always did. It was a habit she had developed years ago, not out of pride exactly, but out of necessity. When you had nothing much to show the world, the least you could offer was posture. She was muttering quietly to herself — going over the lesson she had planned for her JSS2 class, a topic on quadratic equations that she already knew would result in at least four children staring at the ceiling, two pretending to write, and one, inevitably Luke, doing something creative with a piece of folded paper — when it happened. The car came from nowhere. Or rather, the car came from the right side of the road, moving at the kind of speed that suggested the driver either had somewhere extremely important to be or had simply made peace with the possibility of manslaughter. It clipped the edge of the gutter, threw up a generous arc of muddy water, and caught Favour directly — her blouse, her skirt, the left side of her face, and, most unforgivably, the wig. The world stopped. Favour stood completely still for three full seconds. The muddy water dripped from the brim of the wig down the side of her cheek. Her lesson notes, now speckled with brown spots, fluttered weakly in the morning breeze. Her handbag strap had slipped off her shoulder from the force of her flinching and now dangled at her elbow. Then she turned. The car — a black SUV, clean and expensive-looking despite the violence it had just committed — had slowed to a stop a few metres ahead. The driver's door opened. A man stepped out. Tall, well-dressed in a pressed grey shirt and dark trousers, shoes that cost more than Favour's monthly salary. He was perhaps in his early forties, with the kind of face that was handsome in a tired, distracted sort of way — as though he had once been fully present in his own life and had simply never found his way back. He looked at Favour. He looked at the state of her. Something crossed his face — guilt, yes, but also the particular discomfort of a man who knew he was about to have a problem and was rapidly calculating how expensive that problem would be. "Madam," he began. "I am sorry. I am — I'm really sorry." Favour looked down at herself slowly. Then she looked back up at him. Then she looked at the wig. She reached up and touched it. Her fingers came away muddy. Something ignited behind her eyes. "Come out," she said. Her voice was dangerously quiet. "Come out of that car." "Madam, I —" "I said come out." The quiet was gone now. "Come out! Come out! Come out!" The man stepped fully away from the car, both hands slightly raised, the universal posture of a person trying very hard not to escalate a situation that was already escalating on its own. "Madam, I'm sorry. I am really, really sorry. Please —" "Are you blind?" Favour's voice had found its full register now, rich and carrying, the kind of voice that could silence a classroom of forty children and summon a crowd of curious onlookers from a hundred metres away. "Are you visually impaired? Are you telling me that you are driving on this road and you cannot see a human being standing here?" "I'm not visually impaired," the man said carefully. "I was in a hurry. I was rushing somewhere and I —" "You were rushing somewhere." Favour repeated it back to him in the tone of a woman who had just heard the most spectacular nonsense of her adult life. "You were rushing somewhere. Okay. Fine. Samuel or whatever your name is. I don't care that you are big. I will beat you like a child on this road today. I will beat you like a child." "Please," the man said, "take it easy. I believe we can sort this out. If you just —" "Three thousand naira." He blinked. "I beg your pardon?" "Three thousand naira." Favour enunciated each word the way she enunciated words for students who were not paying attention. Slowly. Clearly. With the faint suggestion that she would not be repeating herself. "And you say you are not blind. Look at my clothes. Look at what you have done to my shoe. Look at what you have done to my —" she gestured upward, toward the wig, and her voice cracked very slightly before she steadied it, "— my head. Three thousand naira. Now." The man stared at her for a moment. Then he reached into his pocket. He produced a wallet — leather, thick, the kind of wallet that did not concern itself with how much things cost. He counted out three one-thousand naira notes and held them out toward her. Favour looked at the money. She looked at him. She took it. But she was not done. She straightened up, tucked the money into her handbag with great ceremony, and then fixed the man with a look that contained several years of accumulated grievance — about salaries not paid, about roads not fixed, about a certain wig that had been in perfectly acceptable condition before this morning. "It is not because you have money," she said, her voice dropping back to that low, controlled register that was somehow more frightening than the shouting, "that you will be driving anyhow on this road. It is not because you have air conditioning and a big car that you will be treating people like they are rubbish. Some of us are trekking. We are walking on our own two feet on this road. We still deserve respect. We are still human beings. You cannot just be doing anyhow because you are in a car." The man opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "I am really, really sorry," he said, and to his credit, he sounded like he meant it. "Mm." Favour looked him up and down one final time. Her eyes travelled from his expensive shoes up to his tired, handsome face, and something flickered in her expression briefly — something unreadable — before she shut it away and replaced it with judgment. "Someone that is dressed like this, this early in the morning. There is something that is wrong with you. And it is not me. It is not." She gestured vaguely at his clothing. "See your cloth. Like traffic lights. Disturbing everywhere. Traffic light. And you still cannot see where you are going. Absolute rubbish." She turned on her heel and walked away. The man stood by his car and watched her go. He did not get back in for a long moment. He just watched Teacher Favour — muddy wig, speckled lesson notes, handbag swinging with the indignation of a woman who had just won a very important battle — march down the road toward Hippo High School with her chin held high and her posture unbroken. Then he got back into his car, sat behind the wheel, and stared at the road ahead for a moment longer than necessary. His name was Samuel. He had come back to Umuleke after more than two years away. He had come back for his daughter. He had not expected to be defeated by a schoolteacher before he even reached his mother's house. He started the car and drove on. Behind him, Teacher Favour was already calculating. Five thousand naira. The blouse she was wearing had cost five hundred. It would wash. The shoe — she would check later, but it looked like it might survive. The wig — She touched it again gently as she walked. Still there. Still hers. She exhaled through her nose. "Five thousand naira," she said quietly to herself, and despite everything, despite the mud and the indignity and the ruined morning, the corner of her mouth lifted just slightly. "At least I can change that shoe now. Those nonsense children will stop laughing at me." She walked on. The sun climbed higher over Umuleke. Somewhere ahead, Hippo High School was waiting — with its broken chairs, its unpaid salaries, its forty restless children, and one boy named Luke who was almost certainly already folding paper into something he had no business folding. Teacher Favour straightened her wig one final time. She went to work.