Her Last Breath of Love

Chapter 16: Favour At Home

Grandma took her hands — both of them, in the two-handed grip of a woman making a specific kind of contact. She looked at Favour the way she had been looking at her since the first afternoon she had come through this gate with a lesson bag and a plan, with the warm, certain knowledge of someone who had seen something clearly from the beginning and had been waiting patiently for everything else to catch up.

"This family needed you," she said simply. "You may not understand yet in what way. But you will."

Favour opened her mouth.

"You do not need to say anything," Grandma said. "Just go. And know that this house is yours to come back to whenever you need it."

She released her hands.

Favour picked up her bag — Samuel had already put it in the boot but she had no bag to pick up, so she stood for a moment with empty hands, which was somehow the most accurate representation of how she felt. She looked at Grandma one more time.

"Thank you, Mama," she said. "For everything."

"Thank you for seeing my granddaughter," Grandma said. "Now go before this rain gets worse."

The drive out of Umuleke took twenty minutes.

Favour sat in the front passenger seat — Princess had claimed the back with the sovereign certainty of a teenager who had decided this was her domain — and watched the village go past the window. The market, not yet open. The school, gates locked, the yellow building fading in the grey morning rain. The road where it had all started, the specific stretch of laterite that had been the scene of a five thousand naira negotiation that felt, from this distance, like it had happened in a different chapter of somebody else's story.

She watched it all go past and said nothing.

Samuel drove with the quiet competence of a man who was comfortable with long roads and did not feel the need to fill silence with conversation. The radio was on low — something instrumental, unobtrusive, the kind of music that accompanies things rather than demanding attention for itself.

From the back seat, after about ten minutes, Princess said, "Is there music in the house?"

Samuel looked at the rearview mirror. "What kind of music?"

"Any kind. For the kitchen. When I cook."

A pause. "There is a speaker system," he said. "You can connect your phone to it."

"Good." A pause. "Good."

Silence again.

Favour looked at the road ahead, at the place where the village track joined the wider road that led, eventually, to the city. At the point where Umuleke ended and everything else began.

She thought about what Grandma had said. This family needed you. You may not understand yet in what way. But you will.

She thought about what it meant to be needed. She had been needed before — by her students, in the transactional, institutional way that teachers were needed by the children they taught. She had been needed by Deborah, in the companionable, daily way of neighbors who had become something more than neighbors without ever formalising it.

But this was different.

She could feel that it was different even if she could not yet say precisely how. There was a quality to it — to the way Princess had said I am not going without Teacher Favour and the way Samuel had come to her door in the rain at seven forty-five in the morning and the way Grandma had held her hands and said this family needed you — that was different from being useful. Different from being convenient. Different from filling a function.

She was not yet ready to name what it was.

She looked at the road.

She was going to have time to figure it out.

They stopped once, about an hour into the drive, at a filling station on the outskirts of the next town. Samuel went to pay for fuel. Princess got out and stretched and came to stand beside Favour, who had also gotten out and was standing at the edge of the forecourt looking at the road ahead — wider here, better paved, the beginning of the country that existed between the village and the city.

"Are you nervous?" Princess asked.

Favour looked at her. "No."

"Not even a little?"

"What would I be nervous about?"

Princess thought about it. "New place. New people. New everything."

"I have handled new before," Favour said. "New is manageable."

Princess looked at the road ahead. She was quiet for a moment. Then, without turning, she said, "I am glad you are coming."

"I know," Favour said.

"You are supposed to say you are glad too."

"I am glad too," Favour said.

"You said it like you were reading a grocery list."

"I am not a sentimental person, Princess."

"I know. But you could try."

Favour looked at her. At this girl — this complicated, brilliant, infuriating, magnificent girl who had thrown a spitball at her wig six weeks ago and had since become, through a series of events that defied straightforward explanation, one of the most significant people in her life.

"I am very glad," she said. And she meant it completely and the completeness of it was audible even without embellishment.

Princess nodded. Satisfied.

Samuel came back from paying. He looked at the two of them standing together at the edge of the forecourt and something moved across his face briefly — something private and warm that he did not share but did not entirely hide.

"Ready?" he said.

"Ready," Princess said.

They got back in the car.

The road opened up ahead of them — wide and grey and wet with the morning rain, leading away from everything that had been and toward everything that was coming. Favour looked at it through the windscreen and breathed in slowly.

She was ready.

She had been ready, she thought, for longer than she knew.

They arrived in the city in the late morning, when the rain had stopped and the sun was doing its best to reassert itself through the breaking clouds, throwing sharp light across the wet surfaces of a city that was, as cities go, large and confident and uninterested in the private significance of the particular car making its way through its streets at this particular moment.

The house was in a quiet part of the city — not ostentatious, not the kind of wealth that needed to announce itself, but a solid, well-built compound with a gate and a garden and a space that communicated, clearly and without effort, that someone had made considered choices about how to live here.

Samuel turned the car into the compound and cut the engine.

They sat for a moment in the sudden silence after the long drive — the three of them, in the still car, in the still compound, in the city that was loud beyond the gate and quiet within it.

"Home," Samuel said.

Princess looked at the house. Then at the tree at the side of the compound — older, wider, its branches spread over a corner of the garden with the proprietary ease of something that had been here long before the house.

"What kind of tree is that?" she asked.

Samuel looked at it. He had called his botanist friend. He knew the answer. "Mango," he said.

Princess looked at it for another moment. Something settled in her face — quiet, satisfied, the expression of someone who has received an answer that confirms something they had been hoping was true.

She opened the car door and got out.

She walked to the mango tree. She stood under it and looked up into its branches, at the young green fruit beginning to form in clusters above her, at the spread of it, generous and certain, the way things that have been growing for a long time are generous and certain.

Favour got out of the car and stood beside Samuel and they both watched her.

"She asked about the tree," Samuel said quietly.

"I know," Favour said.

"Why? What does the tree mean?"

Favour watched Princess standing under the mango tree in the morning light, looking up. She thought about Umuleke. About the mango tree in Grandma's compound, wide and old and permanent, the landmark of a home.

"It means she is looking for a reason to call this home," she said quietly. "And she found one."

Samuel was quiet beside her.

Above Princess, the mango tree moved slightly in a passing breeze, its leaves catching the light that was coming now fully through the breaking clouds, the fruit in its clusters green and certain and growing.

"Welcome home," Favour said, to no one in particular.

Or to all of them.

Which was, perhaps, the same thing.