Two weeks

Fourteen days on E.'s uncle's floor, and the uncle, who is not a warm man, has said nothing and charged nothing, and has twice left a plate of rice outside the door without knocking, and I have decided that this is what kindness looks like in Owerri in 2019: rice, no questions, the door left as it is.

On the ninth day a number I knew called E.'s phone. Mama. Not from the house phone; from a number I did not know she had. She did not ask where I was. She asked whether I had eaten, and whether I had my Bible, and she told me Charles was fine and that Eudora had shouted at Papa, which nobody has ever done, and that Papa had not answered her, which is worse for him than shouting.

Then she said: I am your mother. I did not tell you to go. And I said I know. And she said: eat. And the line went.

I did not tell you to go. I have written it at the top of every page of the small notebook since. It is not the same as come home. I know that. But it is the difference between a door and a wall, and I have slept better for four nights on the strength of it.

Two weeks. I have a floor, a plate of rice, a number I did not know she had. I am going to be all right in the way that people in Owerri are all right, which is to say, on Tuesday, and then we see.