Yes
The man at the window said yes. October. I told my mother in the kitchen, and for the first time in nine years her hands stopped.
Yes. After two years and two not-yets, the paper says yes, and a date, and the date is in October, and I have read the paper eleven times to make sure the word does not change while I am not looking.
I told Mama in the kitchen, on the stool, because that is where things are told. And her hands stopped. I want that written exactly. Nine years of Sundays with the knife, the door, the pill, the boy from Aba, and her hands never stopped, and today she put the knife down for the second time in her life and she held my face in both of them, ugu and all, and she said, in Igbo, the thing that means both go well and come back, because Igbo has one word for that and English needs two.
Then she said: write the book about us before you go. The Biafra one. With me. So that my name is on something in that country before yours is. And I said yes, and we have started, in the kitchen, in the afternoons, her talking and me typing, the war, the twenty pounds, her mother's tray, all of it, in order, at last, with the numbers.
October. Four months. I am going to spend them in the kitchen. It is the best decision I have made in this notebook.