A new worry struck him. Over the last year, Hosiah had gained social confidence and overcome the physical and emotional consequences of his long illness. With new activities in which he could take part, he was enjoying life to the fullest. In particular, he had become best friends with one boy in his class called Seth. Sometimes it seemed that Seth was at the Dawsons’ home more than his own. Wrenching Hosiah away was going to be tough on both boys.
Sly was more adaptable to change than his younger brother because of his past street life. Dawson wasn’t worried about him, and in fact, Sly would be of great moral support for Hosiah.
In the evening after the children had gone to sleep, Dawson would talk it over with Christine. He turned back toward CID, his stomach churning with anxiety.
As soon as Dawson walked back into the office, Chikata saw that something was wrong. The two men had known each other long enough to intuitively sense each other’s moods.
“What happened, boss?” Chikata asked him. “Chief super gave you a tough time?”
Dawson slumped into a chair beside Chikata. “Your uncle has posted me to Obuasi. For one year.”
Chikata’s jaw went slack. “What?”
Dawson despondently rested his forehead against his fist. “Oppong just told me. The transfer is in your uncle’s hand-over notes.”
Chikata shook his head. “I don’t believe it.” He picked up his phone from the table. “I will call him right now.”
Dawson put a gentle restraining hand on Chikata’s. “No, don’t do it. There’s no point.”
“How no point, boss?”
“Forget it, Chikata.”
“I’m sure this isn’t my uncle’s doing,” he insisted. “I should call him to reverse the decision.”
Dawson hesitated, torn. He didn’t like to use his junior officer as a tool, but it was tempting. If he could get the decision reversed…
“Okay,” he said finally.
Chikata made the call, and left a message when his uncle didn’t pick up. There wasn’t any point dwelling on the matter further, so the two men moved on to other things. After discussing both the cold cases and others, Chikata left for training with the Panthers Unit, and Dawson was alone for the rest of the morning.
Just before lunch, Dawson’s phone rang. It was from ACP Lartey, who got straight to the point.
“The decision came down just yesterday,” he told Dawson. “I did not have time to call you this morning. No, it was not me who thought up the plan of sending you to Obuasi. It came from higher up than me. Sorry, Dawson, but that’s how it is. Unfortunately, when you are as good at your work as you are, you come to people’s minds very quickly.”
Half praise, half blame, Dawson thought ironically, like honey sprinkled with quinine.
“The Obuasi office needs you, Dawson,” Lartey added. “Don’t let them down.”
And as he always did, Lartey ended the call quickly and abruptly, leaving Dawson feeling not much better.
At the end of the day, Dawson wanted badly to talk to Christine about the situation confronting him, yet he was dreading it at the same time. How would she react? In the past, his postings to different parts of the country had not sat well with her.
Darko fought evening peak traffic for an hour before finally reaching his neighborhood of Kaneshie. He pulled into the small yard of their once cream-colored bungalow with olive trim. It needed a fresh coat of paint. Inside, Christine was helping the boys with homework, which they interrupted to give Dawson an animated account of all that had happened in school that day. Dawson had to keep track of all the characters-good and bad-in their school. He pushed aside the events of his own day to pay close attention to theirs, giving no indication that anything was amiss. Hosiah in particular was apt to pick up negative signals.
It was later on when the boys were in bed and Christine and Darko were cleaning up in the kitchen-she washing the dishes and he sweeping up the floor-that he broached the subject. He leaned the broom against the counter.
“Christine,” he said. “Something has come up at work.”
She looked up, searched his face for a moment, and then shook the excess water off her hands. “I can almost predict. They want to transfer you, right?”
He nodded, glad in a way that she had guessed correctly.
“I knew I shouldn’t have asked you anything about transfers on Saturday when we were at the park,” she said regretfully, wiping her hands on a towel. “I put juju on us.”
She sat at the table, as though she thought it best to be sitting down as he delivered the brunt of the bad news. “Where is it this time?”
“Obuasi.”
“Oh,” she said, cocking her head. “Well, I guess it could be worse. You could be going to Bolgatanga.”
“It’s not the distance,” Dawson said moodily. “It’s the duration.”
“How do you mean?”
“I could be there for up to a year.”
She pulled back as if someone had tried to jab her in the face. “A year!”
Dawson winced. “Yes,” he said, not meeting her eyes. The timer was ticking down to the explosion.
“So you’re going to be away for a year,” she said flatly.
“Well… basically, yes.”
“A year is a long time.”
“Yes, it is. I was thinking… what do you think of the idea that all of us move to Obuasi-or Kumasi?”
She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it as she began to consider that as an option. Dawson felt encouraged that she hadn’t immediately rejected the whole idea, and pushed on. “I mean, for the boys, I don’t know the school situation in Obuasi, but there’ll be something good for them in Kumasi, so maybe we could stay there. It’s only about one hour drive north of Obuasi.”
She was pondering. “And Mama has a place in Kumasi,” she said.
Dawson stiffened inwardly. He had not even thought of that, and it should have occurred to him long before now. Dawson and his mother-in-law, Gifty, did not get along. To him, she would not be an asset in this already tricky situation. He couldn’t say that to Christine, though, and his face grew hot as he realized she was scrutinizing him, waiting for a response that was clearly taking too long to materialize.
“Dark,” she said reproachfully. “My mother’s not going to ruin everything.”
“Did I say that?” he protested.
“You were thinking it.”
“Not at all,” he denied, lying badly. “But do you think she can really accommodate us?”
“Why not? I don’t think she has a tenant in the guesthouse right now.”
Gifty lived in Accra, but she was a proud Ashanti woman. Kumasi was her hometown and she had a lot of family in that city as well as some property. Gifty, who was quite well off, used the guesthouse from time to time as either a rental or a place for family members to stay, or both, perhaps.
Dawson had never been able to shake the feeling that his mother-in-law condescended to him. Before Christine had met him, she had been dating a doctor whom Gifty highly fancied as her future son-in-law. A policeman was a big step down in Gifty’s eyes, and Dawson was convinced that she had never gotten over her daughter’s change of mind.
All this mutual resentment between Dawson and his mother-in-law had come to a head years ago when Gifty had decided she would take the troubling problem of Hosiah’s heart disease into her own hands. Acting without the permission of the boy’s parents, she took him to a traditional healer-with disastrous consequences. That had sealed Dawson’s discomfort with Gifty.