“Yeah.” The box shakes and I raise my voice: “There are rattles in there. I should take out the batteries.”
“Have lunch with me today,” Kaz says. “You play hard to get.”
I smile.
“You see? I’ve never seen you smile. Your eyes are prettier when you smile.”
“I have to run a quick errand to VI at lunch,” I say, pointing at the box. “Is it okay if I go?”
“Okay, but you can’t escape me. Clear it with HR and go. You must have lunch with me soon, Tola. But before you go, please make me some coffee.”
I smile and widen my eyes as he walks out.
I go to the kitchen to make him a cup of coffee. Three cubes of sugar this time, with eight ten-milligram diazepam tablets and no cream.
When I give it to him, he looks at me and says, “When you come back, please remind me to call my doctor. The man says my drugs haven’t been working well.”
“It must be all the coffee you drink,” I remark.
“Hey, Steph.” I drop by her office before my lunch break. These days I call her Steph — it makes her eager to do what I want. She smiles. Her smile is pretty, unlike her laugh.
“What’s up, girl?”
I tell myself not to cringe, so I smile and widen my eyes. I’ve learned that it makes my eyes brighter and my smile seem more genuine.
“I have to run a quick errand and I don’t know how long it’ll take. Cover for me?”
“Sure, girl.”
“You’re the best.”
I hold the shift box in front of me and walk to the taxi stand on Broad Street. All the cabbies know me by this point.
“Baba Hafusa,” one of them calls out, “come and carry your customer-o.”
But he’s busy arguing in front of the hospital gate. The young lady he’s talking to has a phone in her hand and is not paying him mind.
“I be taxi driver nor mean say I nor fit born you. I get your type at home. I have child your age. Mo ni e nile nau.”
“Oga, story niyen, please give me my change.”
And this is the point where he flips and threatens to slap her.
“Try it,” she says, typing on her phone.
“What are you going to do?” he yells at her.
The other men are laughing and telling him to leave her alone.
“You get customer wey dey wait for you-o,” the taxi park chairman calls out to him.
The driver sees me and walks over. “Don’t mind this Ashewo girl,” he says. “All these small, small girls are following big men, and because of that she thinks she can be talking rude to me.”
I stare at him, willing him to shut up. My phone beeps. It’s a message from Stephanie: Babes! Kaz just collapsed in the office. They’re taking him to the hospital. Poor guy.
I smile and my eyes widen.
“All these Lagos girls,” the taxi driver says as he jimmies open his door. “You close early?”
I get in the back. “No, I’m going to VI.”
As he turns onto Marina Road, I say to him, “Did you know that girl you were fighting with?”
“No-o. I drove the yeye girl to the hospital and she’s talking rude because of N200.”
“So why did you call her a prostitute?”
“All these Lagos girls, that’s what they are,” he replies. “God save us from them. Few responsible girls with job like you.”
I smile. “But why must woman exist for man to be closer to God?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“I guess man always needs a woman to blame.” I twist the latch on Lucy’s shift box and let her slither onto my lap and down my legs.
“Are you talking to me, aunty?”
“Stop at the beginning of Ahmadu Bello,” I tell him, handing him money.
“I go carry you home for evening?”
“We’ll see,” I say, clutching the empty box to my chest.
For Baby, For Three
by Onyinye Ihezukwu
Yaba
Right there, at the street corner by the roundabout that circumscribed the faded statue of the army general in a marshaling pose, stood Bisola’s food shed. It was an old shed, built from corrugated zinc, cardboard flaps, and an oversized sun umbrella to protect her burning coal embers from the frequent lashes of gritty breeze. Bisola’s Power Joint, everyone called it — for it was here you could buy the best roasted corn and coconuts, when in season, or the juiciest chicken gizzards dunked in pepper sauce and garnished with onion rings. Even better — this was like legend — her akara was made from properly processed, unadulterated bean paste fried in properly purchased, unadulterated vegetable oil. When the bean balls emerged from her pan of hot oil, they remained golden brown with a soft simmering dent in the middle, so abounding with freshness that people lined up for meters to fill their stomachs with these spheres of delight. For her regular customers, Bisola dusted a spice mixture of pepper and groundnuts into the dents in the center, then smiled a dimpled smile when the non-regulars protested the unfairness of her selective service. Pretending to point out that the added spice would cost them more, she would sprinkle the pepper and groundnuts anyway, talking in her slurred, deep voice and working her large, veiny hands. Her laugh sounded like a drum roll from the marching drill at the army barracks not far away, a laugh that might have tumbled from something strong, like the chest of the statue of the army general perpetually striding toward her shed, observing her as she sat basting gizzards, roasting corn, and molding bean cakes six days a week from noon till a little after ten p.m.
Now a buyer was requesting two particularly large corn cobs, evenly browned on all sides from where they lay on the coal wire mesh. Bisola quickly plucked them off the mesh in swift motions, blowing on her fingers to soothe the sting. She bent over to rip a page off a heap of newspapers in the corner, and as she wrapped the steaming cobs in the paper, the customer said, “You’re forgetting the coconuts, na.”
Bisola tapped her waist and thumped her chest softly. She blinked. “Sorry,” she replied, and leaned over, cradling her stomach to reach the basin of shelled coconuts.
“Ah, this belly issue is getting in the way,” the buyer said with a grin. “Since this belly, Bisola has been forgetting, na.”
The other customers laughed. One woman piped up: “And you people think carrying baby is easy? God should have made you men share in the work too. Then we’ll see who’ll cry first.”
A man not far away scoffed. “Huh? What is there to cry about? Baby business? You mean making baby? But that’s easiest of all!”
Bisola, with a face flushed from the heat of her ashes and a chest filled with the acid of her badly digested lunch, did not flash her dimples this time at the teasing. She let them talk, trying to ignore the sensations of stiffness in her shoulders, peering above the customers’ heads as if searching for something in the horizon. Her mind held a ticking clock inside. This moment — the sun setting over the barracks, the young children peddling biscuits and wristwatches, the motorcycle riders fleeing annoyed traffic wardens — all pointed to the fact that it was about six p.m., offices were closed, the prayer meeting was at hand, and Osei would be arriving soon to pick her up.
She watched the signs, marking the bustling world through the fumes rising from her pan of oil.
When the last batch of akara was served up, she refused to mix a new batter. She sprinkled water on the coals and slowly rose to her feet. The customers in line raised a fuming chorus. She said, as quietly as she could, “I don close. Come back tomorrow.” Then she uprooted the sun umbrella from the soft earth and folded it like a pocketknife. Through the threats of departing customers, none of which she responded to, she gathered her wares of business: the glass showcase for fried gizzards, the now-empty basin for holding coconuts preserved in water, the wire mesh, raffia fan, sitting stool, coal pot, batter pot, and plastic spice containers; and stacked these items inside the slanted shed of zinc and cardboard. She sat on the stool inside, pulling the door slightly closed so she could still see Osei arrive. She stretched her long, trunk-sized legs before her, huffing and belching and thumping her chest softly.