The Tiny Things Are Heavier

Sommy notices his legs first, hairy and stumpy, the part not covered by his tan-colored shorts. He’s standing by the airport’s exit, watching a woman on tiptoes, a piece of cardboard held above her head. His name is Bayo, Sommy’s new roommate. She’d imagined him to be taller. Over the phone, he sounded like a big man, a kind of gushing boisterousness about him. And once, he’d told her, unprompted, that he ate twelve bananas in one sitting. About her now are people walking slowly, clasping passport booklets, sandwich bags, phones, their luggage skidding behind them. Nothing like the mad crowd at the airport in Chicago, where she’d first landed, that avalanche of people sweeping past with speed, a terse, cosmopolitan sheen to them.

Bayo still hasn’t noticed her, though she’s standing right next to him. His gaze is fixed on the woman holding the cardboard.

She taps his shoulder.

He turns. “Sommy?”

His tight eyes inspect her quickly, and relax, as if in approval. He slides his phone in his pocket, grabs the bag to her left.

A short static tumble from the airport speakers, and then a flight announcement.

“Hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” she says.

“Not at all,” he whispers, and smiles, a secret smile, motioning his head toward the woman with the cardboard. Sommy’s close enough now to read the writing on the cardboard. It reads: welcome home my lying sniveling cheating husband. Sommy studies the woman, dressed sanely, in a short floral dress and black ballet shoes. Her skin, clear and plump, contrasts sharply with the red circles around her eyes. She’s looking to the sharp corner that Sommy had turned when she’d descended the escalator. The airport crowd doesn’t pay the woman any substantial attention. They throw glances her way and look on ahead, as if, like Sommy, they feel the spectacle to be too naked, too private.

Bayo, satisfied that Sommy’s seen what he wants her to see, tugs her bag behind him and walks out of the airport, into Iowa’s blinding heat.

Sommy walks behind Bayo, tugging at the strap of the duffel bag hanging on her shoulder, watching his sloping, one-sided walk, each step forceful, announcing itself: the walk of a short man, a man who’s had to stretch himself to be heard. She imagines that in secondary school his classmates called him “small stout.” The thought amuses her, and she rubs her eyes until she no longer feels like laughing.

He turns to her now, his eyes wide with mischief. “I wish we stayed to watch the entire drama.”

She nods, forms a strained smile. Strange, she thinks, this desire of his to bask in another’s misfortune.

“You are tired, abi?” he says. “Sorry, the drive is not that far. You will soon rest.”

She swipes beads of sweat from her forehead. She did not anticipate the heat. She’s always associated America with the cold.

They walk on ahead. The air smells clean. The sky, clear like an overshined window. Unlike Lagos’s gray sky and fogged air. It occurs to her then that she’s indeed landed. She is in America. She wants to throw her arms around Bayo, say to him: “We are here, we are here.” But it passes, the giddiness, as swiftly as it came.

Bayo forces her bag into the car boot. When she tries to lift the other bag beside her, he says, “No, no, let me carry it for you,” and then grins.

Soon they are driving past vast expanses of greenery, trees and grasses, past large billboards bearing names of unfamiliar brands—Blue Moon, State Farm, Wells Fargo—and past several road-construction sites, streetlights, and the occasional pedestrian.

“Yes,” Bayo says, as though able to read her thoughts. “America fine die. Too beautiful. See as everywhere clean. Everything just set.”

She nods, smiles. He’s a talker, this one. He’d been talking since the car engine spurted to life. He’d described the apartment they’d rented. Small, neat, very modern, he said. He’d given her details about the generous classmate of his who’d allowed him to borrow his car just three days after they met, and about the new white church he’d attended the day before, just a stone’s throw from their apartment, where he’d met another generous American who’d offered to give him some used furniture. He told her about his two-day flight from Lagos a week ago. He’d spent the night in Doha, at a hotel inside the airport. He’d been unable to sleep, anxious about missing his connecting flight, and even when he decided to sleep, sleep wouldn’t come, and usually, he would watch porn, masturbate, you know, to release the anxiety, but he couldn’t watch porn in Doha, because Sharia law and all. He didn’t know how they would know he was watching porn. But what if they had a server that alerted some officials when someone logged into Pornhub? Of the woman with cardboard at the airport, he said that he understood the spectacle. “She wants validation,” he’d said. She wants someone to walk up to her and say they are sorry. Isn’t that what people seek on social media when they share intimate details of their life? He said he would have gone up to the woman, told her, “Madam, that man—he’s not worth it. Chin up. Move on,” but he doesn’t feel as free here, in America, to just approach people, even when they seem to beg for the attention. “Any small thing someone would just call police for you,” he’d said. And, he added, with this whole MeToo movement thing, he’s especially careful with women these days. He looked at Sommy briefly and took his gaze back to the road. He believes women, of course. He said this loudly, as if prompted by something he’d glimpsed on her face. But he’s also aware that not everyone says the truth about a matter. In short, he’d said, it’s a little condescending to believe that women always say the truth. Women are human beings, and human beings lie. He nodded, agreeing with himself, or perhaps proud of having said what he believes to be profound. He then threw her glances so quick and beckoning that she, too, began to nod. Though what she wanted to do was sigh. Bayo often tweeted in support of Nigerian feminist Twitter. She viewed his tweets as progressive but sensed in them a kind of lazy posturing, as if he believed misogyny, at least an active performance of it, beneath him, primitive. She feels validated now.

When she asked if she could connect to his mobile hot spot, she’d expected a simple yes or no, but he launched into a tirade about the plan the phone company had made him buy. With this plan, he could not connect to any device.

Sommy, tired, aching from the twenty-four-hour trip, responded to most of these with a long, exclamatory “That’s effed,” or “Nice,” or a nod or several, depending on what response she thought he was anticipating. But she’s not interested in conversing with him. She wants to call her brother, Mezie. She’d called him from the airport in Chicago, and then immediately when she landed in Iowa and could connect to the airport’s Wi-Fi, but he did not pick up. She’s not surprised. Since his attempt, he’s stilled himself to her. She imagines that he is lying on his bed now, staring at the ceiling. Or seated in the sitting room, eating. She wants to tell him about the woman at the airport. She wonders how he would react. Years ago, she would have been able to guess. She isn’t so sure anymore.

Now Bayo asks, “So you say you grew up in Ojo?” 

“Yeah, Iba Estate.”

“Some of my guys live in Ojo,” he says. “I used to visit there often. In short, there was one time I almost started dating a babe living there.”

“Nice.”

“The girl was bigger than me, so I just respected myself and left her.”

“That’s effed.”

“We were not on the same level at all. She fine die and the guys chasing her were plenty. I don’t mean, like, normal guys. I mean men, those big-bellied men with plenty cash to throw around.”

Sommy shrugs, looks out the car window. The houses about are squat, modest, most of them painted a dull white, fenced with short wooden planks, bright gardens, and one or two gleaming cars parked in their driveways. Trees sandwich houses, stand beside them like body- guards. They pass a gas station, a McDonalds, and a Chinese restaurant.

“That’s our house.” Bayo says, pointing to the middle flat of a gray apartment building.

“Nice,” Sommy says.

“Right? I like it. Very small and cute. Like a button.”

He turns off the car, looks at himself in the rearview mirror before stepping out.

Sommy stands in her empty room, by the window, looking out at the tall apartment building on the other side of the matted green lawn. Bayo has chosen the bigger of the two rooms. She’d taken a quick look into his room while she stood in the sitting room inspecting the apartment. It’s twice the size of hers and he’s already furnished it with a bed, a reading table, and a tall lamp. He’s also occupied the only storage room in the house. He’s lined his shoes on the floor and stacked his empty bags and boxes by the wall. She’d not expected him to take the smaller room. She would have done the same if she were in his position. But he has no right to occupy the storage room. She paid exactly half the rent, and she deserves exactly half the space. She thinks of how hastily she’d agreed to their roommate-ship, how when he’d commented under her slightly viral tweets about getting admitted into James Crowley University’s English department on a full ride, her senses numb with joy, her happiness concentrated and total, that everything everyone told her then was fortified with honey, with possibility. Me too, he’d written. Congrats to us! He’d then sent her a direct message, and soon they were looking for an apartment on craigslist together. He found the apartment, and took charge of everything, corresponding with the landlord, getting a cosigner since they did not have social security numbers. She’d sent him her share of the deposit and rent in naira, and he’d changed it to dollars, and paid it into someone’s account, who paid it into the landlord’s account. All these she’d been grateful for. But now she understands that it had been about him all along, his need to establish ownership. She wants to march to him, demand that he remove his things from the storage room, or maybe give her half the space, but he opens the door then, and saunters in.

“Settling in, I see,” he says, looking overly satisfied, standing there, a sly smile on his face, like he’s just wanked himself off.

“My room is bigger,” he says. “But I like yours more, you know. The window is bigger and lets in more sunlight.”

“So why didn’t you take it instead?”

“I wanted you to have more sunlight.” He grins. “Have you heard of SAD?”

“Nope.”

“Seasonal Affective Disorder. Iowa is horrible in the winter. I mean, it is one of the coldest and gloomiest places in America in the winter after Alaska and Alabama. So shit gets real quick, and you can get depressed from the lack of sunlight. So the more sunlight you can get in the summer, the better for you.” He pauses, walks to the window, stands. He turns to her after a short while. “Imagine saying to someone, I am sad from SAD? Isn’t that funny?” He watches her face, looking for signs of amusement. He then laughs.

She lowers herself to the ground and opens her boxes, hoping to signal that she’s done entertaining him. She unfolds the plain gray bedsheet she’s had since her days in undergrad. She eyes the room, searches for the best place to lay the bedsheet, to pass the night. She knows she needs Bayo, needs him to drive her to the store where she can get a new mattress and phone, a desk and a chair, needs the knowledge of the town he’s glimpsed since his arrival a week ago. But she’s going to do without it. She’s going to stay on her own. She won’t even ask him to clear the storage space. She will not feign a friendliness she doesn’t feel. She dislikes the boy—it is as simple as that. He talks too much. He has a large and loud self, an unmitigated energy. He seems to her the kind of roommate who will be oblivious to boundaries, who will touch her things, eat her food without permission, sit on her bed, and maybe even use her body sponge.

“It feels good to have someone I know around,” he says, after he’s emptied out his laughter. “These past days have been weird. I have felt very alone. Not in a depressing way or anything. I don’t have depression or any of that stuff. But I kept thinking about how strange it was that I did not really know anyone around. If something happened to me, no one in this whole state will feel obligated to get in a car and come to my aid. It wasn’t a terrifying thought or anything. It was just strange.”

She turns to him. “But we don’t know each other.” 

“Huh?”

“We are strangers to each other.”

“Oh,” he says, pressing a wrist to the wall.

She turns her attention back to her open boxes.

After a moment of silence, he says, “Let me leave you to unpack.” 

“Thanks,” she says. She doesn’t turn to look at him.

Alone now, she sits on the floor, her back to the wall. She pulls her phone from the pocket of her jeans. In Lagos, the time is about six a.m. She imagines that Mezie is asleep. Before she left for the airport, they’d exchanged hasty goodbyes. She stood by his bedroom door, and he sat on the bed, near the window, shirtless, his bony back slightly curved. “Safe journey,” he said. “Take care,” she replied. She’d wanted to say more, but nothing came to mind. That she was leaving him two weeks after his attempt was all she could think, and she was certain that it was all he could think. The woman at the airport, holding the cardboard, comes to mind now. Sommy understands the impulse to allow strangers to gawk at one’s pain. Since Mezie’s attempt, she’s found herself, at odd times, wanting to stop strangers to tell them that the force holding her life has been blitzed, and she’s now without a center. It’s the shock, she should have said to Bayo, when he implied that the woman only sought attention. It’s feeling yourself to be steady in a thing, and then having it become so suddenly a figment. There’s the urge to call Mezie again now, to go to Bayo’s room and ask if she can use his phone. But she waits instead for morning, when she’s able to walk to the mall, to the AT&T shop.

James Crowley University is interwoven in the city’s center. It has buildings scattered about, sitting side by side with the city’s businesses: restaurants, grocery stores, banks, boutiques. It is nothing like what Sommy knows of universities. It has no fences, no large, looming signpost signaling an entrance to the school’s premises. The English building is located near the bus station, and like all the other school buildings, it has the glassy, clinical finish of modern constructions. It can pass for a bank, or the branch of a software company. Sommy finds this slightly disappointing. She expected buildings modeled like castles. It is what Legally Blonde and Good Will Hunting promised her. Still, she feels sharp moments of awe while walking around the campus, past the polite shops around it—their front yards, furnished with tables and chairs and umbrellas, spilling out to the road, their menu lists, featuring their Happy Hour discount, written on dwarf blackboards in different colors of chalk—past the sprinklings of white students sauntering up and down the sidewalks in shorts, crop tops, T-shirts, sneakers, past the groups of four or five laying on long patches of grass, half-naked, their books and baskets filled with snacks and cans of beer set in front of them.

On these walks, she’s sometimes attacked by an eerie sense that she’s sneaked into the country, that there’s been a mess with the school administration and the embassy personnel and the border officers, and that mess has landed her here. It would make sense if Amara, her best friend, were in this position—Amara has long dreamt of schooling in America, as had Mezie. He’d always clutched the American dream to his chest, even before it became a matter of survival for him.

When Sommy had gotten her admission letter to James Crowley while Mezie was still in Oslo, she’d imagined that on these walks she would call him, and they would spend long minutes arguing about which was better—Iowa City or Oslo. She imagined that he would brag about Oslo as he usually did. “This place is chassis,” he’d said to her around the first week of his arrival in Norway, his voice cracking with hope.

But she’s been unable to reach Mezie in the two weeks since her arrival. She’d sent him a message on WhatsApp as soon as she got her new AT&T SIM card, called several times, all to no avail. When she complained to her mother, she’d said to give him time, and so had Patrick, Mezie’s closest friend. Sommy decided to do so. She stopped calling and texting, and she’s now taken to eating away her sadness.

Today, after her solemn walk around the campus, she picks up a bunch of ripe plantains at the co-op a few minutes from the house. Her plan is to deep fry them and have them with egg sauce. But, as she stands in the apartment kitchen, the brown paper bag of plantains in hand, she’s certain that a meal of fried plantains and egg sauce will not numb her feeling of dread, so she goes to Bayo, who is prostrate on the sitting-room couch watching television, a YouTube video on cryptocurrency, and asks if she can use his phone.

“For what?” he says, voice shrouded in mockery.

“I want to call my brother,” she says.

“And you can’t use your phone?”

She opens her mouth, and then closes it. “It’s fine,” she says. “I don’t want it anymore.”

“Take joor,” he says, handing her the phone. “Small play, and you are hyperventilating.”

In the past week, they’ve developed a pattern of interaction, one where he meets her irritation with the amused resignation of an adult watching a child throw a tantrum.

She takes the phone, dials Mezie’s phone number.

“Can you turn down the volume?” she asks.

“Yes, my madam,” he teases.

She rolls her eyes, places the phone to her ear. Her irritation with Bayo is unfair, she knows. He is mostly nice. But his buoyancy unsettles her curated atmosphere of gloom. He sings in the shower. He watches YouTube videos titled different variations of “How to Grow Money in Thirty Days.” He spends long hours on the phone with his numerous Lagos friends, laughing and laughing. She always fights the urge to kick down his door and ask, “What is funny? Why are you disturbing me?”

The phone rings, but Mezie doesn’t pick up. She tries again and again, until Bayo says, “If I’m the one you are calling like that, I’ll vex o. Why person go call me five times? When I no dey owe you money?”

“Bayo, please, just shut up.” 

“Sorry o! Madam caller.”

She tosses the phone at him, and he strains to catch it. “If you spoil my phone, you will buy a new one.”

“Just let me know if he calls back.”

“No ‘Thank you’?” He picks up the TV remote, turns up the volume. “This girl, you are very rude.”

“Shut up.”

“Why body dey always bite you?”

She ignores him, walks to the kitchen, pulls out the plantains from the bag and holds them under the gushing tap.

Bayo comes behind her, asks, “You want to fry plantain?” 

“Obviously.”

“Fry for me.”

“I’ve heard,” she says.

He shakes her shoulders limply, says, “My guy, my guy.” 

“Bayo, remove your dirty hands from my shoulders.”

“Please ehnn,” he says. “I like my plantains fried, fried. Deep golden brown. I didn’t say burn it o. Just fry it well.”

She walks to the cupboard, throws it open, and pulls out a chopping board. Mezie probably saw Bayo’s area code and decided not to pick up. She dabs the plantains dry with a handful of paper towels. She wonders if she’s overreacting, catastrophizing. If all Mezie needs is time. Time to heal. She wonders, too, if all there is to this panic of hers is guilt—the guilt of leaving him behind.

Bayo leans on the countertop, his face near her arm, and asks if she plans on attending the meeting organized by the Black Graduate Students Org later that evening. At the International Students Orientation a few days ago, a group of girls had walked up to them and handed them flyers for the event.

“No,” she says.

“Why?”

“I just don’t feel like it.”

He stands upright, frowns. “I am not trying to fight or anything,” he says. His shirt hangs around his neck like a rope, and he tugs at it. “And I don’t necessarily have anything against angry and moody, but is this your constant state of being? I’m just asking because when we used to talk on the phone in Lagos, you were chiller.”

“Maybe it’s because you were less annoying then,” she says.

He laughs. “Just follow me to the meeting. You did not come to this country to lock yourself up in your room.”

She’s now slicing the plantains into oval slabs. “You know what will make me chiller? Turning down the volume of the TV whenever you want to watch those nonsense crypto videos.”

“It will be fun,” he says, ignoring her. “I don’t want to go alone.” 

She pauses now to look at him. At the International Students Orientation, he’d glided through the crowd of new students with ease, introducing himself, drawing laughter, while she stood in the corner near the projector, watching. He’d come to her, urged her to network. “Some of the people in this room might be able to help you one day,” he said. She envied his razor-sharp intentions. Like an ambitious farmer at the start of the planting season, he’s planting early. She, on the other hand, is stuck back home, always reaching toward it, to Mezie, unable to see what’s in front or ahead.

“I’ve heard,” she says to Bayo now. She’ll go with him.

“And you will not go and hide like you did at the orientation lunch?” 

“Bayo, please, be going.”

Later, from the sitting room, over the high TV volume, Bayo yells, “We leave at seven, so start getting ready at six. I know how you girls are with your makeup.”

On their way to the BGSO gathering, as they walk past a Kum & Go store, Bayo turns to her and says, “How is this even a real name?”

Sommy studies it for a while and breaks into laughter. “Your mind is just dirty.”

“Seriously,” Bayo says. “The other day I saw a mechanic shop. Guess what it was named?” He watches her expectantly, and then laughs. “Dick Servicing. That’s the name. I almost died of laughter. I’m sure they choose these names on purpose.”

At the restaurant, Sommy walks in shyly. The crowd before her is intimidating. About thirty Black people, seated round a long table, chatting, laughing. The restaurant is Italian, coated in blue lights, and the severe waiters are in white shirts and navy-blue pants. Classical music plays in the background.

Sommy sits next to Bayo, who seems to have none of her anxiety, and who leans over the table now to say hi to a thin dark-skinned girl with short hair and eyebrows dyed a blistering blond.

“I’m glad you could make it,” the girl says.

The girl had been among the group handing out flyers at the orientation lunch. Sommy remembers being struck by the color of her hair and brows, thinking the decision to appear radically different so brave. It’s a virtue Sommy does not possess. Her instinct is to assimilate, to disappear.

Bayo introduces them. The girl’s name is Kayla.

“Sommy,” Kayla says. “I like your name.”

Sommy tells her that her full name is Somkelechukwu. Kayla attempts to pronounce it. Her version sounds like the name of a rare flower. “Sumkelchoku.” Bayo laughs, and Sommy laughs. Kayla laughs too, says, “Oh my god, oh my god, I’m terrible.”

“You tried,” Bayo says, a sudden American accent surfacing. “Don’t mind us.”

He’s seated cross-legged, looking prim in his light blue T-shirt and plain black pants. He so easily could have been one of the boys in her childhood estate, with whom she attended secondary school. They were the almost kids, the kids who had just enough to escape the categorization of poor street kids. They had roofs over their heads, even if the roofs sometimes leaked. They ate rice and beans, even if without eggs and fried plantains. They attended secondary schools with libraries, even if the libraries were empty of books. They lived amongst thieves and cultists, but also amongst teachers and civil servants. They were the kids who could switch from a British accent to an American one, who, during morning assemblies, argued over whether Beyoncé was a better dancer than Ciara. They were the kids who could make it. They were the chameleon kids. They did not reek of poverty. You had to come a little closer to smell it.

She feels a deep affinity to Bayo in the moment, as she watches him flirt with Kayla. Back home, they wouldn’t even be seated so close. Bayo would look at her from afar, and conclude that she’s out of his league, already at the age where every conversation is somehow steered toward getting married or having kids. He’d think her a woman for an older man. And she would look at him and think him a small boy looking to play around. But here, they are more. They not only share a home, but they also share a peculiar childhood. He could have been one of Mezie’s secondary school classmates, boys who gathered in their sitting room after school to watch football replays. It is something, she thinks. She’s on his side. She suddenly wants him to win Kayla’s attention, so she compliments Kayla’s blouse, a silky black thing, and then adds, “I’ve been admiring your hair color by the way.”

Kayla smiles, turns her head here and there, showing off the curved carvings on each side. “Thank you so much!”

“I told her the same thing,” Bayo says. “The color really fits her.” 

“You are too much,” Kayla exclaims.

The boy sitting next to Bayo, to whom Sommy has paid no attention until now, turns to Bayo, asks if they are Nigerian. He is deep-dark-skinned like Kayla, with the sharp jawbones of West Africans. Bayo says they are Nigerian, the boy says he’s Gambian, and his name is Michael. He then asks why he sees Nigerians everywhere. Most of the Africans he met at the orientation lunch are Nigerian. Sommy cannot tell if there’s humor in his voice, so she’s silent. Bayo spreads his hands nonchalantly but says nothing.

The table clatters now with chattering, none of which Sommy can make out. In the air is the sense of excited anticipation. She’d felt it at the orientation, where they were made to sit and listen to different people give lectures on acclimatizing to the American condition. How to make friends. How to open a bank account. How to avoid scam calls from fake car dealers. Everyone had the bright-eyedness that comes with the first day of school, the ambience thick with prospect. It’s the same way now, and in her spirit is a fight to allow herself to feel it.

Bayo asks if she’d like a drink, and Sommy says she’ll have what he’s having.

Kayla says to her, “Try the pomegranate cocktail. It’s amazing.”

Michael, unprompted, leans over and says to Bayo that he thinks the rivalry between Burna Boy and Wizkid is pointless. Everyone knows that Burna is the real artist, he says, Fela reincarnated. He then swerves into a harangue about Nigerians and their exceptionalism.

“Name one Gambian artist you know.” 

“I don’t know any,” Bayo says.

“Just one artist.”

Bayo guffaws. Sommy and Kayla exchange a knowing look. Michael, irritated now, turns his attention to the end of the table, where a stout, freckled girl is speaking. The word president lays crested on a pinstripe on her breast pocket, underneath it her name, nia. She speaks with her shoulders high up, and with the practiced fake smile Sommy recognizes well—in secondary school, all the girl prefects wore that smile.

“We have some new members in our midst,” Nia says. “I won’t do the embarrassing thing of asking them to introduce themselves. But I do want to take questions if anyone has any.”

Michael raises his hand. “Where can one buy good weed in this city?”

The table shuffles, a few snorts of laughter.

“What?” Michael says. “No one here smokes weed?”

“It’s illegal,” Nia says, smiling curtly. “Now let’s ask questions I can actually answer.”

Michael raises his hand again. “How does the organization navigate our differences? I’m asking this because I’m hoping this is not some ‘Black power, one people’ organization.”

“Do you mind rephrasing your question, um, Mm . . . Michael?”

Bayo pinches his nose as if to refrain from laughter. Kayla has her hands over her face. Sommy clears her throat intermittently. It’s the only thing keeping her from coming undone with laughter.

“Does the organization recognize our differences?” Michael continues, slowly, emphasizing each word. “Yes, we are all Black, but we are still different, with different histories, cultures.” He turns to Sommy, nodding, seeking support. Sommy turns away. Her eyes are teary from swallowing her laughter.

Michael continues: “I just want to be sure that the group understands that we are all different and we see things differently. Also hoping that one culture will not impose on the others. For instance, I hope that our next meeting can be held in an African restaurant.” He looks around. “I think it’s important that we take this seriously, and not go about acting like our colonizer and enslavers.”

“Oh,” Nia says. “We will look into that.” 

“Great,” Michael says, relaxing, smiling.

He turns to Sommy, opens his mouth to speak, and she says sharply: “Excuse me. Restroom.”

He grunts, moves his attention back to the table.

Sommy walks outside, finds a dark spot by the hotel entrance. Behind a red Toyota, and alone, she buries her face in her palms and laughs quietly for a long time, hiccupping, snorting, and it comes to her that in the past half hour, she’s not thought about Mezie. The guilt dampens her, and she straightens herself, stands, looks about the open space, which has the character of a courtyard. The ground is paved. Stores and restaurants surround it, creating the impression of a fortress. Bright light beams from poles and everything appears bathed in a clear yellow. People stand in small groups smoking, chatting. On the bench a few steps to her right, a couple sits, their faces so near each other. She takes her gaze to the city library, which stands beside a water sprinkler, and around which two white kids run, laughing, splashing. The library is closed now, but light breaks through its glass walls. She’s wanted to go there since her arrival. Get a library card. Browse through its aisles. Feel like a member of the living. She’s determined now to do so. Uncloak this suffocating sorrow. Mezie did not die, did he? And for all she knows, he could be hanging out with Patrick now, sharing a beer.

She walks a bit to get a better view of the water sprinkler, so she can watch the kids. One of the kids, noticing her, pauses, beats his hands to wrench off water, and then runs toward her. He looks to be about four or five. His short dark hair lies flat on his head like a wet cloth. He stops right in front of her and says something she can’t hear, so she squats, says, “What’s your name?”

“Liam,” he screams.

His teeth are so tiny, little white bricks, and it amuses her. Kids amuse her. Everything so small and crackling with potential. Until recently she’s wanted kids of her own. Mezie’s attempt has obliterated that desire.

“You are very handsome, Liam,” she says now.

“I know,” Liam says, bouncing as if high on sugar. “And I’m also smart. And I’m also strong.” He flexes his bony arms. “And I’m Superman.” 

“You are,” Sommy says.

“And I’m kind and I’m patient.” 

“You are!”

The boy tells Sommy to say that she, too, is smart and kind and patient. He says, “It’s good for your confidence.”

“How do you know what confidence is?” Sommy says. “You are, like, four.”

She recognizes that he’s an affirmed child, a child whose parents read parenting books and attended parenting seminars. She’s never met an intentional parent. All her friends have parents who wing it. Her own parents winged it. Children for them were necessities, and the one aim was to keep them alive. Feed, clothe, and shelter them. Whatever happened inside, in the mind, in the spirit, was left to chance.

She’s laughing with Liam when a woman appears, her face hard as a rock. She doesn’t look at Sommy, nor does she say a word. She pulls the boy away. “Silly,” she says to him, her voice stiff with contempt. She’s clearly the mother. They share the same blue-black hair, the same pointy nose. Liam begins to cry. Sommy remains in the squat position, her laughter stuck in her throat, too embarrassed to stand and meet the gaze of any one of the people about watching. She has it in mind now to run after the woman and demand an apology. But an apology for what, really? This is the sort of insult that Amara would accuse her of bringing upon herself. “If you weren’t doing nice nice,” Amara would say, “no one would see space to insult you.” Or perhaps, she’s thinking now, this is the nature of microaggressions. The “micro” part of it being its imperceptibility, its dismissibility. If she tells this story to someone, they could argue that the woman was simply trying to take her kid away from a stranger, a mother’s instinct. But what about the contempt in her voice, the curve of her elbow, as if trying to build a wall between them. Sommy thinks now that she would rather a big insult than a small insult. She can burnish and display a big insult. “Look what that idiot did to me,” she can say, and then feel good for having borne it all with grace. A small insult, a passive insult—of what use is that? It pinches and stings but commands no real attention. She would rather that this woman had spat in her face, gnarled some disgusting slur at her.

Sommy stands with much effort and starts to head back to the restaurant. She’s not even angry at the woman, she thinks. She’s numb, and she knows it has something to do with the heft of the pain she’s experienced in the past weeks. Everything now pales in comparison. Everything feels like a joke. A scared, mean woman cannot pull any meaningful emotion from her. She’s watched her brother almost die, watched him vomit and shit blood, dragged all six feet of him down their staircase and into their father’s old Volvo, watched his body straighten like a stick and then go limp like a rope. She’s seen things, she thinks. She’s seen shege.

“Hey,” someone says from behind her now.

She turns, startled, clutching her purse. “Sorry?”

Before her is an anxious-looking man, somewhere in his late twenties, average height, and very light-skinned. Full, curly hair. Black, but mixed with something. White? Brown?

“I’m sorry to walk up to you this way,” he says, taking off his glasses to reveal dull brown eyes. “I was watching you from over there.” He points to the bench by the water sprinkler. “And I saw.” He says saw emphatically. “And I just wanted to say that I think that was fucked up. I don’t want you walking around with that interaction in your mind, and I thought it might make you feel better to know that you have a witness.”

He has on a black T-shirt and a pair of shorts, and against his very light skin, the dark T-shirt looks even darker.

“Thank you,” Sommy says, smiling. “That’s thoughtful of you.” 

He stretches his hand for a handshake and says his name is Bryan.

She hesitates, stares at his lean hand, his clean pink nails, the beaded bracelet on his wrist, and then takes the handshake. “Sommy,” she replies. “Nice to meet you.”

There’s a moment of awkward silence. They both smile stiffly, waiting for the other person to steer the conversation, so Sommy says, “Thanks again for saying something.”

He nods, says, “You are welcome.”

She unclasps her hand from his and continues on her way back to the restaurant.

At the restaurant, Sommy tells Bayo about the woman, and then Bryan.

“Which one is witness again?” Bayo says, irritated. He hands her the pomegranate cocktail. The crowd has thinned. A few people sit about, talking even louder than before, loosened by alcohol. The light has grown dimmer, the music lower.

“I thought it was sweet,” she says.

“I don’t know,” Bayo says. “It feels too self-righteous. Too ‘Look at me I’m a sensitive person.’”

Sommy laughs, takes a sip from the cocktail. “You have a point.”

She thinks now that Mezie would say the exact thing about Bryan, a man who wears his goodness on his sleeve. “With people like this,” Mezie would say, “you never see it coming.” She wonders if it is perhaps a matter of socialization, for men to be so weary of displays of kindness. Kindness that is muted, mangled by feigned or real disdain, sure. But kindness that announces itself as kindness? It seems excessive to them.

Sommy asks about Kayla.

“You won’t believe she let that fool, Michael, drive her home.” 

“Jesus, it’s a lie.”

“I swear. I don’t understand women.”

Sommy smiles affectionately and flicks the edge of his collar. “She’s a real mumu. Don’t mind her.”

They both finish their drinks and head home.