Good News

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he first day they met, he’d nicknamed her Christmas, saying she had a face like the Christmas mornings of his childhood. Later, when she asked him what he meant, he said only that she had a joyful face. ‘Like good news,’ he added. ‘Your parents should have named you Iruoma.’

Emeka had been the better cook of the two, so he had been the primary cook. The only time he didn’t cook was when they had guests, especially male family members from his side. A few months into their marriage, when his uncle from Ekwuluobia spent a night with them because his flight from Enugu airport to Lagos had been cancelled, Emeka hadn’t even helped in the kitchen. He sat in the living room with the uncle, talking about this and that. Afuajuba cooked, served and cleaned. Emeka had warned her that this uncle was an Ichie. He was a titled man, and so it was taboo for him to eat any food prepared by a man. ‘What does he do when he goes to a hotel? Does he ask if a man or a woman prepared the meal?’ Afuajuba wanted to know. Emeka shrugged, and even she had laughed at the foolishness of that tradition. So, she expected that Emeka would not cook for his uncle, but she hadn’t thought that Emeka would not help out at all, or that he would shout from the living room to remind Afuajuba that she had forgotten to serve them drinking water. After the uncle left the next day, Afuajuba asked Emeka what was up with that. ‘Really treating me like a servant!’ she said.

‘You don’t want him to go back and say that my wife rules my home?’

‘And so what if he had?’ Afuajuba asked, her anger still raw.

‘I am sorry, Babe,’ Emeka said. Then he had nuzzled her neck, and they had made love right there in the kitchen, and she had been quick to forgive him.

Emeka cooked all of her favourite dishes for weeks to make up. Jollof. Yam porridge. Egusi soup. Seafood okra. Goat meat stew. He knew just the right amount of thyme to throw into stew, how to fry the egusi just right, how much spinach to throw into the okra. She watched him as he cooked, her heart brimming with love for this man who cooked in such large quantities, they had to invest in Tupperware, meticulously labelling each container of food.

She picks up the Tupperware and, in that moment, the doorbell rings, startling her. She thinks it is her next-door neighbour, a woman with whom she has become close since Emeka’s death. The person at the door has short, cropped hair, toned arms peeking out of a floral-patterned blouse, and a stomach that looks too big for the small frame. Afuajuba thinks that maybe she is a Jehovah’s Witness, come to bring ‘Good News’.

‘Afuajuba,’ the woman asks, but it doesn’t come out like a question.

‘Yes?’

‘Orie.’ She brings out a hand as if for a handshake, withdraws it when Afuajuba doesn’t reciprocate. She walks past Afuajuba into the house and settles herself into the sofa. She has the easy assuredness of someone who is familiar with the house. Afuajuba feels sick.