Ugwu sat up. “I have tired of stories of Onyeka. I noticed something when he came by yesterday. He should bathe more often, he smells like rotten oil beans.”
“And you, what do you smell like?” Anulika poured the ukwa in the bag and knotted it. “I’ve finished. You better get going before it gets too late.”
Ugwu went out to the yard. His mother was pounding something in a mortar and his father was stooped near her, sharpening a knife against a stone. The scrape of metal against stone set off tiny sparks that flickered briefly before they disappeared.
“Did Anulika wrap the ukwa well?” his mother asked.
“She did.” Ugwu raised the bag to show her.
“Greet your master and madam,” his mother said. “Thank them for everything they sent us.”
“Yes, Mother.” He went over and hugged her. “Stay well. Greet Chioke when she returns.”
His father straightened up and wiped the knife blade on his palm before shaking hands. “Go well, ije oma. We will send word when Onyeka’s people tell us they are ready to bring palm wine. It will be in a few months’ time.”
“Yes, Father.” Ugwu stood around while his little cousins and siblings, the younger ones naked and the older ones in oversize shirts, said their goodbyes and listed what they wanted him to bring on his next visit. Buy us bread! Buy us meat! Buy us fried fish! Buy us groundnuts!
Anulika escorted him to the main road. He saw a familiar figure near the grove of ube trees and, although he had not seen her since she went to Kano to learn a trade four years ago, he knew immediately that it was Nnesinachi.
“Anulika! Ugwu! Is it you?” Nnesinachi’s voice was as husky as he remembered but she was taller now, and her skin was darker from the fierce sun in the North.
When they hugged, he felt her chest push into his.
“I would barely have recognized you, the North has changed you so,” he said, wondering if she had really pressed herself against him.
“I came back yesterday with my cousins.” She was smiling at him. She had never smiled at him so warmly in the past. Her eyebrows had been shaved and penciled in, one thicker than the other. She turned to Anulika. “Anuli, I was on my way to see you. I hear you are getting married!”
“My sister, it is what I hear too,” Anulika said, and they both laughed.
“Are you going back to Nsukka?” she asked Ugwu.
“Yes. But I will come back soon, for Anulika’s wine-carrying.”
“Go well.” Nnesinachi’s eyes met his briefly, boldly, before she walked on, and he knew he had not imagined it; she really had pressed herself against him when they hugged. He felt a rush of weakness to his legs. He held himself from turning back to look at her, just in case she turned as well, and for a moment he forgot the uncomfortable churning in his stomach.
“Her eyes must have opened in the North. You can’t marry her, so you had better take what she is offering, before she marries,” Anulika said.
“You noticed?”
“How could I not have noticed? Do I look like a sheep?”
Ugwu narrowed his eyes to look at her. “Has Onyeka touched you?”
“Of course Onyeka has touched me.”
Ugwu slowed his pace. He knew she must have slept with Onyeka and yet he did not like her confirming it. When Chinyere, Dr. Okeke’s housegirl, first started to sneak across the hedge to his Boys’ Quarters for hasty thrusts in the dark, he had told Anulika about it during a visit home and they had discussed it. But they had never discussed her; he had always made himself assume that there was nothing to discuss. Anulika was walking ahead of him, unbothered by his sulky slowness, and he hurried up to her, silent, their steps light on the grass where they, as children, had hunted grasshoppers.
“I’m so hungry,” he said, finally.
“You didn’t even eat the yam Mama boiled.”
“We boil our yam with butter.”
“We boil our yam with boh-tah. Look at your mouth. When they send you back to the village, what will you do? Where will you find boh-tah to use to boil your yam?”
“They won’t send me back to the village.”
She looked at him from the corners of her eyes, up and down. “You have forgotten where you come from, and now you have become so foolish you think you are a Big Man.”