Loose Ends — Chapter 47: Bread in the Shade

Chapter summary

Folasade joins Mama Bolu, confronts shared complicity, and waits for Karo while they share bread.

MAMA BOLU

Friday The police came to the stall at ten. Two of them, in a pickup, with a notebook. They wanted to know about a girl named Karo. They asked whether she had ever seemed strange.

Mama Bolu stood behind the counter with her arms folded and said, “She is a quiet girl. She buys bread.”

They thanked her and went. She watched the pickup out of sight. Then she sat down on the stool and put her hands over her face.

She sat like that. A customer came and went. When she looked up again the sun had moved to the other side of the street, and Folasade stood at the edge of the shade in her best wrapper, a bag over her shoulder, sunburned and old.

“Bolu.”

“You came.”

“I took the first bus.” Folasade set the bag down. She looked smaller than she had at the funeral. She looked like a woman who had been carrying a heavy thing for a long time and had at last been told she could put it down. “Where is she?”

“Gone. They say she walked into the dark. The police are looking.”

“They will not find her.”

“No.”

“She learned that from me,” said Folasade. “How to go into the dark and not be found.” She sat down on the other stool. “I have been thinking since yesterday. I have been thinking about the Chief’s wife. I hated her sixteen years. I wished her dead every night. And last night I thought, what did I do to her? I took her husband’s Fridays and her husband’s envelopes. I sat in a house that she was paying for. And I told my little girl it was a fair price.”

“Folasade.”

“I am not saying she was right. I am saying that there are two women in every second house, and I only ever looked at one.” She wiped her face with the corner of her wrapper. “There was a wife in this too, Bolu. A wife who put a calabash at my child’s door. I think that wife and I would have liked each other, in another life.”

Mama Bolu said nothing. She reached under the counter and brought out a loaf, still warm from the morning’s delivery, and broke it in two. She handed half to Folasade.

“I have not eaten since Isara,” said Folasade.

“I know,” said Mama Bolu. “Eat.”

They sat together on two stools in the shade, with the market going about its business around them, and shared a loaf of bread.

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