The Third Door — Chapter 28: The Good Day

Chapter summary

During Mama’s lucid day, Dami learns Eni’s childhood wound was seen, regretted, and still haunting.

11.10am, Saturday 18 July 2026, Akoka, Lagos

“Madam Dami, Mama dey sharp today o.”

Bukola met her at the gate with a wet cloth over one shoulder and the look of someone who had been waiting all morning to deliver good news. She was twenty-two, from a village outside Ado-Ekiti, and she had looked after Mama for three years without a single complaint, which Dami privately considered a miracle.

“Sharp how?”

“She wake up for six o’clock and ask for her comb. She ask who sweep the veranda. She say my plait too tight.” Bukola touched her own head, grinning. “She don even eat all her pap.”

Dami stood still with her bag in her hand.

The good days came now like rain in the dry season. You could not plan for them or count on them. You only knew them when they fell, and by then you were already running outside with your face turned up. She had learned not to hope, because hope made the next day heavier, but she felt it anyway, rising through her chest and leaving her mouth in a breath.

She went in. Mama sat by the window in her wheelchair, in the blue wrapper she kept for church, with her hair combed and a handkerchief folded in her lap. The light came through the louvres and lay

across the rug in long stripes, like a ladder laid down for someone to climb. She turned her head as Dami came in, and the look she gave her was clear and sharp and entirely present, the look of a woman who had returned from a long journey and found the house just as she had left it.

“Damilola. You are thin. Have you eaten?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Which food?”

“Rice. And some plantain.”

“Rice and plantain is not food. That is a rumour.” Mama lifted her chin. “Come and kiss me. Then take me to the kitchen. That girl does not know how to cook ewedu.”

She sat at the kitchen table and ran the whole operation like a matron on a ward.

“Not like that. You do not cut the leaves. You bruise them. Use the broom.” She pointed at the wooden ewedu broom hanging from its nail. “Don’t tell me you do not know what a broom is for. Your sister knew at eight years old.”

“Eni did not cook at eight.”

“She cooked every Sunday. You were not born. You were not even an idea.” Dami laughed. It surprised her. It came up out of her like something she had forgotten was in there, a coin in the lining of an

old coat.

They worked for an hour. Bukola was sent to the market with a list and a lecture. The kitchen filled with the green smell of the leaves and the sharp smell of locust beans, and the radio on the shelf played old highlife, low. Mama’s hands were not what they had been, but she directed them with a tap of her finger or a sniff, and between the sniffs she talked, easily and sensibly, about things Dami had not heard her mention in years: the market at Mushin in 1975; the matron on her first ward, who starched her cap until it stood up like armour; a night in 1983 when a young doctor had fainted at his first delivery and she had held his head in her lap until he came round.

“He is a professor now,” she said. “He still does not know that I know.”

Then she began to hum.

Dami did not notice it at first. It lay under the sound of the radio, low and thin and a little off the note. She was stirring the pot, thinking about salt. And then something in the tune caught at her, like a sleeve on a nail, and she stopped with the spoon in the air.

“Mama. What is that?”

“What is what?”

“That song.” “Oh.” Mama looked down at her own hands. “It is the hymn. The one we sang at Akoka, at the little church with the leaking roof. The evening hymn.”

“Eni hums that.”

“Of course she does.” Mama sounded faintly impatient. “She learned it at six. She sang it every Sunday evening on the veranda, with her feet on the rail. You were not born. After you came, she stopped singing it and started humming it instead. Nobody asked her why.”

She began to sing it, softly, in Yoruba. All of it. Her voice was thin and cracked, but it found the tune and held it. Dami knew every note and had never known a word. She had grown up believing her sister made that tune up, a private thing that came out at sinks and on staircases and while she was waiting for something.

When the third line came, Mama sang it without a pause. It began with a word that meant Lord.

Dami put down the spoon.

1.20pm

They ate at the table, the two of them, with the ewedu and the stew and a piece of fish between them. Mama ate slowly and finished every bite. Afterwards she sat with her hands folded and looked at the wall, and Dami thought she might be drifting, and made ready to be sorry.

But Mama said, “I knew something happened.” “Mama?”

“To Eniola. That year. The year she was ten.” She was still looking at the wall. “She came home one afternoon from school with a fever, and by evening she was a different child. She stopped singing. She stopped running to me when she fell. She began to knock at every door in this house. I saw it. I knew something had happened.”

Dami did not move.

“I never asked. I was too tired.” Mama turned her head. Her eyes were wet and quite steady. “I want you to understand this, Dami. I was always too tired. I have been tired for thirty years. If I wrote the whole of my life on one page, that is what it would say. She had a trouble. She carried it alone. And I was asleep in the next room, between two shifts, because there were two girls to feed and no one else to feed them.”

“Mama, you did everything.”

“I did what could be seen.” She lifted her hand and let it fall. “It was never enough. It is not enough now.”

Her face was tired and old and honest. Dami took her hand and held it, and for a while they sat without speaking, while the radio played and the pot ticked on the stove.

Then Mama said, in a different voice, brisk and practical, “Is Eniola coming?”

“Mama…” “She has been knocking since morning.”

Dami’s arms went cold.

“Nobody is knocking, Mama.”

“Three times. Soft. Then she waits.” Mama’s brow creased in mild reproach. “She always waits. Go and open the door for her. Do not leave your sister standing outside.”

“Mama, it is only me and Bukola.”

“Then go and see.”

Dami got up. She did not want to, but she went anyway, out of the kitchen and down the corridor, across the sitting room with its brown sofa and its glass cabinet and its crocheted headrests. She stood in front of the front door with her hand on the handle.

She waited. She listened.

There was the sound of the street: a motorcycle, somebody’s radio, the faint dry rattle of the mango tree.

Nobody knocked.

She opened the door anyway. The veranda was empty. The gate was shut, and Mama Rotimi’s gate beyond it, and the road ran away white in the afternoon sun with no one on it at all.

She stood there for a minute, feeling foolish and not quite alone.

When she went back, Mama’s head had dropped a little to one side. Her breathing was slow. The handkerchief had slipped to the floor, and the light had moved across the rug and left her in shadow. Dami picked up the handkerchief and folded it. She knelt beside the chair.

Mama opened her eyes.

They were no longer sharp. They had gone soft and wandering, and they passed over Dami’s face without quite settling. But she smiled, and put out her hand.

“Eniola,” she said. “You came.”

Dami opened her mouth to correct her.

Then she closed it, and took the hand, and let her mother hold on.

The Third Door · Continue reading

Chapter 29 is the next door

The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.

Continue to Chapter 29 →

What stayed with you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Cover and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover source; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.