Chapter Two: THE ROOF ITSELF

The day after the proposal, the city hummed like a phone left charging on the bedside table, constant, low, obliging itself to keep going. News vans and wedding bells felt far away; inside my small apartment, the ring still sat on my finger, a warm gold that seemed to pulse with a life of its own. I turned it slowly and then rested my palm against my chest as if that could anchor the world into the shape I wanted it to be.

The first meeting with his mother felt inevitable, like a tide whose arrival the whole shoreline pretends to ignore until the water is already at the gate. He had spoken of her with a softness that made her sound like a ghost of good things, nurturer, prayer warrior, the woman who taught him to tie proper knots and fold shirts into rectangles that looked like promises. I had seen a picture of her once, a stiff photograph from a school album; she wore a smile that did not require permission. I imagined warmth.

The house where we met was the kind of compound that folded over itself, rooms leaning into rooms like people who had long ago learned how to be close. Its gate was painted a tired green, and the pavement smelled faintly of old oil and the kind of stew you could smell for a block. Gardenias puffed in a confined bed; a radio played an old highlife song that steadied my nerves.

She opened the door in a wrapper tied so tight at the waist she looked repaired, as though the fabric was holding more than material, held together, perhaps, by memories and careful rules. Her hair was braided into a crown that sat like a verdict. She scrutinized me once, a long look that cataloged me without comment, then stepped inside as though the space had already remembered she belonged there.

So this is the woman, Emeka said, voice soft, as if speaking louder might break the fragile politeness that housed us all.

She smiled the smile in the photograph and reached for my hand. Her fingers were cool and practiced, like someone who had done this before,counted hands and names, and the weight of marriages. The smile lasted long enough to be a ceremony of its own.

"Welcome home," she said, and the house echoed the phrase like an answer.

"Home"?, The word hummed in my mouth. I had not yet packed a box, not yet folded a blouse into a rectangle or labeled a jar with a farmer’s neatness. But home had arrived for me in the shape of a sentence and the way her eyes traveled over my clothes, the small things they inventory.

Lunch followed. Rice with stew, small fish fried to a delicate crisp, and a pepper sauce that tasted like it had been stirred for years. Emeka chatted about small things, his job, a cousin’s wedding, and repairs that needed doing on the fence. His voice carried an ease that sometimes made me forget stakes; it was a warm hand on a cold day.

His mother watched him like someone reading the sky for storms. She asked questions that sounded like warmth but were trimmed with a kind of measurement, how I liked my sleep dressed at night, who would do what when the washing piled up, whether I believed in God enough to let prayers begin in the morning. Her curiosity was a ledger.

When we rose to leave, she took my hand in both of hers and placed something in it, two small folded napkins, embroidered with initials. I smiled, surprised, and for an instant thought this was affection. Emeka laughed and squeezed my hand, delighted, and I walked out with the napkins pressed to my palm like a small map.

That night, we talked about the house I would move into, about furniture and a bedroom, and where my things would go. He spoke in specifics, this corner, that shelf,and I could hear the neat boxes of his life being arranged in my head. He said his mother wanted the wedding to be small, something intimate with family, maybe a small reception. He said she was traditional but not cruel, that she only wanted to protect what they had built. I wanted to believe him with the kind of faith that could light up a room.

The first week under her roof came like a slow practice in learning. The house lived by a rhythm I did not yet know the tune to. Mornings began with the mother moving through rooms like a wind that knows every corner, popping in to smooth sheets, to pull a curtain slack here and tighten it there, to take an extra cup of sugar from the jar and tuck the spoon back into the other side. Her hands left the kind of neatness that felt like attendance, an evidence of ownership.

I learned the rules without instruction. Some were obvious, shoes removed at the gate, praise reserved for elders, but others were smaller, and their weight surprised me. Dishes were to be rinsed the moment a plate left a mouth; towels never dried on the bed; visitors who came after dusk must be greeted in the living room, never the courtyard. Each tiny decree looked harmless until I layered one upon the other until I could feel pressure building in the seams of my day.

The first evening he left for work late and I stayed behind in the kitchen stirring a pot of okra stew, a smell that reminded me of the nights of my childhood and the way my mother would hum with a ladle. The mother came in as she often did, unannounced, like a weather front that could not be predicted. She held a folded shirt, Emeka’s favourite, and shook it gently as if trying to decide whether the scent of cologne had stayed.

" You do not cook like this", she said, not unkind but not designed to be kind either, and set the shirt down on the counter.

Her set downness was a movement that made the kitchen rearrange itself. She added a spoonful of ground crayfish to the pot without asking, tasting, nodding once before turning to me as though to check a report.

Next time, you must first ask before changing the food, she said.

I felt the words land and scatter in the small space between us. Her correction was a map for everything that followed. I opened my mouth to say something, the kind of reply that explained who I was and who raised me, but the words folded in. Emeka arrived then, a doorway of apologies already in his eyes. He murmured to her, an exchange done in small, private tones. I watched him choose the soft voice reserved for his mother and felt the old knot tighten in my chest.

Over the days, little indignities collected like lint the lent washer could not be removed. She would rearrange my toiletries with a thoroughness that implied they had been left in ignorant places. She steeped our small cups of tea until the sweetness fled and then offered to remade them herself. When I suggested that I would handle the bills she smiled and said that money is dangerous when young people carry it; leave it to the experienced hands, she would say, as if experienced hands were a limited currency.

I kept my temper under a thin glaze of patience. I told myself we were all learning one another, husband, wife, and elder. But each evening I laid my head on the pillow and felt the sting of small renunciations, the jokes she told at my expense to visiting relatives, the way she pronounced my name with an affection that felt like an invoice. i asked Emeka once, in bed, with his palm warming the place where my head met his chest, why she rearranges things.

"She is my mother", he said. She raised me. She knows the house. It is not her fault she wants things a certain way.

I understood the argument. The logic worked like a net. But absorbingly, there were nights when I could feel my shape trying to expand and the house constricting, like a cup that fits a river until the river decides it will wear the cup down.

A week after we moved in, a cousin of his dropped by, a woman with hair heavy with braids and jewelry that spoke in gentle clinks. She sat in the living room and watched the mother as one might watch a ceremony. After pleasantries, she leaned toward me and, in a voice that wanted to be my friend, said in a low tone that could have been pity or prophecy.

"She looks after her son very well" ,she said. You will learn. She meant the words as consolation and warning in the same breath.

The more days passed, the more I felt the house layering itself, memories of his childhood, schedules kept like vows, and rituals for every semblance of life. Each time I tried to place my own thing inside those rituals, I felt like an intruder who had not learned the handshakes. The mother, for all her small kindnesses, a dish given here, a tea remade there, had a way of reminding me that the center had always been hers.

Yet there were cracks to which I clung. Emeka’s look when he thought I could not read it; the way his fingers traced the back of my hand at night as a quiet map of allegiance; the memory of the proposal where his voice had promised to make me his life. I kept returning to the ring, to the beach where the sky had felt like possibility. I told myself love required patience, that families are complicated things, that the kind of battles that look like surrender are often the slow building of peace.

The household had its rules, and the roof had its own language. I decided, in the secret place where I carried my breath, that I would learn the grammar without losing my voice. If the compound expected one kind of woman, I would meet it there with a different kind of courage, small, deliberate, and private. I had not yet decided whether this courage would look like leaving or like standing. For now, I would hold the ring. For now, I would watch and count the moments and find the seams where pressure could be applied without shattering everything we had begun.

At night, I wrote on the first page of a new notebook, a line dedicated to what I would not forget.

I would not forget that the man who asked me to be his life also told me his mother had been praying for this day. I would not forget either that prayers can sometimes come folded in chains. I would not forget the taste of the sea, the sand that still clung to my feet from the night he asked, and the small hope that somewhere between the prayer and the chain there existed a passage wide enough for both of us to step through.

This I resolved: I would learn the house and its language, but I would not give away the thing that made me distinctly me. The roof could be hers, but the rules I would one day write myself.