Everyday People Read online

  She told me about how, after graduation, Derrick and Geoff left for California together, where they bought a condo with money they’d saved, and Derrick went to school while Geoff worked at a sporting goods shop and supported him. They eventually got married—the secret to Geoff’s devotion and Derrick’s hesitancy a secret no more.

  I then told her about how I became a professional gay, as it were, working inside of gay businesses, for gay media, for my life since I went away. I had had boyfriends; finally, I had a man, and then I lost him. Had another, lost him too. Found another, still had him, as of the trip back home. She smoked on her stoop and filled me in on her and on the man she’d had and lost and had again; they had divorced and now were dating again.

  All the while, I tried to imagine the call I was going to make later, to my mother, as well as my boyfriend. Turns out I’m a dad seemed like not quite the right tone to strike. My idea of my life going forward up until now had no room for a child, a son of my own. This was nothing I had planned for myself, and it all made me feel like I was barely able to take care of myself, much less anyone else. The bus stopped then, and as I waited for him to come into view, there was a silence in me into which everything I had been until then vanished.

  I don’t think there’s any video of me from when I was his age, but I’m pretty sure that as he crossed the street I knew his walk. My fourteen-year-old son, the quiet, good-looking kid Katie had named Boomer, confident but with a slight sad streak of the kind that ran through me as well, the spitting image of me and my dad.

  I am trying to think of how I can explain how it was to meet him. To stand in front of him and for Katie to say, “This is your father.” Me thinking of how I wasn’t ready to suffer his scrutiny of me, even as I found myself holding him in a sudden hug I knew he wasn’t sure he liked.

  But only when I walked into my mother’s house with him and Katie and saw my mom’s eyes, me with this old friend she’d had filling her prescriptions for all the years after I’d left for college, did I understand what I had done. I had told my mother to look for it, to prepare for it, but when she saw what I’d seen right away in Boomer, I could barely get the words out for introductions and then it didn’t matter, my son being kind while a woman he didn’t know wept on his shoulder, gently rocking him from side to side, speaking softly, in Korean, words I hadn’t heard her say since I was a boy. And a new one for her: sonja. Grandson.

  Katie was kind to her, and waited before quietly walking over so her son could see her. Our son? I don’t think I knew until then what a family was or could be, despite having been in one all this time. That it was something you built to keep what you could of what you loved from the depredations of time and the world and how they would lead all you loved to ruin and death, no matter what. My mother had stayed here all this time, despite how alone she was. She and my father had been the only Korean couple in our town, and then she was without him. Just with me. And then I left. My father was buried there, and she had never remarried. She had accepted my being gay, and my decision not to have children. Somehow I had thought this meant we were okay, and yet all of this had obscured for me how the blunt and forcible separations caused by my father’s death were not healed, maybe not even a little, in her or in me. I didn’t know how much she still missed him. I often didn’t let myself feel how much I did. As my mom wept on Boomer’s shoulder, though, I knew I’d finally broken her heart the right way after breaking it the wrong way all those years ago. I had brought something into the world that neither of us was ever going to admit we needed, not until he was right in front of us.

  There was a lot I didn’t know and would come to know, about how Katie and I were going to manage this, or whether she would even let me do the three things I could probably do, or if she was ready for Boomer to have a grandmother, and one so close by, and my family in the bargain too. But just then, what stared out at me as I watched my mom let go of Boomer and turn to me, and smile, was that my punishment, my time at the CVS—this had never been about her anger at my accident and the damage to the car and the wall, or even her shame. It was all because . . . How could I be so careless, after she had lost my dad? How could I act like I could not die?

  WISDOM

  Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond

  IT WAS LONG past the time of night when the prostitutes on Lagos Avenue shouted “Ah-way!” at any car that dared slow without intent to purchase. The kebab, waakye, roast pork, and guinea fowl sellers had packed up. The drinking spots were closed. Only armed robbers, avuvis, taxi drivers, and prayer warriors were awake, and maybe watchmen, if they were good.

  Of the sleepless, Yao was among the first group, if you counted the two clothes hangers he had unraveled and joined to create a long, wiry accomplice. He inserted it now through a torn window net and the space between missing louvers, moving the hooked extension past two bodies rising and falling in the surrender of sleep on two mattresses joined together on the floor.

  He directed the wire to the red dot of a charging cell phone, bypassing the green light of a charged laptop for the former’s easier mobility. He wiggled his wrist like he was turning a key, unlocking the house he peered inside of. When his hook fastened onto an edge of the phone, Yao took advantage of the faint magnetic connection, yanking his booty with ginger determination, slowly dragging it along the ground, past the dreaming owners, up the inside wall, and out.

  The mobile lit up and trembled in his hands just as he clasped it, an alarm surprising him. Yao juggled the phone in reflex, almost dropping the device and his wiry extension as he simultaneously noted the reminder accompanying the alert—“Exams.” He jabbed the power button and scrambled toward the section of wall he had hopped over, past the window he had first looked into, finding nothing but a naked old woman sleeping next to a rotating fan.

  A light switched on.

  Now straddling the pillow he had used to smother the jutting shards of glass affixed along the top of the wall for security, Yao looked back momentarily. A man poked his head through the absent louvers and fraying net, heaving with the anger of interrupted sleep and the shock of violation.

  “Heh! Djulɔ! Djulɔ! Djulɔ!”

  He repeated the thievery charge in firing squad succession, shedding more grogginess with each declaration as he became increasingly infuriated. His rising decibel was a call to arms, a desperate rallying cry to his neighbors and the watchmen that manned the mix of modest bungalows and code-flouting mansions that dwarfed the domicile Yao had picked because it had no guardhouse or dogs. A distant Doberman barked, but no one emerged from the adjacent watchhouses or visitor gates.

  It was two hours before dawn, when sleep most resembles death—the time night security snore in peace. It was also the part of East Legon that had managed to maintain its quiet neighborhood aspirations, even after Boundary Road was paved to connect it to the motorway, and a spree of new construction had changed the area’s topography.

  Shiashie had become a sprawling grid of mansions and newly built town houses, complete with companion signboards advertising US dollar asking prices, and protected by a firewall of amenities for expats. International schools, corner provision shops, and passion project clothing boutiques hid and hemmed the movements of the shantytown Shiashie had taken its name from, and the residents that predated the gentrification.

  Lagos Avenue, with its bars, outdoor eateries, ATMs, and nearby mall was a minutes-long drive from Shiashie—a long enough walk that it kept revelers, riffraff, and the prostitutes’ patrons out, unless they were coming home. This was why Yao had gone in.

  Now on the street side of the wall, the mobile in his pocket, adrenaline lacing his blood, Yao sprinted away, his extended hanger and punctured pillow in tow. Somewhere between the French Embassy Lycée and A&C Mall, he started laughing.

  The mirth-cum-bravado of relief escaped him in dog-throated guffaws, pooling in his eyes. He moved the pillow to the hand that held the deformed wire and felt for the phone, his spontaneous howls ebbing to inte
rmittent wheezing and gulping sounds as he recalled the naked old woman he had spied.

  The abiriwa’s legs had been spread and twisted like his hanger, stuffed and misshapen like his pillow. He had watched her roll over, the moonlight illuminating breasts with the loose heft of fufu as they slid into her armpits, before he remembered his mission and moved to the next window in search of a valuable left out that could be easily pocketed. Now Yao shook with a renewed stream of cynical giggles at the thought of making the grandmother munch her pillow as he drilled himself inside her, her rotating fan their only witness.

  A hissing sound interrupted his brutal reverie.

  The serpentine call had come from a woman sitting on the steps of the closed mall, the light from the adjacent filling station and an overhead security beam making an eerily frizzy halo of her wig. The short hairs had the plastic pluck and ambition of a storefront boutique mannequin. Her outfit was as elegantly garish—a T-shirt bearing the bedazzled noun-verb “Flirt,” and similarly spangled jeans that tapered above platform stiletto sandals.

  Prostitute, he decided with a mix of condemnation and arousal. He stopped to look her over from his position across the street, and yanked the waistband of her jeans to her shoes in his mind. His penis stirred at the thought, pushing against the zipper of his shorts. He waited for a taxi to pass before padding over to her, still clutching the pillow and extended hanger.

  The girl sat as stoic as the Kwame Nkrumah statue in the new “Dubai” park near Circle, dubbed so, Yao assumed, because the United Arab Emirates city was also awash in blue floodlights. Only her eyes darted, from the rectangle in his pocket to the burglar’s accessories he carried.

  “You’ve come to sleep or to clear a drain?” she asked when he stood in front of her. “What do you have in your pocket?”

  Smiling, Yao rehearsed a line of dialogue he had heard on A Traição, a Brazilian soap opera that always seemed to be on at the salon next to the construction site he shared a room in. “Something big for you.”

  “That’s for me to find out,” the girl replied. She had apparently watched the same episode, her accent morphing to match the baby-pitched English of the actors who voiced over the Portuguese-speaking talent.

  He brought himself closer, dropping the pillow and hanger. She stood, slighter than she had looked sitting with her knees grazing her breasts, and shorter, even in her platform stilts. Her wig at his chest, he fixated on the fake patch of scalp the hairs radiated around as her hand reached for his bulge.

  “Ahshhh!”

  Yao tore away from her in pain, but she had let go first, skipping away into the taxi that had passed moments before, taking the rectangle in his pocket with her.

  Shame lit through his body as he watched the yellow flanks of the cab turn the corner. He looked around wildly, helplessly for witnesses. The only ones who had seen were two ginger-haired dogs, uninterested as they trotted across the empty street.

  Yao wandered now, fists curled up like weights at his side. He didn’t want to go home, where the mosquitoes that nightly besieged the half-built building he squatted in would have him for supper. And he didn’t want to be alone. He was always alone.

  His roommate was ever occupied with work or a party. His many neighbors—also squatters paying the architect overseeing the house’s construction for some Ghanaians in Germany—were always around, but not with him. They offered polite greetings when they passed him in the back of the house when he looked for a private spot to bathe, or when he passed them as they scrubbed their clothes and hung them to dry. But that was the extent of their connection.

  He thought of the man whose phone he had taken in Shiashie, and envied him the one who slept on the adjoining mattress as well as the old woman in the next room. If not for Elinam’s accusation, he would be home in Tafi with his people too.

  Unlike his closest friend, Kofi, who dreamed of leaving their hometown for the capital, Yao had been content to man his mother’s banana stand opposite the Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary. It wasn’t that he didn’t realize that there was far more to experience outside his small town; he just appreciated the experiences he had right there in Tafi. He relished chatting with the visitors who stopped to buy enough of the crescent-shaped fruits to entice the bearded primates from their homes deep in the grove. He missed peering from his perch outside the sanctuary, watching them pose for tremble-selfies when the mona monkeys hopped on their arms, carefully peeling the fruit for themselves.

  Yao longed to amble Tafi’s wide streets again, strike up a conversation with a woman stooped over a sudsy bucket, or simply perch near the visitor center with Kofi and watch the stream of passersby. People came to Tafi from across Ghana and the globe to connect with the monkeys, the people, and a part of themselves. In Accra, there was no time for connection unless it could lead to profit. No one wanted anything to do with anyone unless they had something in their pocket the other could spend. Especially the girls.

  He vibrated with new anger at the memory of Elinam’s charge, and the aftermath, replaying the incident that had ultimately driven him to Accra.

  As he had once before, Yao had gone with Elinam, his mate since primary school, into a part of the sanctuary forbidden to all but the priests. Deep in the thicket of mahogany and ficus trees, he had taken off her top and his shorts. She had knelt to take him in her mouth, but when he moved to join them at the hip, she pulled away. He was already inside of her, had already been inside of her, but this time she ran from him wailing.

  He had accepted her histrionics as part of the maddening game of virginal pretension girls were raised to play to prove the masculinity of their pursuers. Their first time, he had played along, gently unfolding her crossed arms, prying apart her shut thighs as he coaxed her in the drowsy octave of desire to give in to her own wanting.

  Days after their negotiation of limbs and longing, Elinam performed a routine of contrition. What else could it be but an act, Yao wondered, when his old friend began turning her head when they encountered each other in town?

  “She says it was rape,” Kofi reported back after Yao had sent him as an emissary to find out why Elinam had abruptly gone cold.

  “Nonsense,” he replied, fear, confusion, and anger behind the defensive swallow that followed.

  “I know you have to be sorry about what we did,” he said, confronting her at the Tafi Abuife Development Youth Association Celebration Week Game Day. The TADYA pickup truck roared by, packed with, and trailed by, revelers dancing to the jams DJ One Touch blasted from the tent that housed his turntables. Yao leaned in to tell Elinam, “I am not sorry.”

  Elinam’s head jerked at his statement.

  “You were begging me. Pressuring me. You forced my hands to touch you,” she said.

  “Heh! Did I force you?”

  “There are more ways to force than by force.” She folded her arms under her breasts now, her words seeming to give her courage as her tone became firmer. “You continued to coerce me, even after I resisted. I told you I didn’t want to, but you wouldn’t stop.” She shook her head.

  “Do you mean to tell me you vex,” he said, slipping into a hybrid of pidgin and English, “because I was able to persuade you?”

  “Because you wouldn’t stop until I did what you wanted.”

  He studied her tightly wound arms now, remembering how he had detangled them. “But you gave me head.”

  “That was all I wanted to do. Full stop.”

  Her friend Ana had been watching them from the edge of the crowded street, as had Kofi from the opposite side of the road. Now Ana strode over.

  “O le okay?” she asked Elinam, mixing English and Ewe.

  He almost laughed as he swallowed again. Watching Ana rub circles of comfort on Elinam’s back as they walked away, his certainty that he had done nothing wrong gave way.

  • • •

  Now Yao stalked futilely in the direction of the long-gone taxi, his anger at Elinam and the prostitute becoming one. As he walked a
long Lagos Avenue, the streetlamps went black. Dumsor. He sucked his teeth at the latest in a string of intermittent power outages, and the feeling that the ground had dropped out from underneath him again.

  The white rubber capping the toes of his sneakers slowly reappeared as his eyes adjusted and he decided what to do. He had planned to liquidate the phone at the electronics repair shop near American House Junction. He needed to get money some other way for the two trɔtrɔs he would have to take to reach the room he shared in Oyarifa. His alternative was a two-hour walk home.

  Yao picked up his pace now, focused on beating morning’s first light, resolving in that moment to return to Shiashie for the money. By the time he passed the American International School, he had broken into a trot.

  Breathing hard from the risk, he stopped in front of the house he had burgled earlier. He could chance another home, but this one had no snarling dogs or gateman to elude. And he knew they had a laptop. It wouldn’t be as easy to take as the phone, but the residents of the house were likely sleeping again, he told himself, the humiliation of violation giving in to their respective circadian rhythms. They would never expect him to come back. No one expected the same misfortune to strike twice in one night.

  He advanced to the wall, suddenly remembering he had left his pillow and wire at the mall steps. Hastily, he removed his shirt and shorts and folded them into a padded cushion before placing them over whatever glass it could cover. When he pat tested it, he could feel the jagged grooves through the fabric. He inhaled, resigned to the pain that would come as he gingerly twisted his left hand to place it along a glass-free space before gently pressing his second palm into the material and hopping up.

  In his briefs, he couldn’t sit into his straddle and gain the balance to jump. He fell into an awkward heap on the other side. Ignoring the pain shooting through the arm he had landed on, Yao furiously rubbed the scratch on his inner thigh. Relieved to find the skin wasn’t broken, he lay still for the seconds that followed, listening for movement inside the house. The sleeping silence unbroken, he rose to his sneakers, bravado beginning to numb him again.