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In fact, her mother did not know which of the men she had slept with was Mulenga’s father. She told her husband that lie so he would marry her. It worked. He would see in her, as I so stupidly would see in her daughter—inexperienced as I was at the time with the ways of the world—virtue where there was none.
    “Mango don’t fall far from the tree,” my father said when I left his compound the second time to accept the scholarship the missionaries had offered me to the university in London. I was ungrateful, he said. Just like my mother. He had wanted me to help him till his land.
    For what should I have been grateful to him? Yet there was wisdom in his words, and had I accepted that wisdom, I could have saved myself the heartache that almost destroyed me when I discovered, within a matter of weeks, that Mulenga was no different from her mother. Time did teach me eventually, though, for in time, like my mother before me, I found myself lost in grief for someone who was not my spouse.
    I never saw Mulenga’s parents and siblings after that first evening when I sat with them at their table for dinner. My mother and father are well now, Mulenga told me the second time I visited her. Their fever has gone. They are strong now. Indeed, they had seemed fit that evening when I saw them for the first and last time.
    And the children?
    They stay with my father’s mother during planting season when my parents are working in the fields.
    And why not you? I wanted to ask. Why aren’t you in the fields helping them?
    But I did not ask her that. The answer was obvious. She was too refined to work in the fields. She had been to school. To the ninth grade, she said. She had already finished the sixth grade when hermother married. She was too good to work in the fields. But good enough to do what? Mulenga’s mother had no answer to her husband’s question.
    To marry a rich man, my friends said to me. But they were wrong. I was not a rich man, and yet Mulenga let me court her.
    It was a trap, my friends said. “If her mother cannot find a rich man for her, she will take a university man. A university man has potential,” they said. “Her mother leaves you alone with her because she has a plan.”
    I did not care. So what? I said to myself. I was in love with her. “I may marry her,” I said.
    There were rumors: Mulenga is not who she seems to be. I stopped talking to those who brought me such rumors.
    Yet I never asked Mulenga what she did during the day, or how it was that she was always available to me whenever I wanted to visit her at her home. If these questions arose in my mind, I always banished them with proof of her virtue: She kept her front door unlocked and allowed me to enter her house without knocking. If she had anything to hide, surely she would not have taken that risk. Then, too, she had refused my advances. She was keeping herself for her husband, she said. Why shouldn’t I have believed her? And, oh, how I longed to be that husband she had saved herself for, to stroke those firm thighs, to let my fingers climb beyond those points where she stayed my hand.
    I was in the habit of coming to her house on Tuesdays and Thursdays after the end of the school day. I would take the 2:30 bus and would arrive at her door at exactly 3:00, give or take fifteen minutes for the African sense of time. I would leave at 5:00 when the bus returned for the trip to my village. I would walk directly to her house and enter without knocking. She would be there waiting for me with pancakes she had just made, and a cup of tea. We would spend the afternoon talking. This was the pattern we established.
    I realize now that it was I who would spend the afternoon talking. She would simply listen, holding my hand in hers. But isn’t this what endears women to men? Don’t we love it when they hangon our every word and look into our eyes with the kind of adulation that says, Yes, you are my hero; yes, you are my conqueror; yes, there is no