The Best American Short Stories® 2011 Read Online Free PDF Page B

person who would understand, and yet he was afraid that she would feel contempt for the person he had become. He still did not understand why Chief had decided to help him; there was, after all, a trail of eager visitors to Chief's house, people bringing relatives and friends, all of them with pleas in their eyes. He sometimes wondered if Chief would one day ask something of him, the hungry and honest boy he had groomed, and in his more mel2odramatic moments, he imagined Chief asking him to organize an assassination.
    The party was more crowded, suffocating. Chief was saying something to a group of men and Obinze heard the end: "But you know that as we speak, oil is flowing through illegal pipes and they sell it in bottles in Cotonou!" He was distracted. He reached into his pocket to touch his BlackBerry. Kosi was asking if he wanted more food. He didn't. He wanted to go home. A rash eagerness had overcome him, to go into his study and reply to Ifemelu's e-mail, something he had unconsciously been composing in his mind. If she was considering coming back to Nigeria, then it meant she was no longer with the black American. But she might be bringing him with her; she was, after all, the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect certainty, made a certain kind of sureness somehow become possible. When she held his hand during those campus days, she would squeeze until both palms became slick with sweat, and each time she would say, "Just in case this is the last time we hold hands, let's really hold hands. Because a motorcycle or a car can kill us now, or I might see the real man of my dreams down the street and leave you, or you might see the real woman of your dreams and leave me."
    Perhaps the black American would come back to Nigeria too, clinging on to her. Still, there was something about the e-mail that made him feel she was single. He brought out his BlackBerry to calculate the American time when it had been sent. In the car on the way home, Kosi asked what was wrong. He pretended not to have heard and asked Gabriel to turn off the radio and put in a Fela CD. He had introduced Ifemelu to Fela at university. She had, before then, thought of Fela as the mad weed-smoker who wore only underwear while performing, but she had come to love the Afro-beat sound, and they would lie on his mattress and listen to it and then she would leap up and make swift, slightly vulgar movements with her hips when the run-run-run chorus came on. He wondered if she remembered that. Kosi was asking again what was wrong.
    "Nothing," he said.
    "You didn't eat very much," she said.
    "Too much pepper in the rice."
    "Darling, you didn't even eat the rice. Was it Mrs. Akin-Cole?"
    He shrugged and told her he was thinking about the new block of flats he had just completed in Parkview. He hoped Shell would rent it because the oil companies were always the best renters, never complaining about abrupt hikes, paying easily in American dollars so that nobody had to deal with the fluctuating naira.
    "Don't worry. God will bring Shell. We will be okay, darling," she said and touched his shoulder.
    The flats were in fact already rented by an oil company, but he sometimes told her senseless lies such as this, because a part of him hoped she would ask a question or challenge him about something, but he knew she would not, because all she wanted was to make sure the conditions of their life remained the same, and how he made that happen she left entirely to him. She had never asked him about his time in England either. Of course she knew that he was deported, but she had never asked him for details. He was no longer sure that he wanted her to, or even whether he would have told her about feeling invisible in that removal center, but it suddenly became a glaring failing of hers. Ifemelu would have asked. Ifemelu would not have been content to ignore the past as long as the present existed. He knew very well