Chapter 21: The Kitchen Counter

Clayton flew in on Tuesday, in the same borrowed shirt, with a roofer's tan.

He had a plastic bag of mango candy for my mother.

The roof on the maternity ward had gone on, he told us, three days early.

Wanjiru had inspected it with a flashlight and said it would do.

"That's the highest praise there is," I told him.

"I know," Clayton said. "I've been waiting my whole life to be told that."

He did not stay at my mother's house.

He took a room at a motel on the ring road.

He came to the old house on Dunmore Street at ten in the morning, alone, with a folder.

It was my house now, by the paper he had signed.

Alec had driven up from the airport hotel to wait on the porch.

I let Clayton in myself.

The kitchen was exactly as I had left it three years before.

There was the tile I had picked, and the counter, and the window over the sink with the dead basil on the sill.

Clayton stood in the doorway and looked at the counter for a long time.

"This is where you left the papers," he said.

"Yes."

"I came down at seven and made coffee and walked around them."

He gave a small laugh.

"I thought they were a pharmacy receipt. Then I saw your handwriting. I put my coffee cup on them and went to work."

I didn't answer.

He put the folder on the counter and opened it.

"The lawyer says it's all in order. There's a filing at the courthouse for people who agree, and it takes a few weeks."

He turned the page toward me.

"You sign here, and here."

"And you've signed."

"The first set in Kisumu, the night I read it," he said. "The court copy at the lawyer's desk before I flew. I wanted my hand to know it twice."

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