He Left at 2 AM for Her Tampons, So I Left for Kenya novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Volunteer

Alec puts Clayton on latrine duty. At dinner Clayton retells their marriage wrong and Rosemary corrects it in front of the staff. Clayton says Rosemary's mother told him to ask about the bathroom that night.

At six the next morning Alec handed my husband a shovel.

Clayton was wearing a pressed polo shirt and boat shoes.

"Where's the latrine?" he asked.

"Behind the maternity ward," Alec said. "It's four feet deep now. We need eight."

"By when?"

"By the time it rains."

"When does it rain?"

"Today, probably."

I was on the porch of the clinic with my coffee, and I did not offer to help.

Wanjiru came and stood beside me with her clipboard.

"He will last until ten," she said.

"Eleven," I said. "He's stubborn."

"Ten," she said. "I have seen the shoes."

He lasted until ten-fifteen.

Wanjiru marked it on the clipboard, and I paid her the hundred shillings we'd bet.

By afternoon his hands were blistered and the polo was brown to the chest.

He worked the way he did everything, loudly and with great confidence, and every twenty minutes he looked around to see who was watching.

Marissa was watching.

She had spent the morning in the clinic kitchen, and by lunch there were three trays of banana bread on the staff table.

"I found a recipe that works with the oven," she told the cooks, and the cooks, who had been wary of her, took a second slice.

She learned every name in an hour.

She asked the pharmacy assistant about her new baby and she carried water to the waiting room without being asked.

At dinner we all sat at the long table under the lantern string, the way we had every Friday for three years.

Clayton took the seat across from me, the one that had been Dr. Reeve's, and Alec moved down one chair without comment.

"So I'm just going to say it," Clayton said, to the whole table, "so nobody gets the wrong idea. Rosemary and I have had a great marriage. We met at a food drive. She told me I stacked cans wrong. I knew right then."

"We met at a hospital job fair," I said.

"A food drive."

"You were handing out lanyards for your company. I asked you where the bathroom was."

Wanjiru put her fork down.

"Then," Clayton went on, undeterred, "she had a rough year, work was crazy, we got a little disconnected, and she needed some space. I get that. I do. That's why I'm here."

"I didn't need space," I said.

He turned to me, and his face was kind and patient.

"Romy."

"I left because in five years you never once asked what I needed."

Nobody at the table moved.

"I'd have given it to you," Clayton said.

"You were at Marissa's."

"That was one night."

"It was the one night," I said.

Marissa set down her fork and touched Clayton's arm.

"I think we should let her eat," she said softly. "She's had a long day. I'm so sorry, Rosemary. We came in blazing, and that wasn't fair."

Everyone looked at her with approval.

Down the table, Alec did not.

He was looking at the hand on Clayton's arm, and then he looked at me.

"There's one thing to know about this place," Wanjiru announced, as she did to every new arrival, in the voice of a woman reading out a fire code. "We have one rule. Nobody on this compound dates anybody on this compound."

"Why not?" Marissa asked, interested.

"Dr. Reeve's rule," Wanjiru said. "Ask him."

"It doesn't end well," Alec said, and went back to his rice.

Marissa smiled at him anyway.

"Does he have a wife?" she asked me, quietly and kindly, a minute later.

"He's the director," I said. "He has a clinic."

She nodded and passed me the salt.

Dinner broke up the way it always did, with the cooks clearing and the generator shutting off at nine.

I was halfway to the guesthouse when Clayton caught up to me in the dark, out of breath.

"Romy. Wait. I talked to your mom before I came."

I stopped.

"She sounded good," he said. "She said she's missed you."

"That's nice."

"She said something strange, though."

He rubbed the back of his neck, the way he did when he was working himself up to a question.

"She said if I really wanted to know why you left, I should ask you about that night. The bathroom. She said you'd know."

The generator died, and the lanterns went out one by one.

"What happened in the bathroom, Romy?"

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