“What you said in church?”

I was still working on the puzzle as Chidi drove. I should have kept my big mouth shut.

“About not believing?”

I looked up sharply. “Are you going to preach to me? If you are, don’t. I don’t need . . .”

He took his right hand off the wheel and tapped my thigh. “I’m not going to preach to you.” He took away his hand. “I was just going to say, I understand.”

I was still looking at him.

“You know my mom is dead?”

I nodded.

“Did your dad tell you how she died?”

I shook my head.

“She died when I was ten. Armed robbers came to our house in Nigeria. Six of them. They had guns and machetes. They took everything—laptops, TVs, her jewellery, phones, the stereo—everything. Then they asked for money. My parents had about fifteen thousand naira at home. That’s a little over three hundred cedis. The robbers were infuriated. They dragged me out of bed and put a machete to my neck. My dad offered to go to an ATM with one of them. But how much can you withdraw from an ATM?

Then one of them hit my mother. She fell down. My dad was going to help her. They slashed him with a machete. If you look at his left arm, you’ll see the scar. I was too scared to even scream. There was blood everywhere. Then they raped Mummy. All six of them. And they made us watch, Dad and I.”

I was quiet. I didn’t know what to say.

“Dad got one of the neighbours to take her to the hospital. She stayed there for two weeks. He reported to the police but they never got them. She came home but she never really got better. I mean, she was there in the flesh but she wasn’t there. It was like some part of her was gone. Like she died before she really died.”

I knew exactly what he meant. Mom had been the same way after news of Ntiriwa’s drowning reached us. She and Dad had immediately gone to the university in Accra. He came back after a week. She stayed for two weeks and when she came back it was like a part of her was gone. She was there in the flesh but she wasn’t there.

I’d gone into the kitchen once to find it filled with smoke. She’d put rice on the cooker to boil but it had burnt completely. Every last grain was charred and Mom had been sitting right there at the kitchen table not two feet away in the smoke and she hadn’t noticed a thing. I’d put off the gas and called her name. It was only when I touched her that she realized what had happened. She’d looked at the burnt rice and started to cry. I helped her to bed and she remained there for the rest of the day.

Other times we’d find a tap had been left on, the doors hadn’t been locked, the fridge had been left open. Then one morning, two months after Ntiriwa’s death, we came down to find Mom’s bags packed. She said she was convinced Ntiriwa wasn’t dead. She had dreamt Ntiriwa had hurt her head and couldn’t remember who she was. She could feel in her spirit that she was alive. She was going to Accra and all the little coastal communities to look for her.

I remember I’d felt an urge to laugh. Dad had been too shocked to say anything. Sarfoa had started to cry and climbed into her lap but Mom hadn’t even held her. She’d asked Dad to go with her and I had had the urge to laugh again. Our lives had turned into a telenovela—that was what had made me want to laugh.

Dad had asked Sarfoa and I to go back upstairs. We did. I listened shamelessly from the top of the stairs. He tried to talk her out of going. She tried to talk him into going with her. He talked to her about how futile her search was going to be. She talked to him about faith. The more he sought to soothe, the angrier she became. He tried to hold her. She shrugged him off and left.

Sarfoa and I got sent to live with my grandma in Sunyani who at the time had been recovering from a stroke. Dad spent two weeks looking for Mama along the coast and eventually found her along a stretch of beach in the Volta Region. Nothing he could say would convince her to give up her search.

He came back without her. Mom called a week later. She’d gone to Togo and combed their beaches as well, looking for a nineteen-year-old amnesiac female. So far her search hasn’t turned up anything. But she still believes Ntiriwa has lost her memory and is out there somewhere.

“I’m sorry,” I said as we drove into the parking lot of the Friends Gardens restaurant.

“I’m not preaching to you or anything, but for a while I couldn’t understand why God would allow bad things to happen to good people. Why He couldn’t have stopped the robbers from coming to our house or at least from raping mom, and I was angry. Very angry. But God is God and He is with us even when bad things happen. He promised . . .”

“You’re preaching.”

“Sorry. I just want you to know He still loves you. He has you in the palm of His hand . . .” he said turning the engine off.

“Preaching . . .”

He held up his hand. We got out and he surveyed the place while I made small talk with one of the car park attendants. We sat in a corner of the open courtyard and placed our orders. Chidi ordered cocoyam fufu with ebunuebunu soup and snails and goat meat. I ordered fufu with akrantie light soup.

“Have you eaten ebunuebunu soup before?”

He shook his head. “My dad says it was my mom’s favourite. I’m feeling adventurous today. I want to try it.”

Dad and Sarfoa joined us just before the food was served. When Dad asked him how he liked Ghanaian food so far, Chidi admitted he hadn’t eaten a lot of typical Ghanaian dishes but he found most of our soups to be very light. He asked if he could have some kontomire stew that a man at two tables ahead of us was eating with slices of boiled yam and plantain. Dad agreed and the waiter brought the kontomire stew, which Chidi had with his fufu.

“Eew. Fufu and stew?” Sarfoa said making a face.

He laughed. “Our soups are as thick as your stews, that’s all. But this is delicious, you can try it.”

Everyone declined. When he finished his fufu with kontomire stew he used a spoon to eat his ebunuebunu soup.

Chidi insisted on buying a bucket of chocolate ice cream for dessert because Dad paid for lunch.