Chapter 13
Sarah
The veterinary pharmacy in Nanyuki was a narrow building on a side street, wedged between a mobile phone shop and a closed storefront. Donovan had dropped me at the door and gone to pick up hardware supplies for camp. I’d told him twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was generous. I needed one drug.
The woman behind the counter typed my order number into a computer that looked older than I was. She scrolled the mouse wheel with one finger, reading something on the screen that was taking too long to be good news.
“I’m so sorry, but it looks like your order has not arrived yet.”
“What do you mean, it hasn’t arrived?”
“The shipment was delayed. A supply issue at the distributor.”
I waited for the part where she told me there was another option.
“It will be here first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“By eight o’clock. They are very reliable once the shipment leaves Nairobi.”
I put my hands flat on the counter. Two cases of xylazine. That was what I’d driven two and a half hours for. Two cases still sitting in Nairobi.
“Is there anywhere else in town that carries it?”
“For that dosage and concentration, no. We are the only veterinary pharmacy in the region with the license.”
I closed my eyes. Driving back empty tonight meant another five hours round trip tomorrow. That was a full day gone for meds I could pick up in the morning if I just stayed. We had fuel to think about, and the truck had been running rough on the drive in.
“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock.”
“We will have them ready.”
I walked out into the late afternoon. Everything felt too loud.
Shops playing music, people bustling about, and vehicles using their horns like echolocating devices to navigate the streets made it difficult to suppress the panic building in my stomach.
What was I going to do about us having to stay here overnight?
I stood on the sidewalk and pulled out my phone.
I needed to find Donovan and tell him we were going to be stuck overnight. But first, I needed to handle the overnight itself before I had to say the word out loud to him.
There was a hotel two blocks over. I’d seen it on the drive in. I walked there and went to the front desk.
The lobby was small and air-conditioned. The woman at the front desk smiled when I approached.
“I need two rooms,” I said. “For tonight.”
Please have two rooms. Please have two rooms.
She checked her system. “Of course.”
The breath I let out was embarrassing. The woman glanced up from her screen but didn’t comment.
Thank God.
I gave her my name and paid, and she told me the rooms would be ready when we checked in later.
Handled.
I texted Alyson.
Meds delayed. Have to stay overnight in Nanyuki. Back tomorrow.
The response was instantaneous.
OVERNIGHT??? With DONOVAN???
It’s a supply run, Aly.
Sarah, you are spending the night in a hotel with that man. Get it, girl.
I booked two rooms.
Undo that immediately.
I put the phone away. It buzzed again. And again. I pulled it back out.
You have been waiting for this since Paris, whether you admit it or not. Tonight is the night you stop being scared and let something happen.
Nothing is happening. We’re picking up xylazine.
That’s tomorrow’s business. Tonight is all about YOUR business.
I shoved the phone into my bag. It kept buzzing. I unzipped the bag and looked.
I’m serious. If you don’t put your mouth on that man tonight, I will drive to Nanyuki myself and do it for you.
Had she really just gone there? Who was I kidding? Of course she had.
ALYSON.
You know what his arms look like. You know what those hands could do. SARAH. Get out of your own head and get into his lap.
The heat climbed my neck and settled across my cheekbones. I was standing alone in a hotel lobby, and I was flushed to my ears.
I shoved the phone back into my bag, zipped the bag shut, and didn’t look again.
I found Donovan at the hardware shop three streets over. He was loading a box of supplies into the back of the truck, and he straightened when he saw me coming.
“Meds aren’t in,” I said. “The shipment got delayed. They said they’ll have them first thing in the morning, so…”
He waited.
“I booked us rooms. At a hotel. Two rooms.” I said it too fast. “So we don’t have to drive back tonight and turn around and do it again tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
That was it. No questions. No commentary on the fact that I’d said two rooms like it needed to be a legal declaration. Just okay.
“Since we have some time to kill, how about we grab some food?” He pulled out his phone and scrolled for a minute. “There’s a place not far from here. Good reviews.”
“Sure. Sounds good.” I could totally handle a meal and conversation without embarrassing myself. Hopefully.
Donovan drove the truck to the hotel lot and parked it where he could see it from the street. Then we walked.
Nanyuki moved around us in late golden light, vendors and motorcycles and women carrying things on their heads with a balance I’d never master.
As we walked, Donovan’s arm was close enough that I could feel the heat off his skin.
Did I really want two rooms?
He stopped in front of a restaurant with a wooden door and a sign I couldn’t read from the angle we were standing. Through the window, I could see white tablecloths. Actual cloth napkins. A waiter in a collared shirt.
“No,” I said.
He looked at me.
“I can’t go in there.” I looked down at myself. Field boots, cargo pants, a tank top I’d been wearing since five in the morning. “Look at me.”
His expression shifted quizzically. He put his phone in his pocket. “We don’t have to.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to eat with you.” A rapid-fire over-explanation was about to come out like the word vomit it was. “Fancy just isn’t my thing. I grew up on a farm in Iowa.”
“So what’s your kind of place?”
I looked down the street. A block away I saw a small restaurant with an open front and a long counter facing the street. A woman was grilling meat over charcoal behind it, and a row of people sat on plastic stools eating off paper plates.
“That,” I said pointing to the restaurant.
We crossed the street and took two stools at the counter. Donovan leaned forward and said something to the woman behind the grill. It took me a second to realize it was Swahili.
She giggled and began cooking with a smile. I could only assume it was because she didn’t expect him to speak Swahili.
Neither did I.
“Since when do you speak Swahili?”
“I don’t. Zayn’s been teaching me a few words. I can order food and ask where the bathroom is. After that, I’m useless.”
Of course he was learning the language. Of course he was the kind of man who showed up somewhere and tried to meet it on its own terms.
When the plates came, the food was good and hot. Grilled chicken and ugali, a thick cornmeal cake that came with everything in Kenya, and two cold Cokes in glass bottles.
Donovan ate without performance. No commentary about the plastic stools or the lack of a menu. The ease with which he relaxed made it easier to relax myself. This was easy. This I could do.
“My mom would like this place,” I said. “She always said the best food comes from the smallest kitchens.”
“Yeah? Tell me about her.”
“She raised six kids on a cattle farm in Iowa. She didn’t have a choice about being smart.” I took a drink of my Coke. “Do you have any siblings?”
“Five.”
“Five.” I set down my fork. “Just like me.”
He leaned back on his stool and told me about them.
Frank, the eldest, a PhD in history and worked at a museum and never let anyone forget he went to graduate school.
Ty, third in line, on the Citadel team. Leonard, a high school teacher.
Annabel, a midwife who made everyone look at photos of the babies she delivered.
Bridget, the youngest, fresh out of law school.
“That’s a lot of overachievers,” I said.
“Says the woman who started college at sixteen.” He picked up his Coke and took a drink, watching me over the bottle.
I stared at him. “I didn’t tell you that.”
“Alyson told Andrew. Andrew told me.” He set the bottle down. “I know you graduated top of your class. And I know you got the fellowship on your first application.”
“Alyson has a big mouth.”
“Alyson’s proud of you.”
I pushed a piece of chicken across my plate and didn’t say anything for a second.
“I loaded up on extra courses,” I said. “Every semester, as many as they’d let me take. I told myself it was because I wanted to get through faster.” I shrugged. “The truth was, if I was studying, I didn’t have to figure out how to talk to people.”
He seemed to be pondering that intently.
“And you ended up in the military?” I asked.
“Army at eighteen. Twelve years.”
“That’s a long time.”
“It was.”
There was a closed door hidden behind those two words.
Whatever lived on the other side of twelve years in the Army, he wasn’t opening it over chicken and ugali at a counter in Nanyuki.
Before I could decide whether to reach for the handle, my phone buzzed in my bag at my feet.
I bent down and pulled it out, angling the screen away from Donovan.
Has anything happened yet? Don’t you dare tell me you’re eating FOOD when you could be eating that man alive.
I unlocked the screen. Typed back I will block your number one-handed under the counter and shoved the phone back into my bag.
“Everything okay?” Donovan asked.
“Fine. Aly being Aly.”
He looked amused but didn’t inquire.
We finished eating and walked for a while.
Nanyuki at dusk was quieter, the vendors packing up, the light shifting amber and then blue.
He told me he’d joined Citadel about five years ago, after the Army.
I told him about the fellowship, how competitive it had been, how I’d opened the acceptance email in my apartment in Iowa and sat on the floor and cried.
“Kenya was my first passport stamp,” I said. “Paris was my second.”
“And now you don’t want to leave.”
“No. I don’t.”
His arm brushed mine as we walked. Neither of us moved away. I felt it for a long time after.