Chapter 32 Kal
32
KAL
I love this girl. Instead of waiting for me to tiptoe my way to her room once the household is slumbering, she brings herself and her overnight bag to my room express while everyone is still dispersing for the night and I’m in the middle of undressing. “Whatchu lookin’ at?” she says, letting herself in. “Peoples know I’m already your wife, right?”
I laugh and finish undoing my belt, then untuck my shirt. “If anyone missed it, the memo will be distributed shortly,” I say.
She tosses her bag aside and flings her body on the bed. I abandon undressing and join her. Our lips meet. In our kiss, I taste the sweet vanilla of our wedding cake. Small fete, huh? Miz had said—her refrain throughout the night at every “extra” development, from the moment we walked into the garden to when Zebiba wheeled out a two-tier gold-and-rose creation. I had to remind Miz she did marry into a family of bakers. My father had insisted that Miz and I cut the cake. I had a feeling that my father would keep doing this tomorrow—staying on the periphery of things while pushing Miz and me into the centre of everything. Even if Emay were physically with us, I bet it would have been the same.
“At least there’s no bedazzled stepladder,” I said, as guests huddled around the cake table chanting Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! I had been ready to do the customary blink-and-you’ll-miss-it peck on the lips, as couples do here at their weddings, as if they’ve never kissed before. But just as on our wedding day, Miz had other plans, as if to remind me this was not our first time and that, since November, we have almost succeeded in permanently rearranging one another’s anatomy. Our kiss became a full-on make-out, live, in high definition. I knew we had gone on too long, even for this loosened-up crowd, when I felt a tugging on my sleeve and heard Bini’s voice yelling, People waiting on cake, yo!
I want to pick up from that moment, but we’re both so worn out from the night that our lovemaking is the quietest and slowest it’s ever been, to the point where we have to laugh at ourselves.
“It’s like we’re already in old age,” I say, after.
“Change of pace is good sometimes,” she says, curled into me. “Literally.” She chuckles.
“You had a good time tonight?”
She puts her chin on my chest to see me better. “Are you kidding? The slow dance especially,” she says.
I nod. Me too. After dinner, at Eske’s urging, we had relented to doing one solo slow dance in the living room, starting with a special entrance emceed by the one and only Bini. But the second he launched into his lengthy Ladies and gentlemen! and I heard the opening bars of “Yehiwote Hiwot,” I tried to signal to him to change the song, remembering Miz’s dislike for Tilahun. All that time I was sending her links to songs, I had made sure to not send her any of his tracks.
“It’s okay,” Miz said, her eyes moist, blinking rapidly at the chandelier to reverse her tears as we walked in. “We have to dance to this song. It’s practically the law.” We took our positions and started sweeping gently across the floor. She leaned into my ear. “It’s just that a couple’s first dance always gets me emotional, and now I’m doing it. So double trouble.”
“What is it about Tilahun anyway?”
She sighed so heavily I was about to tell her it didn’t matter, to not ruin the night. But she went on. “So basically,” she started, talking to my shoulder as we danced slowly, “when I came here the first time, and I found out my parents were actually married?” I nodded. How could I forget? “There was more.”
“What, Tilahun played at their wedding?” I said, chuckling.
She did a double take. “What are you, psychic? A Tilahun music video was playing on Dad’s TV when Dad showed me, get this, their wedding album .” I widened my eyes, amazed. “I kid you not. Legit plastic-protected pages, gold-ringed spine, padded floral cover, fifty-three black-and-whites. Total coincidence Tilahun was on at the time, but I have not been able to stand his voice ever since.” She shuddered. “I associate him with that period of my life. It was on my first day back too!” This made me stop dancing for a moment. She pointed at my face. “That, how shocked you look? Multiply that by a thousand, then add the soundtrack of a guy who half the time sounds like he’s crying more than he’s singing. I mean, it could have been anyone, but it had to be Tilahun? Who would ever want to listen to anything of his again?”
She’d kept her game face on since we were still slow dancing in the spotlight, but I could feel the light tremor in her chest—she was working hard to keep the full impact of that memory at bay. I wished we’d been alone.
She hesitated, then quietly added, “But sometimes, I still look at the photos.”
I shook my head, speechless with fury at her parents, but keeping my smile on. Perhaps too convincingly, because she narrowed her eyes at me as if I’d said the wrong thing.
“I know you want to defend them,” she says. “Say they had their reasons blah blah —”
I cut her off firmly. “No. They did you wrong. A terrible wrong. Messing up your first taste of love like that?”
She tsk ed, shrugged. “Can you blame me for turning non-believer?”
There was a note of regret in her voice, as if lamenting something lost. The belief that her first would be her forever. The one she doodled about in her high school notebook, the outline of her hands with his, their names conjoined under a halo of hearts.
“And now, what do you believe?”
“I think they had no idea what the hell they were doing. Love is worth everything.”
Her words hit me with a force that made me pull her closer. I’d promised myself I would wait for her to say it back to me before I said it again, but I couldn’t help it. Tomorrow was not guaranteed. This could be the last time I got to say it. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Afekrihalehu .”
In Amharic too! I almost shouted with joy. I brought her closer yet, and we danced the rest of the four-and-a-half-minute song without speaking, not with our words anyway. I began to pull away as the song wound down, for her sake.
“Hold on. Few more seconds,” she whispered while Tilahun held the final note. “I want to.”
So we stayed, until the very last whisper of his breath. For fifteen seconds, we were still, soul recognizing soul, feeling as if everyone was also holding still with us.
In the shaft of moonlight slipping through the bedroom curtains, our wedding rings gleam as Miz interlocks her left hand with mine. “From now on, you will pick what we dance to on our anniversaries,” I say.
“Ooh, you might live to regret that.”
“Nah.” I caress her plain ring, the complement to mine, bought at random after a long day of solitary wandering. “We should order real ones with engravings from Teklu Desta. What do you think?”
She twists our wrists this way and that. “I would love that.”
“Those, we will never take off. No matter what.”
“Unless we have to have surgery.”
I burst out laughing.
“I’m just being practical!” she says. “Or an MRI.”
I adjust the pillow, propping myself up, and she shifts up with me. “You know, when I was small, I used to think if wedding rings came off, then the couple was not married anymore, because I never saw any married grownups without their rings on.”
“Oops,” she says. “I took this thing off the same night, back in October.”
“It’s okay. The hex doesn’t apply to us because these aren’t our final rings,” I say authoritatively.
“Phew,” she says, then grows pensive. “Never to come off, like my dad’s.”
I nod. Exactly. I’m so happy she thought of him, despite his part in mishandling her lovestruck-teen phase. His commitment to his absent wife is so much like Abay’s. Such an inspiration. I doze off to the soothing feel of Miz tracing her toes along my shin. What feels like minutes later, I am partly pulled out of sleep by the sounds of the women leaving for their beauty appointment. It is dawn already? I open my eyes and look around. Miz is gone. I move to where she had been and fall asleep to the lingering warmth and scent of her, grasping her pillow to me like a man who has been left, an image I can afford to indulge in only because that is not my story. In fact, my story is the opposite. I have been found for life.