Mikki

Kelechi’s mother never said she hated Ada. She just never said her name. Ada was a nurse’s daughter from Enugu, with a mother in debt. Kelechi married her anyway, quietly, without his family’s blessing. When a job in Dubai came, he left his old Nigerian SIM with his mother. “Keep it on, Mama. Ada will call that number.” It was the only number Ada had for him. In his second month away, her phone was stolen in a market. With it went the new Dubai number he had saved on it. She began calling the old SIM from borrowed phones. Every call rang in his mother’s handbag. His mother and his sister Ngozi answered. He’s in meetings. He’s tired. He’ll call. Ngozi’s shop depended on Kelechi’s remittances, and she had decided Ada would end them. In the third month, Kelechi received a letter in Ada’s handwriting, copied from her real ones. It began with his pet name for her, lifted from a letter the family had intercepted. I’m leaving. I never loved you. Don’t look for me. He called Ada’s number for three weeks. It was dead. Her ward said she had gone on leave. His contract held his passport, and breaking it would cost him a year’s salary and a ban. He couldn’t fly home. Every door he knocked on from Dubai stayed shut. Then, in her fifth month of pregnancy, Ada walked to the family compound. Ngozi met her at the gate. “He’s engaged. Please don’t embarrass yourself.” Ada stood there for a long moment. “Tell him I came,” she said. She walked away without crying until she was on the bus. She moved to her aunt’s house in Aba and returned to her mother’s surname, Eze. She would not carry the name of a man who had apparently moved on without even telling her himself. Her aunt’s compound had no proper mailing address, so Ada rented a P.O. box. She worked double shifts and raised her daughter, Chidinma. On the fourteenth of every month, their wedding day, she wrote Kelechi a letter and sent it to the Enugu family compound. The P.O. box appeared on the back as the return address. She never wrote return to sender. Nothing ever came back, so she assumed he was reading her letters and choosing silence. She kept writing. Until one day, her six-year-old daughter asked a question that broke something inside her. “Why do you keep writing to someone who never writes back?”