Read Online Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Free Book Online Page B

to join in the morning prayers. He had never joined before; her mother had once insisted that he do so, before leaving to visit their hometown. “Let us pray and cover the roads with the blood of Jesus,” she had said, and he replied that the roads would be safer, less slippery, if not covered with blood. Which had made her mother frown and Ifemelu laugh and laugh.
    At least he still did not go to church. Ifemelu used to come home from church with her mother and find him sitting on the floor in the living room, sifting through his pile of LPs, and singing along to a song on the stereo. He always looked fresh, rested, as though being alone with his music had replenished him. But he hardly played music after he lost his job. They came home to find him at the dining table, bent over loose sheets of paper, writing letters to newspapers and magazines. And Ifemelu knew that, if given another chance, he would call his boss Mummy.

    IT WAS a Sunday morning, early, and somebody was banging on the front door. Ifemelu liked Sunday mornings, the slow shifting of time, when she, dressed for church, would sit in the living room with her father while her mother got ready. Sometimes they talked, she and herfather, and other times they were silent, a shared and satisfying silence, as they were that morning. From the kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator was the only sound to be heard, until the banging on the door. A rude interruption. Ifemelu opened it and saw the landlord standing there, a round man with bulging, reddened eyes who was said to start his day with a glass of harsh gin. He looked past Ifemelu at her father, and shouted, “It is now three months! I am still waiting for my money!” His voice was familiar to Ifemelu, the brassy shouting that always came from the flats of their neighbors, from somewhere else. But now he was here in their flat, and the scene jarred her, the landlord shouting at
their
door, and her father turning a steely, silent face to him. They had never owed rent before. They had lived in this flat all her life; it was cramped, the kitchen walls blackened by kerosene fumes, and she was embarrassed when her school friends came to visit, but they had never owed rent.
    “A braggart of a man,” her father said after the landlord left, and then he said nothing else. There was nothing else to say. They owed rent.
    Her mother appeared, singing and heavily perfumed, her face dry and bright with powder that was one shade too light. She extended a wrist towards Ifemelu’s father, her thin gold bracelet hung unclasped.
    “Uju is coming after church to take us to see the house in Dolphin Estate,” her mother said. “Will you follow us?”
    “No,” he said shortly, as though Aunty Uju’s new life was a subject he would rather avoid.
    “You should come,” she said, but he did not respond, as he carefully snapped the bracelet around her wrist, and told her he had checked the water in her car.
    “God is faithful. Look at Uju, to afford a house on The Island!” her mother said happily.
    “Mummy, but you know Aunty Uju is not paying one kobo to live there,” Ifemelu said.
    Her mother glanced at her. “Did you iron that dress?”
    “It doesn’t need ironing.”
    “It is rumpled.
Ngwa
, go and iron it. At least there is light. Or change into something else.”
    Ifemelu got up reluctantly. “This dress is not rumpled.”
    “Go and iron it. There is no need to show the world that things are hard for us. Ours is not the worst case. Today is Sunday Work with Sister Ibinabo, so hurry up and let’s go.”

    SISTER IBINABO WAS powerful, and because she pretended to wear her power lightly, it only made her more so. The pastor, it was said, did whatever she asked him. It was not clear why; some said she had started the church with him, others that she knew a terrible secret from his past, still others that she simply had more spiritual power than he did but could not be pastor because she was a woman. She could