The Invitation
The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which Ama considered an omen because all the worst things in her life had happened on Tuesdays. It was handwritten on the kind of lined paper that schoolchildren use, the blue ink faded at the edges as though the words had been sweating in their envelope. "Dear Ama," it began, in handwriting she recognized the way you recognize a scar — not with fondness, but with the involuntary flinch of remembered pain. Mrs. Mensah was retiring, and she wanted Ama to speak at the ceremony.
Ama read the letter three times in her office on the fourteenth floor of a glass tower in Accra, where she managed accounts for a mining company and wore shoes that cost more than her mother earned in a month. The distance between this office and the village school where Mrs. Mensah had taught for forty-one years could not be measured in kilometers alone. It was a distance made of silences, of phone calls not returned, of a single afternoon fifteen years ago that Ama had spent her entire adult life trying to outrun.
She folded the letter into her handbag and told her secretary she was leaving early, claiming a headache that was not entirely a lie. In the elevator, she caught her reflection in the polished steel doors and saw, for one disorienting moment, the fourteen-year-old girl who had stood in Mrs. Mensah's classroom with chalk dust on her uniform and fury in her