The Weight of Rain

The rain arrived before the guests did, sweeping in from the lagoon with the kind of fury that made old women cross themselves and young men shutter their windows. Adunni stood at the kitchen doorway watching it batter the bougainvillea into submission, each drop heavy as a stone. She had spent three days preparing jollof rice and pounded yam for a homecoming nobody wanted, and now the sky itself seemed to share her misgivings. The generator coughed once, twice, then settled into its familiar diesel-throated hum. Her mother, Folake, arrived in a black Mercedes that looked wrong against the unpaved road, its tires spinning briefly in the new mud before finding purchase. She emerged with the practiced grace of a woman who had spent twenty years forgetting where she came from — heels sinking, smile fixed, designer bag clutched against the downpour. Adunni noticed she did not look at the house. She looked past it, above it, through it, the way you look at something you have already decided to demolish. In the back room, Mama Ife sat in her wooden chair with her Bible open to a page she was not reading. At eighty-three, she had outlived two husbands, five of her seven children, and every secret she had ever been asked to keep — except one. Tonight, she had decided, the last secret would finally speak. The rain drummed on the corrugated roof like impatient fingers, and she closed