The Weight of Rain

They sat around the table like strangers sharing a train compartment, each guarding their own silence. Folake had changed into a wrapper and blouse she found in the guest room wardrobe — her own clothes from decades ago, mothballed and waiting. The transformation unsettled Adunni. Without the armour of her Lagos wardrobe, her mother looked smaller, younger, almost approachable. The jollof rice sat between them like a peace offering nobody had agreed to accept. "Your father would have liked this," Mama Ife said, and the words landed on the table like a grenade with its pin half-pulled. Folake's fork stopped mid-air. Adunni watched the space between them fill with something electric — not anger exactly, but the memory of anger, the scar tissue of arguments that had never been resolved, only abandoned. The generator outside stuttered, and for three heartbeats they sat in perfect darkness, breathing the same heavy air. When the lights returned, Mama Ife was holding a photograph that Adunni had never seen before. It showed a young man in military uniform standing beside a woman who was not Mama Ife, and between them a child with Folake's unmistakable eyes. The rain intensified, as if the sky understood what was about to happen. Folake reached for the photograph with a hand that trembled, and the evening split open like fruit left too long in the sun.