The Kitchen After Midnight
Ruth is boiling water in the big kettle. She hates the big kettle. She has told our mother, many times, that nobody needs a kettle of that size, and our mother has said, many times, that it was our grandfather's and that he liked to make tea for the whole house at once, and therefore the kettle stays on the stove and so does the argument.
It is twenty past midnight. We buried him this afternoon.
Ruth stands with her back to me at the stove. From behind she looks like our mother, which is an observation I am not going to make out loud tonight. I am sitting at the kitchen table in the chair that used to be his, because no one else has taken it yet, and I am aware that by sitting in it first I am making a small claim, and that Ruth has noticed.
"Do you want honey," she says, "or sugar, or nothing."
"Nothing."
"You always have honey."
"Tonight I don't want honey."
"Fine."
She puts two mugs down very carefully. Our grandfather's mugs, the ones with the chipped rims that our grandmother bought in Mombasa in the 1970s and that he never let anyone throw away. The steam rises between us. Ruth sits down opposite me, in the chair that used to be hers when we were children and that she has, without apparently noticing, gone back to.
"I keep expecting him to come in," she says.
"Don't."
"I'm not doing it on purpose, Nyambura. I'm telling you what I keep doing."
I stir my tea,