Port Heya Chapter 3

3

The next call on the flip phone came on Sunday afternoon.

Zuri and the kids had left for church, leaving Kwame alone at home. Jabari thought his father was too busy for church (as his dad had explained), Stella opined her father considered himself too good for church folks, but Zuri knew better. She had long since learned never to discuss religion with her husband, lest she triggered a twenty-point debate on the comparison between modern religion and ancient rites, which her husband was vigorously partial to.

“Now, lemme tell you why ancestral veneration beats anything monotheistic,” Kwame would start and seemingly go on nonstop.

Wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a brown bathrobe, Kwame reclined on the couch in the living room, his legs propped up on the coffee table. The papers he was grading sat on his lap while reruns of M*A*S*H played on the TV.

“Henry,” Hawkeye said on the forty-inch screen and Kwame went word for word with Alan Alda for the rest of the sentence, “you have no idea what it’s like sharing a tent with a guy who thinks he’s all twelve disciples!”

“You, funny Hawkeye, you,” Kwame added with a sly grin.

“Tintintin-tin, tintintin-tin, tintintin-tin…”

He’d thought himself past jumping every time the dang flip phone rang, yet his feet swung off the table as if they had suddenly grown a brain of their own, scattering the papers on his lap. The luxury Lamy fountain pen flew out of his hand and landed nib-first on the table, ruining the cherished gift. (Zuri will have a goat.)

Kwame was cursed with a curious, analytical mind (as he was wont to advise anyone who cared to listen) and he intended to get to the bottom of this most elaborate hoax. But anyone would be excused for being a little uptight every time a dead man reached out through the phone.

He fished the damned thing out of his pocket and checked the screen. Still no caller ID.

“Hello?” he said.

“Kwame?” said the same voice from before, the same voice that sounded very much like Juma’s, if only a little more ragged around the edges. “Thank you, my friend. Thank you for picking up.”

“Why? Did you not expect me to?”

“I know what you’re thinking and trust me, this is not some Sheng Long bullcrap. It really is me.”

“You knew I’d google you, didn’t you?”

“I’d have expected nothing less from the Kwame I knew back then.”

“Is that so? Forgive me, but if I may be bold enough as to ask, how have you managed this first of a kind feat of calling from the afterlife?”

Juma chuckled. “I wish I have. That would be something, wouldn’t it? Imagine possessing the ability to talk to your dear grand�"”

Kwame sprang to his feet. “You need to cut this crap, whoever the f**k you are, you hear me? This is gone far enough. Whatever your con is, you trust me it won’t work. Not this time, not on me.”

A brief silence followed before Juma said, “You kept the phone.”

“So?”

“So, you’re curious. You always have been. But more than anything, I wanna say I’m sorry one more time.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve thought about it all these years and it doesn’t look like I said it enough. Or truly convincingly.”

The temperature in the room went up a notch. “The hell are you blathering about?”

“Nala.”

Kwame bunched his hand into a fist. “Now, you wait one goddamm minute. How do you�"”

“I shouldn’t have, Kwame, that’s the high and low of it. Back then I tried to justify it, in my head, you know? You guys had broken up and she came to me for consolation then one thing led to�"”

“Stop it! Stop it!”

“You’re right. There was no excuse for it.”

Kwame flopped back onto the couch feeling older than ever before. “Is this why you’re glad I picked up your call, Juma? So you can apologise for screwing my college girlfriend two decades ago?”

Juma snickered. “C’mon, Kwame, you gotta give me more credit than that. Allow me a minute to explain, alright?”

“There’s nothing to explain. That ship’s already sailed. Long past gone, my friend. If I held a grudge for every single thing I went through in college, I’d have gone insane by now.”

On the television, Max Clinger said, “If I had all the answers, I’d run for God.”

“Here’s what I don’t understand, Juma,” Kwame said, leaning forward as if Juma sat on the other side of the coffee table. “Why are you playing dead?”

“The simple answer is, I owned Serenity Towers.”