Thato Segaetsho was at the end of her road when Oteng came around the corner. She’d messaged to say she’d walk out to meet him halfway. He’d agreed, and now he was glad, because he was better at conversation when he was moving. Sitting still across a table from someone new had a way of making him too conscious of his face.
She was twenty-four. Yellow dress, flat shoes, natural hair pinned back on one side. She looked like she’d put no effort into any of it, which Oteng recognised as a specific and unreachable skill. The people who could do that — appear assembled without appearing to have assembled themselves — had always struck him as operating according to a different set of rules.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. You look nice.”
“Thank you.” She looked at him. “You put a lot of cologne on.”
“It spilled.”
She looked at him in a way that didn’t fully accept this but chose not to pursue it. They started walking.
The road was the kind every person from a Botswana ward knows without thinking: partly tarred, partly not, the untarred sections packed smooth by years of foot traffic and the occasional vehicle that had no business being on a road this narrow. Chickens on one side behind a fence, conducting their usual ongoing crisis about something only they understood. Houses on the other painted cream and ochre and a green that looks better in the morning than by afternoon, when the direct light shows you all the places where the paint is thinking about peeling.
Children up ahead were kicking a ball made of plastic bags and twine. They were very serious about it. A grandmother on a veranda was watching them with the calm of a referee who has already seen everything and only gets up for real emergencies. A man washing a truck had his radio on — something with a lot of guitar and a vocalist who was working very hard — the music mixing with the sound of water and the low steady hiss of the hose.
They talked. First-date talk has its own careful grammar. Where did you grow up. What do you do. How do you know the person who introduced you. The grammar exists because it keeps you busy while you are actually doing something else, which is deciding whether the person in front of you is someone you can be less careful with later.
Thato had grown up in Molepolole. She’d moved to Otse three years ago for work and had stayed because the rent was reasonable and she liked the pace of the place, the fact that it was close enough to Gaborone that she could get there for things but far enough that those things didn’t follow her home.
She worked at a school, admin side. Not teaching, she clarified — the distinction mattered to her. Teaching, she said, required a patience with repetition that she hadn’t been able to locate in herself. She could do the same task every day and not mind. She could not explain the same thing thirty times to thirty different children and maintain the same warmth on the thirtieth as on the first.
“That’s honest,” Oteng said.
“I have watched too many people go into teaching thinking they have the patience and discover halfway through the year that they don’t,” she said. “At that point everyone is suffering. Better to know first.”
“What’s the admin side like?”
“It is whatever people need it to be,” she said. “Which is most things. The school runs because of the admin side. But the admin side is also invisible, which is something you have to make peace with. The moment something goes right, it’s because of the teachers. The moment something goes wrong, it’s because of admin.”
“Does that bother you?”
She thought about it genuinely, which Oteng noticed. She didn’t give him the comfortable answer first.
“Some days,” she said. “Other days it’s just the shape of the thing. You stop expecting credit and you start doing it because the thing needs doing. That’s its own kind of freedom, in a way. Nobody is watching, so you can just work.”
Oteng was a driver for a logistics company. Not what he had planned, but plans at twenty-six are more like intentions — general directions you point yourself in, with the understanding that the road will make its own decisions. He had studied business administration for a year and a half, run out of money, taken the driving job to save up, and then found that the saving-up part was more difficult in practice than in theory, and here he was.
Thato didn’t respond to this with the performance of encouragement that people sometimes offered — the oh but things will change or the you’re still young. She just nodded, which Oteng found more comfortable.
“My brother did the same thing,” she said. “He saved for three years and then his car broke down. The money went to the car. He’s been driving ever since. He doesn’t seem unhappy.”
“Does he seem happy?”
“He seems fine,” she said. “Which I think is its own kind of thing.”
Then Thato sneezed.
Twice, fast. She pressed the back of her hand to her nose and blinked against the sudden watering.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s that cologne.”
“It spilled.”
“Why did you put so much?”
“I told you, it spilled. The bottle was almost empty. You can’t control how much comes out.”
A third sneeze, sharp, involuntary. She pressed her lips together. “Okay,” she said, assembling patience from whatever was available. “Okay.”
She shifted slightly to the side — not enough to be rude, just enough that they both knew it had happened — and they continued with this small geography between them. Oteng noticed it and said nothing. There was nothing useful to say.
Mama Ofile’s was what everyone called it, and it was written on no sign anywhere. What there was: a piece of cardboard above the ordering window with MAMA O. in black permanent marker, the letters slightly uneven in a way that suggested the person who wrote it had done so quickly and never felt the need to redo it. The building was small and block-built and painted a faded yellow, with a hand-painted menu board leaning against the outside wall. Someone had added a cartoon smiling burger to the corner of the board at some point, in a slightly different shade of paint, done with more confidence than skill. It had stayed.
Outside were four plastic tables and chairs that didn’t match each other and had clearly come from different places over the years — the kind of collection that assembles itself through necessity and attrition rather than intention. Three umbrellas: one red, one white, one repaired with so much tape it was more tape than fabric, the original colour visible only in a few patches along the edges. A large cooler box under the serving window held cold drinks, water, and on good days mango juice in small cartons. Today was a good day. The cartons were visible through the fogged plastic lid.
Mama Ofile herself was not a myth. She was a woman of about sixty who appeared in the ordering window when she felt like it and sent her granddaughter Kefilwe when she didn’t. Very small, very fast, with the manner of someone who has made all the important decisions about how things are done and no longer needs to discuss them. She made the best chips in the ward, charged what she charged, and didn’t negotiate. These were facts about her in the same way that her name was a fact about her.
It wasn’t a restaurant. No tablecloths, no menus. You looked at the board, said what you wanted, sat down, and waited. The food came and it was good. That was the arrangement, and the arrangement had been working for long enough that no one questioned it.
Oteng had been coming here since secondary school. He knew the board by memory, knew the burger came with extra onions unless you said otherwise, knew the chips were better at lunch because Mama Ofile fried the first batch herself and the quality shifted when she delegated — not badly, just differently. He had once tried to explain this difference to Gaone, who had not understood it, which had told Oteng something about Gaone.
“Have you been here before?” he asked.
“Once,” Thato said. She was still blinking occasionally, but the worst had passed. “The chips were very good.”
“They always are.”
They took the table with the white umbrella — best shade at this time of day, the angle of the afternoon sun putting the other two tables in direct light. Mismatched chairs: one red plastic, one white monobloc, one low folding chair meant for outdoor gatherings and pressed into permanent service here. Thato took the monobloc, which was the right choice. Oteng took the red plastic. They looked at the board on the wall together.
“What are you having?” she asked.
“Chips and a hotdog. You?”
“A burger.” She squinted at the board. “And chips.”
“Good choice.”
He went to the ordering window. Kefilwe was there — approximately fifteen, with the face of someone who would rather be somewhere else but had accepted her position at a level deeper than resentment. She had a phone she was supposed to put away when customers were at the tables. She put it in her apron pocket when she saw him coming.
Oteng ordered. Kefilwe wrote it down on a small pad with a pen she had to press hard to get to work. He said he’d pay when the food came. She accepted this. He went back to the table.
The afternoon was doing what it does in that season. The light was very clear, very direct, the shadow of the umbrella pole lying sharp on the pale ground. The dry air carried dust and something cooking — the oil from Mama Ofile’s fryer, which was always running, which was always present in the air around the tuck shop like a soft announcement that food existed and was happening.
They resumed talking, and the conversation had moved somewhere warmer, less biographical. Thato told him about her cousin’s graduation the previous month — how her aunt had cried through the entire ceremony, from the opening prayer to the last degree conferred, and then denied it completely the moment someone pointed it out. She had looked at the person who said it and said: I was not crying, my eyes were reacting to the dust. Inside. A fully enclosed hall. With no dust.
She did the denial impression. It was very accurate and very unkind in the affectionate way. Oteng laughed, a real laugh, the kind you don’t organise.
“Your aunt sounds like hard work,” he said.
“She is everyone’s favourite,” Thato said. “That’s the annoying part. She’s the person you’d call in an emergency. She’d show up with food before you finished the sentence. But the dust in the hall — no. She will take that to her grave.”
For a moment the cologne and the walk and the sneezing were just things that had happened. Not things that were still happening.
He was doing well, he thought. He was actually doing well.
Then the food arrived.