“And family, Mma? Do you and Ernest have children?”
Calviniah nodded and then averted her eyes briefly. “I had heard about you, Mma. I heard that…”
“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe quietly. “My baby is late.”
Reaching across the table, Calviniah placed a hand gently on Mma Ramotswe’s arm. “I’m so sorry, Mma. I’m so sorry about that.”
Mma Ramotswe inclined her head. “It was a long time ago now.”
“I know. But your heart must still be broken, Mma.”
Was it? Mma Ramotswe thought about her friend’s words. There were so many things in this life that we had to regret that we sometimes forgot those things that belonged to the distant past. Or the pain was dulled, which was a different thing, of course.
“We have two foster children,” she said. “We love them very much.”
For a few moments Calviniah was silent, before continuing, “Yes, we love our children so much, don’t we? And we expect them to love us back, but—” She broke off, as if she felt she had already said too much.
Mma Ramotswe waited.
“Then they go off,” said Calviniah. “They go off and find their own friends. They start living their own lives and there is no place for you in those lives. That is what hurts.”
“That has happened to you, Mma?”
Their eyes met, and Mma Ramotswe had her answer.
“My first-born is a girl,” Calviniah said. “Nametso. She is twenty-four now. She has a job in Gaborone—a good job in the diamond-sorting office. You know that place out near the airport?”
Mma Ramotswe knew it. It was in that building that Botswana collected the diamonds from its open-pit diamond mines—a trickle of brilliance wrested from thousands of tons of raw rock. A job at the sorting tables was highly valued, and any parent would be proud of a daughter who worked there.
“We were very close,” Calviniah continued. “And then…” She shrugged. “Suddenly she had no time for me.”
Mma Ramotswe frowned. Teenagers did that—they gave their parents the cold shoulder, sometimes even pretended not to have anything to do with them, out of embarrassment—that could be comic, but it was also normal enough. Had this happened here, and was Calviniah simply over-reacting? “I think that sort of thing can happen, Mma,” she said. “But they tend to grow out of it. Some people may just take a little longer than others.” She remembered just such a case—a teenage boy, the son of neighbours, who had been at pains to reject his parents, studiously ignoring them or, at best, listening to them with a pained expression. That had gone on for years, and then, suddenly, at the age of nineteen his behaviour had changed, and he had become helpful and protective. “He suddenly realised that we might die,” said his mother. “You don’t think of that when you are fourteen, fifteen, and then it occurs to you and you change. That is what happened, Mma Ramotswe.”
Mma Ramotswe told Calviniah about this boy, but her friend simply shook her head. “No, Mma Ramotswe, you don’t understand. This didn’t happen when she was a teenager. This happened just a few months ago. It was that recent.”
Mma Ramotswe looked pained. “I’m sorry, Mma.”
“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it,” sighed Calviniah. “I’ve tried to remember if it was something I said, but I can’t think of anything.” A look of anguish came over her face. “I would never have hurt her deliberately, Mma. She is my first-born, my own flesh and blood.”
Mma Ramotswe lowered her voice. “Of course, Mma. Of course she is.”
She asked Calviniah whether she had asked Nametso directly what was troubling her. She had always believed in asking direct questions, an approach which surprisingly often produced the answer one was looking for. If you wanted to know what people thought, ask them, and you might find out what you needed to know.
Calviniah assured her that she had done that. “I did ask her, Mma,” she said. “I said, ‘If there is something wrong, you should tell me.’ ”
“And?”
“She looked away. She didn’t say anything. Then she told me that she was busy and I would have to go. Her own mother, Mma. She was too busy for her own mother.”
For a few moments they were both silent. Then Calviniah made an effort to pull herself together. “But we have heard enough of my troubles, Mma. Let’s talk about the old days. Let’s talk about the people we both knew.”
It was with some relief that Mma Ramotswe agreed to this suggestion. Her friend’s account of her alienation from her daughter had saddened her, but she suspected that many of these family tiffs proved to be just that—splits that would heal themselves in the course of time. And anyway, she was not sure if she could do much to help in that respect—what she could do, though, was to encourage Calviniah to think of something more positive. And so she reminded her of one of their teachers at school who had been known as Mma Forget-the-Words because of her habit of starting a song and then getting tied up in knots of confusion over what came next.
“There are some people who are not destined to sing,” said Calviniah, and they both laughed.
“Even if they know the words,” Mma Ramotswe added. She thought of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, who liked music, but who did not have a good ear for it. “I have a mechanic’s ear,” he said. “I’m sorry about that, because I would like to be able to sing.”
She had thought of a mechanic’s ear, and had decided that it would have its advantages in at least some situations. “But you can hear what an engine is saying to you,” she pointed out.
He had nodded. “Perhaps. Because they do talk to us, you know, Mma Ramotswe. Some engines have a lot to say.”
They talked about one or two other people. Mma Ramotswe remembered Calviniah’s cousin, who had gone to live in Maun, in the far north of the country, and had raised a brood of eight children. Then there was the woman who ran the small shop behind the hill at Mochudi, the woman whose husband had lost his sight and sat in a chair outside the store and felt the sun upon his face; he had smiled a great deal and had asked people who spoke to him whether they were happy—for he was, he said, and if he could be happy in his world of darkness, then they would have no excuse for not being happy themselves. “I don’t think I knew then what he meant,” said Calviniah, “but I think I do now.”
“So do I,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I hadn’t thought of that man for a long time, Mma. Perhaps we should think about him a bit more often.”
“He will be late now,” said Calviniah. “So many of the people from those days are late.”