Ibadan, 2011 For three months, Baba Afolabi stopped drinking. The house did not know what to do with the peace. Neither did Dayo. He was nineteen and home during a university break, though he spent as much time as possible outside. He learned which friends' houses were always open, which cafés tolerated one drink for three hours, and how to make “I have group work” sound convincing. But every evening, he returned. And for three months, the gate sounded normal. His father came home and ate dinner. He watched football. He complained about politics. He sometimes laughed. Nobody trusted it. That was the tragedy. The first week, his mother still moved glasses out of reach before evening. By the fourth, she stopped. By the second month, Dayo sometimes realised after dinner that he had not listened for the gate at all. Those moments frightened him almost as much as the old vigilance. Hope required him to lower a guard he had spent years perfecting. On the eighty-something day - Dayo had stopped counting aloud but not privately - his father knocked on his bedroom door. Dayo was at his desk pretending to read. “Come in.” Baba Afolabi opened the door but did not enter fully. “You're studying?” “Yes.” “What course?” “Project planning.”
His father nodded. “Good.” Then he stayed in the doorway. Dayo waited. The silence became uncomfortable. “Do you need something?” His father looked down the corridor, then back at him. “No.” Dayo returned his eyes to the textbook. His father did not leave. Finally Baba Afolabi said, “I know it is too late for some things.” Dayo’s attention lifted from the page. His father was staring at the floor. The sentence seemed physically difficult for him. “I am trying,” he continued, “to make it less late.” Dayo did not know what to do. This was the apology he had wanted, except it was not an apology. It was the beginning of one. The room suddenly contained every night that had come before it. He wanted specifics. The lamp. His mother's wrist. The wall. The fear. The way his own body had learned to flinch. He wanted a confession large enough to match the damage. Instead he got fifteen seconds. “I don't know what you want me to say,” Dayo said. His father's mouth tightened. “I don't want you to say anything.” “That makes it easy.” The cruelty was immediate. Baba Afolabi looked at him. Dayo almost apologised. He did not. His father nodded once. “Yes. Maybe it does.” He stepped back into the corridor.
At the door, he stopped. “You are doing well in school?” “Yes.” “Good.” Then he left. Dayo sat motionless. A few minutes later, he heard his father ask his mother whether there was more soup. She answered normally. A cupboard opened. Plates moved. The house continued as though nothing had happened. Dayo hated that. He wanted the walls to acknowledge the conversation. He wanted his mother to come upstairs and say she had heard. He wanted some visible proof that fifteen seconds could carry years. Instead, he opened his textbook and read the same paragraph four times. Not enough. More than nothing. That night, he passed the sitting room and saw his father asleep in the armchair with an untouched glass of water beside him. Dayo stood there longer than necessary. His father looked older when asleep. Less dangerous. Less impressive. Merely tired. Dayo resented the pity that rose in him and left before it could become tenderness. The next morning, his father was already outside when Dayo came down. He was checking the oil in the car, an old rag over one shoulder. “You're going out?” Baba Afolabi asked. “Yes.” “Be back for dinner.” Dayo almost said, Why? Instead he said, “Okay.” His father nodded and returned to the engine. No second attempt came. The ordinary morning swallowed the previous night, and Dayo let it.
For years he would remember the inadequacy of that conversation. It took longer to admit another truth: his father had offered a beginning, and Dayo had not known how to receive one. That did not make the failure his. It did not make the damage smaller. It only meant the door had opened once, badly, and both of them had been too frightened to step through it.