The flight from JFK landed at forty minutes past midnight, and by the time Kofi had cleared customs and collected his bag — one large suitcase he had borrowed from a colleague because his own was too small, and which kept pulling to the left on its wheels — it was nearly two in the morning. His cousin Nii was waiting outside arrivals in a car that smelled of air freshener and had a crack in the dashboard that had been there, Kofi thought, for at least twenty years, since the last time he had ridden in it.
"You're older," Nii said.
"Yes," Kofi said.
They drove in through Tema, the highway wide and well-lit in ways he didn't remember, new construction rising on both sides behind fencing, cranes dormant in the dark. Kofi watched it go by. He had been watching this country approach for hours — first from thirty thousand feet, then from the ground — and he was still doing the thing he had started doing somewhere over the Atlantic, which was trying to fit what he saw against what he held in his mind and finding the fit slightly wrong, like a shirt that has been washed too many times and is no longer quite the right shape.
"How is everyone?" he said.
"Managing," Nii said. "Your mother is at the house. She arrived yesterday."
"How does she look?"
Nii considered this. He had always been careful with language in a way that Kofi had once found exasperating and now found steadying. "She looks like a woman who has buried her husband," he said.
His father had died of a stroke, quickly — that was what they told him on the phone, speaking carefully, his uncle's voice thin across the distance. Quickly and without pain. Whether this was true or a kindness Kofi could not know, and he had learned, at forty-three, that he did not always need to know.
He had been in Connecticut when the call came, sitting in the parking lot of a grocery store, having just bought, for reasons he could no longer reconstruct, two large bags of coffee and a rotisserie chicken. He had sat with the phone in his lap for a while. Then he had driven home and called his department chair and arranged his leave and called the airline and called back the uncle to confirm the details, and through all of it he was aware of performing the practical steps that the situation required, which was not the same as being present in the situation.
He had not been home in fifteen years. This was not a choice he had made so much as a condition he had arrived at through accumulated smaller choices — the fellowship that became a position, the position that became a tenure track, the tenure track that became tenure, and somewhere in there a divorce that he did not think about as part of the explanation but which was, he supposed, part of the explanation.
His father had come to visit once, in 2018. He had stayed for ten days in Kofi's spare room and had been polite about the cold and unimpressed by the university, which Kofi had not fully anticipated. His father had been a civil engineer who had built three bridges in the Volta Region and who held opinions about construction quality that he applied to everything, including academic buildings, which he had found wanting in their use of materials. He had said this at dinner with several of Kofi's colleagues in a way that was not unkind but was also not untrue.
They had not argued during those ten days. This was new — they had argued for most of Kofi's childhood, about nothing and everything, with the specific energy of men who are alike in ways neither can quite admit. In 2018 they had simply been careful with each other, which was its own kind of distance.
The house looked smaller. He knew it would look smaller — everyone said that things looked smaller when you returned — but knowing it didn't prevent the slight disorientation of standing in front of it and seeing a house that was plainly less than the house he had been carrying around in his mind. The mango tree was still there, larger than he remembered, spreading over the front wall in a way that would need to be trimmed back. The gate was new, painted a dark green.
His mother embraced him in the front room. She held on for a long time, saying nothing, and he put his arms around her and was aware of her smallness, which was not new but was newly apparent to him. She had lost weight. Her hair, pressed flat against her head, was entirely white.
The house was full of people. His aunts and cousins, neighbors, church members, the older women who came in black and sat together in the back room and would be there for the whole duration. His uncle Emmanuel, who had called him with the news, pressed his hand very firmly and said, "You came." As though there had been a question about it. Kofi thought perhaps there had been.
He moved through the rooms. People said his name and he said their names back, some of them he had to reconstruct from context, the shape of a face older than the face he remembered, the voice attached to a body that had changed. He ate what was put in front of him. He drank the water his cousin Abena brought him without being asked. He thanked people and accepted their condolences and was, he thought, doing reasonably well, which was a thought that immediately made him feel worse.
Later, when the gathering had thinned to family and close neighbors, he sat outside in the courtyard with his younger brother Kweku, who lived in Accra and had not left, and who looked at Kofi now with an expression Kofi couldn't read.
"You should have come sooner," Kweku said. He said it without heat, which was worse than if he'd said it with heat.
"I know," Kofi said.
"He asked about you."
Kofi looked at the wall of the courtyard, where someone had planted bougainvillea that had grown thick and vivid, pink-red in the light from the kitchen window. He had not noticed it when he came in.
"What did he say?" Kofi said.
"He asked if you were happy."
Kofi did not answer immediately. In the kitchen, someone was washing dishes, the sound of water and the occasional knock of a pot. A night bird he couldn't identify was calling from somewhere beyond the wall.
"Was he angry at me?" Kofi said.
Kweku thought about this in the way Kofi had been watching him think since they were boys — tilting his head slightly, working the question over before answering. "I don't think angry," he said. "I think he didn't understand."
"Understand what?"
"Why you stayed."
In the days that followed, Kofi moved between the house and the funeral home and the church where the service would be held and various relatives' homes where it was necessary to appear and where food was constantly being produced and offered. He ate too much. He slept poorly in the small room that had been his and that was now used for storage, lying in a narrow folding bed with boxes around him and the ceiling fan turning slowly above, and he lay awake most nights listening to the city, which was louder than he remembered — generators running, vehicles on the road outside, music from somewhere not quite near enough to identify.
He walked in the mornings. The neighborhood had changed in the way that all neighborhoods change, which is to say it had changed in some ways and not changed in others and the combination of these things was disorienting in a particular way that he found hard to describe even to himself. The pharmacy on the corner had become a mobile money shop. The school — he walked past the school one morning — was still there but expanded, new buildings behind the old fence, a sign announcing it as a partner school of something, he didn't catch the name.
He ran into a man named Tetteh who had been his father's colleague and who was now retired and who walked with a cane and who asked Kofi about his work with the specific and genuine interest of a man who understood what it meant to be given a life that required leaving in order to be fully lived. Kofi tried to explain his research — the economics of infrastructure development, the institutional factors that determined whether public investment compounded or evaporated — and Tetteh nodded and said, "Your father was proud of that work," which was not something Kofi had known and which he was not sure, standing there on the street in the morning heat, what to do with.
On the fourth day, Kofi drove himself — Nii had lent him the car — to the bridge his father had built on the road east of the city. He didn't announce this. He left after breakfast and drove for an hour and a half through traffic that thinned as he left the city, the road opening, the vegetation changing, and he found the bridge by the sign at its approach that named it and named the year it was completed and listed the engineer of record.
He stopped the car and got out and stood on the bridge and looked at the river below, which was broad and slow and the color of tea. The bridge was not beautiful — it was functional, cast concrete and steel, efficient in its proportions — but it was solid, and you could see from looking at it that it had been built by someone who understood what they were building and why it needed to last. He stood on it for a while. A few vehicles passed. A woman with a basket on her head crossed on the walkway on the other side and glanced at him briefly without curiosity.
He thought about his father at twenty-eight, which was the age Kofi had left — the same age, he realized only now, not having thought to calculate it before. He thought about what it meant to build something that you would then step back from, that would exist on its own terms, indifferent to your relationship with it. The river moved below. He had no particular thought to complete.
He drove back to the city.
The funeral was on a Thursday. The church was full, people standing along the walls. His father had been known, it turned out, in the way that certain people are known — not prominently but extensively, the way a tree is known by the birds that have nested in it. People Kofi had never heard of came to speak about what his father had done for them: a young man whose school fees he had paid, anonymously, for two years; a cousin twice removed who had lived in his house for a year after a flood took hers; a church committee he had served on, quietly, for a decade.
Kofi sat beside his mother. She wept without any apparent self-consciousness, which he found himself admiring. When it was his turn to speak, he stood at the lectern and looked out at the congregation and said what was true, which was that he had not known his father well enough, and that this was his loss, and that he was grateful for the time they had had, even if he had not always used it well. He said this plainly. He was not sure it was the right thing to say at a funeral, but it was what he had.
His mother held his hand afterward and said, in Twi, "He knew," which was a statement he understood she was making as a gift, and which he accepted as such without examining it too carefully.
On his last morning, five days after arriving, he woke before four and couldn't return to sleep. He lay in the folding bed and listened to the city and thought about Connecticut — his apartment, which he had always thought of as temporary even after ten years in it; the drive to campus through the bare November trees; his colleagues, who were kind and with whom he had no real intimacy; the conference he had skipped in November and the one in February he had attended and the research he was doing, which was good work, he believed, and which mattered, he believed, in the indirect and deferred way that most work mattered.
He thought about Kweku asking if their father had understood why he stayed, and the answer, which he had not given, which was that he was not sure he understood it either. He had stayed because the work was there and then the position was there and then inertia, which was not the whole answer but was some of it. He had stayed because he was good at the life there in ways he could not be certain he would be good at the life here, which was not cowardice exactly but was adjacent to it.
He got up before the house woke and went out to the courtyard. The bougainvillea was brighter in the morning light, an improbable color. He sat with his tea and listened to the first birds starting up, the sound of the city beginning to move, generators cutting in, the distant call to prayer from a mosque he didn't know was there.
Kweku came out at half past five, already dressed. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at Kofi.
"When will you come again?" Kweku said.
Kofi looked at him. "I don't know," he said. He said it because it was true, and because Kweku was a man who would know if he were given something other than the truth.
Kweku nodded. He came and sat beside his brother and they sat together in the early light, not speaking, while the city organized itself around them into the day.
The flight was at two.