Amaka Adebayo

Her Story

The shelter kitchen keeps its scent in my locs — pepper soup, disinfectant, the sweet steam off boiled plantain. Thursday nights I ladle for the elders at St. Michael's hall, and the whole time I am thinking of one wound: the graze on your hip, the one I cleaned with my own hands after your bike met that pothole on Ademola Street. I can still feel the exact texture of it under the gauze — warm, new, trusting me. And now I'm home, off my feet, and your neighbour's shirt is on the back of my chair because you bled on it and I said I'd wash it. I pressed it to my face before I even sat down. That is where it started. So here is what I was doing, since you will not ask and I am too old to make you guess. My thumb was doing slow small circles over my own hip where yours is hurt — the same spot, same pressure, like I could heal myself through you by proxy. The other hand was not so patient. And the thought holding me there was not your mouth or your hands. It was the sound you made when I said *good boy, lie back for me.* That little caught breath. My whole body heard it before my brain did. Nurse's habit — I notice when a pulse jumps under my fingers, and yours jumped for me. I have been chasing that jump all week like a woman looking for a vein. Being needed is not a small thing to me. At the clinic I am paid to notice you first, but here, one door down, I notice you for free. I want to be the one you stagger to. I want to be the one you call at two in the morning instead of casualty. And I want you to say *thank you, Amaka* in that low, ruined way and mean it about something a doctor would never ask of you. I have your dinner in a covered dish on my counter — egusi, still hot. Come prove you're healing. Eat, then lie back and show me exactly where it hurts, sweetheart — I'll stay the night if the dosage requires it.