Abena turned out the light in her office and stretched her hands overhead. She’d worked late all week, but it was Friday night and she was leaving early for dinner at her aunt’s house. She’d accomplished most of the important tasks she wanted to finish before the day’s end. Everything else was non-urgent and could be worked on when she came back on Monday.

She’d only seen Santiago this morning. He’d been out of the office most of the day, having gone to do surprise inspections on the area restaurants. His work schedule had kept him out of her business for the entire day.

At the elevator, she pushed the Down button, rolling her neck and shoulders as she waited. Then she heard movement behind her.

No, no, no.

“Need a massage?”

Darn it! Was there no justice in this world? What was he doing back here? One day. She wanted one day without having to see his face. “I’m good, thanks.”

“You’re leaving kind of early.” He came to stand beside her.

“I could say the same to you.” Abena kept her gaze pinned on the unopened doors.

“I have plans.”

“With your lady friend?” She immediately wished she hadn’t asked that question.

Santiago’s head turned slowly in her direction. “Don’t tell me you’re interested in my after-hours activities.”

“I’m not.” The doors opened and they both walked into the elevator. “I just feel sorry for the poor young woman stuck waiting around for you.” She shrugged.

Santiago leaned a shoulder against the wall and watched her. His voice lowered when he spoke. “She doesn’t mind the wait. She thinks I’m worth it.”

Her skin prickled, and although she wanted to have a snappy comeback, she’d lost her voice. They exited the elevator and walked out front.

“Have a nice night.” Santiago climbed into the back of a waiting sedan and rode away into the night.

Abena shot daggers at the departing car with her eyes. She shouldn’t let him get to her, and she certainly didn’t care who he spent his nights with. She cleared her mind of everything Santiago-related and climbed into her parked car for the twenty-minute drive to her aunt’s house.

Baaba was the youngest of her mother’s seven siblings, and as such, had practically been raised by Abena’s mother, Effia, after their parents died. They were from a small fishing village in southern Ghana, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Located about fifty miles outside the bustling capital of Accra, Kagogo was a place where old customs warred with the intrusion of modern norms, and prayers to the ancestors were as common as prayers to the Christian God.

For years, Baaba lived with Effia and her husband. At nineteen, she moved to the United States, where she met and married her husband, at the time a budding entrepreneur and also from Ghana.

Abena was fourteen when her father passed away from complications of an infection. In an act of desperation, Effia scraped together what little she had, selling many of their possessions, to send Abena to live with her sister Baaba in the United States.

Abena hadn’t wanted to leave, but education was held in high esteem in Ghana, and her mother couldn’t afford the cost of school fees, uniforms, books, and other supplies without her husband’s fishing income. So Effia sent her only child thousands of miles away to live in a foreign country. It was only supposed to be for a couple of years, until Effia could get on her feet, but two years turned into four, and Abena ended up graduating from high school in Miami.

Baaba and her husband had three children of their own, but they welcomed Abena into the household and treated her as one of theirs. She was especially close to Baaba, and to this day, considered her a second mother.

When Abena pulled into the driveway, light illuminated every window. She let herself into the house with her key. “Hello! Anybody home?” The door shut quietly behind her.

Right away she heard the pitter-patter of little feet hitting the tile as her cousin’s six-year-old daughter came running out.

“Auntie Abby!” Lisa threw her arms wide and Abena hoisted the little girl into her arms and dropped a loud kiss on her cheek.

“Oh my goodness, have you gotten bigger since I saw you last week? Soon I won’t be able to lift you anymore.”

Lisa giggled and tightened her arms around Abena’s neck.

“She’s going to be tall, like her father.” Hands on her hips, Nana, Lisa’s mother, appeared in the arched doorway leading into the kitchen. Long braids hung across one shoulder, and her pregnant belly stretched the T-shirt she wore over a pair of jeans.

Abena let Lisa slip to the ground, and she walked toward Nana, whom she viewed more like a younger sister than a cousin. “Where’s Auntie?”

“In the kitchen, getting the meal ready, of course. As soon as I told her you were on the way, she started making preparation.” Nana’s gaze dropped to Abena’s feet. “So what are you wearing today?”

Abena stuck out one foot and showed off the black pointed-toe stilettos with a decorative silver eyelet detail running along the front and back. “Alexander McQueen. Aren’t they beautiful?”

“You always have the cutest shoes. I’m even more jealous now that my feet are swollen, and I can only wear these ugly wide sandals.” Her cousin pouted.

“It’s your own fault for getting pregnant,” Abena teased. Nana was pregnant with her fourth child. It seemed every time her husband came home from leave, he left a baby in her womb.

“Ah-henh!” Nana agreed with a shrug.

Laughing, Abena trailed her cousin into the kitchen. She did have a lot of shoes. So many she’d lost count: tennis shoes, low-heeled shoes, and high-heeled shoes. In Kagogo, she’d only had two pairs—one for church and the other for school. So, like the other children she grew up with, she ran around the village barefoot and developed rather tough feet.

Upon coming to the United States, she’d been so excited to get multiple pairs of shoes that she developed what could only be described as a shoe obsession. She collected them the way other people collected coins or baseball cards. She had so many shoes, she ran out of space in the closet in her bedroom and stored the overflow in the spare bedroom. She not only adored her collection, she made sure her feet were worthy to rest inside them. Pampering her feet meant regular pedicures, including massages and scrubs to keep them soft and attractive.

Lisa skipped along beside her as she entered the kitchen and greeted Kwei, the youngest of Baaba’s children and the only boy, seated at the table in the breakfast nook. He mumbled a greeting, barely glancing up from the textbook and notebook in front of him. He was a senior in high school but also a college sophomore since he started taking classes at the local college two years ago. Baaba’s middle child was away at Harvard on the path to a law degree.

The kitchen opened up to a den, where Nana’s four- and two-year-old girls were fast asleep on the carpet, with a video of Peppa Pig watching them, instead of the other way around. Lisa scampered into the den to watch the TV.

Baaba moved between the living room and dining room, setting serving dishes filled with food on the table.

“Hello, Auntie.”

Baaba had the same brown-with-red-undertones-complexion as Abena’s mother, Effia. They both also had a prominent forehead and deep-set eyes. The similarities ended there. Where Abena’s mother was thin, tall, and always wore her hair braided, Baaba was short, stocky, and wore her hair in a short Afro. Abena’s mother was quiet-spoken, timid, and staunchly conservative. Baaba was bold, tended to speak her mind, and much more open-minded since she’d moved away from the restrictive traditions of her home village. Her fearless attitude and adventurous spirit had brought her to the United States, nineteen and alone, where she now worked as a nurse.

Baaba looked Abena up and down. “You will take some food with you when you leave. You’re not eating enough. You are working too much.” She tutted and shook her head.

Nana, standing on the other side of the breakfast bar, rolled her eyes behind her mother’s back.

“Thank you, Auntie,” Abena said, fighting hard to keep from laughing. “But I’m fine, and the hours are fine.” She gave her aunt a one-armed hug and pressed her cheek against hers.

“With your boss out of the country, you can relax a little, right?” Nana asked.

“The office doesn’t work that way.” Abena rested her hip against the counter. “Someone else has taken over his duties, and he’s not much different than Esteban. In fact, he’s worse.”

“That’s always the case, my child.” Baaba shook her head. “All right, time for dinner. Let’s eat.”

They left the little ones asleep on the floor and went into the dining room where her aunt had set quite a spread. The aroma of spices and food from familiar African dishes wafted into Abena’s nose and made her nostalgic for home.

“This looks good.” Abena sat at the head of the oval table and her aunt sat at the other end. She didn’t realize how hungry she was until she sat down. “Where is Uncle?”

“On a long haul drive,” Baaba replied. Her husband was a commercial truck driver.

Kwei settled at Abena’s right, and Nana and Lisa sat across from him.

After a brief prayer, they passed around the dishes and spooned food onto their plates. Abena placed rice and a whole fish, smothered in peppers and onions, on her plate. Banku, fermented balls of corn, were placed beside the meat, and red red, a bean curry, next to it. After adding a dollop of her aunt’s homemade hot pepper sauce to the dish, Abena dug in.

“Hmmm. I needed this.” Having a traditional meal with her family made the long week suffering under Santiago’s thumb tolerable. For a split second, she wondered if he’d really gone out with a woman tonight, but quickly discarded the thought so it wouldn’t affect her mood. What he did in his free time was his own concern and had nothing at all to do with her.

“How is school?” she asked Kwei.

“He has a girlfriend now.” Baaba pursed her lips with displeasure.

Kwei sighed. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s a friend I study with.”

“You study all night into the morning?” Baaba asked sharply. She glowered at her son. “Four hours on the phone. Four! Until the phone went dead. I bought you the phone for emergencies. Not so you could spend all night talking and giggling with a girl.”

Baaba might be progressive, but she nevertheless expected her son to treat his education as a priority. Wisely, Kwei kept silent by shoveling red red into his mouth. An argument with her would be a waste of time, and in the end, he might end up losing the phone privileges he did have.

“Have you already found an outfit for Kofi’s wedding?” Nana asked Abena, in an obvious effort to save her brother. Their friend was getting married in a few weeks.

“Not yet.”

“Speaking of weddings,” Baaba began, “have you decided on a date for your own?”

Abena groaned inwardly. She should have known her aunt would broach the topic eventually. In addition to putting in hours at one of the clinics his family owned, her fiancé also worked once a week at the same hospital as Baaba. Her aunt had been the one to introduce Abena to Marc.

“Not yet.” Abena avoided her aunt’s eyes and took a healthy swallow of sobolo. The dark-red drink, made from Bissap flowers, soothed her tongue, inflamed from the spicy food on her plate.

Her aunt grunted. “Your mother is worried. She thinks you’ll never get married and she won’t have any grandchildren before she passes.”

“She has nothing to worry about.”

“You can let her know yourself when you talk to her tonight.”

Nana shot a sympathetic glance at Abena because she knew a conversation with her mother would not go well.

“Tonight?” Abena asked, hoping against hope she’d misunderstood.

“Yes, tonight. She is your mother, Abena.”

With a heavy heart and a stone of dread in her stomach, Abena swallowed a morsel of fish. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to speak to her mother. She just didn’t want any part of a conversation that would fill her with guilt and force her to try to live up to expectations she felt, at times, were more than she could manage.

The pressure she often felt after talking to her mother could put a damper on her mood for days. But she couldn’t avoid the conversation. As Baaba had said, she was her mother, and several weeks had passed since they last spoke. She would simply have to suck it up and mentally prepare for the phone call ahead.