Gold of Our Fathers - страница 9

It was later on when the boys were in bed and Christine and Darko were cleaning up in the kitchen-she washing the dishes and he sweeping up the floor-that he broached the subject. He leaned the broom against the counter.

“Christine,” he said. “Something has come up at work.”

She looked up, searched his face for a moment, and then shook the excess water off her hands. “I can almost predict. They want to transfer you, right?”

He nodded, glad in a way that she had guessed correctly.

“I knew I shouldn’t have asked you anything about transfers on Saturday when we were at the park,” she said regretfully, wiping her hands on a towel. “I put juju on us.”

She sat at the table, as though she thought it best to be sitting down as he delivered the brunt of the bad news. “Where is it this time?”

“Obuasi.”

“Oh,” she said, cocking her head. “Well, I guess it could be worse. You could be going to Bolgatanga.”

“It’s not the distance,” Dawson said moodily. “It’s the duration.”

“How do you mean?”

“I could be there for up to a year.”

She pulled back as if someone had tried to jab her in the face. “A year!”

Dawson winced. “Yes,” he said, not meeting her eyes. The timer was ticking down to the explosion.

“So you’re going to be away for a year,” she said flatly.

“Well… basically, yes.”

“A year is a long time.”

“Yes, it is. I was thinking… what do you think of the idea that all of us move to Obuasi-or Kumasi?”

She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it as she began to consider that as an option. Dawson felt encouraged that she hadn’t immediately rejected the whole idea, and pushed on. “I mean, for the boys, I don’t know the school situation in Obuasi, but there’ll be something good for them in Kumasi, so maybe we could stay there. It’s only about one hour drive north of Obuasi.”

She was pondering. “And Mama has a place in Kumasi,” she said.

Dawson stiffened inwardly. He had not even thought of that, and it should have occurred to him long before now. Dawson and his mother-in-law, Gifty, did not get along. To him, she would not be an asset in this already tricky situation. He couldn’t say that to Christine, though, and his face grew hot as he realized she was scrutinizing him, waiting for a response that was clearly taking too long to materialize.

“Dark,” she said reproachfully. “My mother’s not going to ruin everything.”

“Did I say that?” he protested.

“You were thinking it.”

“Not at all,” he denied, lying badly. “But do you think she can really accommodate us?”

“Why not? I don’t think she has a tenant in the guesthouse right now.”

Gifty lived in Accra, but she was a proud Ashanti woman. Kumasi was her hometown and she had a lot of family in that city as well as some property. Gifty, who was quite well off, used the guesthouse from time to time as either a rental or a place for family members to stay, or both, perhaps.

Dawson had never been able to shake the feeling that his mother-in-law condescended to him. Before Christine had met him, she had been dating a doctor whom Gifty highly fancied as her future son-in-law. A policeman was a big step down in Gifty’s eyes, and Dawson was convinced that she had never gotten over her daughter’s change of mind.

All this mutual resentment between Dawson and his mother-in-law had come to a head years ago when Gifty had decided she would take the troubling problem of Hosiah’s heart disease into her own hands. Acting without the permission of the boy’s parents, she took him to a traditional healer-with disastrous consequences. That had sealed Dawson’s discomfort with Gifty.

“I’ll call her to ask if she can accommodate us,” Christine said, bringing him back to the present.

Dawson was surprised at the way she was taking this. “So you would actually consider moving to Kumasi for a year?” he asked in surprise. “In the past, you were fit to be tied whenever I had to go somewhere on assignment. What’s changed?”

She leaned back, contemplating. “I still don’t like it, but ever since your promotion, I’ve been thinking differently and realizing maybe this is the price we have to pay for your moving up in the force. It was different when it looked like you were stuck at the same rank and getting nowhere. So I’ve decided to have a positive outlook on it. Within reason, of course.”