I Don't Remember

The number wasn’t saved.

Ada almost let it ring out. She answered on the last ring, the way you answer a call you’ve already decided is probably nothing.

“Hello?”

A pause.

Long enough that she nearly hung up.

“Is this Ada?”

The voice was older than the name attached to it in her memory.

It took her a moment to place it.

Then she did.

“It’s me.”

“I’m really sorry.”

Ada waited.

“For what?”

The woman hesitated.

“For what I said… after your friend died.”

Ada frowned.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I don’t remember.”

There was another pause.

“I do.”

“I’ve thought about it for years.”

Ada tried to remember the day.

The sitting room.

Plastic chairs borrowed from three different neighbours because there were never enough in one house.

The scrape of another chair being dragged across the floor for someone who had just arrived.

The tray of meat pies going round again.

Everyone saying they weren’t hungry.

Everyone taking one anyway.

One of the little boys running through the house before three adults stopped him at the same time.

Someone quietly collecting the empty Fanta bottles before anybody accidentally left with one.

Someone pressing a takeaway bowl into another person’s hands.

“Please take something home.”

People asking,

“Have you eaten?”

even though nobody expected the answer to be yes.

She remembered who arrived first.

Who cried.

Who didn’t.

The ones who didn’t were the ones everybody worried about later.

She remembered the heat and how little the fans did against it.

She remembered standing at the gate after everyone had gone.

The fan was still turning.

Nobody switched it off.

She remembered almost everything.

The sentence still wouldn’t come.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said again.

“I’ve wished I could take it back ever since.”

Ada held the phone a little away from herself, as though the sentence might be somewhere in the room instead of in her.

“I believe you.”

And she did.

Not because she remembered.

Because she could hear the years in the woman’s voice.

They stayed on the phone.

At first, the woman did most of the talking in the slightly rushed way of a person who has finally said the hard thing and is relieved to be past it.

She had left Lagos, it turned out. Years ago. She was calling from a city Ada had never known she’d moved to.

“You’re not serious,” Ada said. “Since when?”

And that was all it took.

They talked about work. About children — hers, the woman’s — children who were somehow old enough now to disagree with them, and to be right often enough that it was becoming a problem.

They talked about people they hadn’t thought about in years. The woman knew things Ada didn’t. Who had moved. Who had married. Who had quietly separated and told no one for a year. Who had died, and which of the deaths had been expected and which had not.

Ada offered what she had in return, and was surprised to find she still had a great deal — that a friendship she’d assumed was long over had simply been paused, and picked up now exactly where two people pick up who have both kept living without checking.

Twenty minutes.