Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

“Leave it.” At her father’s words, her frown slipped away and was replaced by incredulity. Looking from one man to the other, her father and the man she must call Uncle, she refused to move.

“You spilled our drinks, clumsy girl,” Emeka said softly. “Go on, get us two more.” Both men watched the top of her head as she collected the snow-covered mugs in her shaky grasp and returned to the house.

After she was gone from their view, Emeka spun on Job. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Take the money and buy a snowblower,” Job said again.

“I don’t need a damn snowblower.” He ground his shovel into the snow.

“My boy likes the crib,” Job said casually. “So take it.”

Emeka’s face softened. Thoughtfully, he stared past the windows out into the distance. “She gave you the crib. I hoped it meant she would be happy, that this ‘boy’ nonsense would be done. We have all we need. We are a great success.” He sighed. “Nothing pleases her these days. Ah, this boy of yours has started it all over again.” Emeka threw back his shoulders in a shudder. His shudder turned into a chuckle, and before long, the chuckle morphed into a great laugh. “Women.”

At first Job couldn’t understand. Then he thought of that night, he and Emeka at the bar, faces upturned to strippers slippery with sweat. He remembered Emeka complaining about juju and native doctors, all commissioned in hopes of producing a son. Gladys again. Was it Gladys who sent Emeka to my house to put the crib together? Perhaps. Knowing this changed everything. This whole situation was nothing more than Emeka giving up and acknowledging that Job had bested him in the most significant manner, producing a son. He chuckled softly. “Why not take the money?”

He thought of Ifi at home, asleep on the bed next to their son in his crib. She had touched Job’s hand. We are a family, he thought to himself. Finally. The piece that had cemented their lives was the boy — with his beautiful, ugly, red, angry little face. “Buy your wife something nice, Emeka.”

“We both know that you need it more than me, my friend,” Emeka said.

His tone. His haughty tone. At that, Job pounced on Emeka. His movement was so sudden, so unrestrained, that for days afterwards, he struggled to pinpoint the place it came from within his body. What had he hoped to accomplish? Whites of his lab coat trailing on both sides, he was on Emeka, feeling his hard gut against his own, tasting Emeka’s powerful breath in his, soaked with the snow on his legs, hating Emeka with all his anger and might. “Take it!” he shouted into Emeka’s bewildered face. “Take the money!” He snatched a handful of bills and thrust them into Emeka’s face.

Emeka resisted. His jaw tightened, so Job bore down with his weight, pinning Emeka farther into the snow. He forgot about the street and the houses and the garages. In that moment, it was just the sounds of their breaths, the scent and taste of beer and crayfish from Emeka’s mouth. Surely Emeka would call him crazy. Perhaps I am crazy, Job thought. But he didn’t care.

Both men looked up at the sound of a creak. Balancing the same mugs glistening with melting snow, once again his daughter stood in the doorway. Silently, she regarded them, a look like her mother’s, a look too grown for her five-year-old legs, the rounded belly like her father’s, and the messy braids piled on top of her head. Stupid girl, Job thought. He was glad to have a son, a boy.

Like a drunken man, Emeka burst into laughter. Playfully, he jabbed at Job’s sides. Ah, he wants us to appear that way, Job realized, like two drunks wrestling in the snow. Like two rusty men who will be scolded by their wives for a late night and juvenile antics. Well, Job decided, I won’t have it that way. After all, he had come to make a point. “Stop it.” He shook Emeka. “Stop this laughing.”

But Emeka’s laughter only rose in pitch. Job took both sides of his shoulders and pressed him into the snow. “Stop this laughing! I am not fooling!” Emeka’s body flailed like a rag doll. He laughed and laughed and laughed.

His daughter descended the steps one more time, trying to decide if she should join the play or simply observe the two men. She settled for the latter and placed the drinks on the snow within their reach. In his distraction, Job loosened his grip on Emeka’s shoulders, and Emeka rolled free. He grasped one of the mugs and drank deeply, staining his mustache with foam. Exhausted, Job joined Emeka, draining his mug in one gulp, watching his life from outside of the ring, his hands red and dripping from the snow.

“Come and take this money your uncle has brought for you and your sisters,” Emeka said to the girl. Happily, she clambered down the stairs and claimed each of the twenty-dollar bills, folding them into the pockets of her jeans.

“Thank you, thank you, Uncle!” she said. She danced up the stairs, all two hundred dollars in her possession.

“That one will not share. She’ll spend it all on candy,” Emeka said proudly. “Three cavities the last time we saw her dentist. Three cavities, I tell you. But she’s stubborn. Like her mother.”

The thought of the five-year-old consuming streams of bubblegum and licorice with the money infuriated Job. “Do not enter my house ever again, you hear?”

Emeka glanced up, startled. “Your house. Heh?”

“Yes,” Job said evenly. “Spend the money on lollipops if you like, but never, under my dead body, never come into my home uninvited again.”

“What are you saying?” Emeka began a strange laugh.

“I mean this.”

“Is this why you have come to me here? You think I have broken into your house to steal your money? You think a man like me would need anything from you? Come now, you cannot be serious.”

“I am not silly.”

“You have lost your mind, my man.” Emeka stood and dusted off the rear of his pants. Snow rained around him and then rose again with the wind. He took a long, deep swallow from his mug.

Job felt cold. But his winter coat was sprawled somewhere in the distance, and his hands were too numb to search for it. Emeka didn’t seem bothered by the cold at all. His sneakers were still full of snow. Without his hat, now forgotten in the snow, the top of his balding head was revealed. How must Job appear now, shivering, his clothes scattered before him? He checked the houses up and down the street, so silent, so private. He was glad to be invisible.

Still, he couldn’t let it go. He mustn’t leave Emeka’s home without a single understanding between the two. “I am not crazy. I am no fool. This is simple,” Job said, leveling his eyes. “I am asking you to never enter my home again.”

Emeka stared back at Job. “I never entered your home.”

“You arranged the crib. In my own room.”

“My only hand was in giving it to your wife.”

When Emeka’s gaze didn’t waver, Job suggested, “Well, then your wife.”

“Gladys was here. With me.” With a wink, he added, “I should know.” After a moment, Emeka furrowed his brow and eyed Job. “Perhaps it is your wife who should worry you.”

Emeka’s words haunted Job throughout his shift at the hospital. What can I say to Ifi? he thought. How can I dignify such a claim? Yet at the same time, he was convinced that Emeka’s accusation was true. Even after many months together, Ifi still had strange ways that Job couldn’t comprehend. For the first time, he began to wonder what she did with her hours alone throughout the day. When he arrived home in the afternoons, the television was usually off, but he always noticed that the radio would be on. Usually he was the one to turn on the television. It helped him sleep. Now, he wondered, Which American stations does she listen to? Were the rhythms strange on her hips as she moved to the music?