Julie Iromuanya - Mr. and Mrs. Doctor

“Hey, Job.” The lady let out a dry laugh. “It’s okay. We’ll pick something else out that’s just right for a big boy.” When she winked at Victor, he regarded her with distrust. Finally, she began to back away and replaced the teddy bear on the table.

It seemed like it was over. She said good-bye to his father. They hesitantly hugged, bumping shoulders as they leaned into one another. She turned to Victor. Victor whipped away from her.

“Victor.” His father’s voice was low.

“No,” Victor said. His father pulled Victor’s arms apart and forced them around the lady, who was stock still in the captive embrace. She smelled of cigarettes and strawberry shampoo.

Victor was utterly humiliated. He shrank into himself. Nothing, not even the woman’s plaintive glance, not even the candy she offered, could make him smile again for the rest of the outing. When they returned home, his mother asked what was wrong. Victor’s father told her that Victor had fallen and bumped his head.

After the garage sale fiasco the outings stopped, and Victor endured long, tedious summer afternoons watching Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner while his father snored on the couch. Inevitably, Victor stopped the sound through his father’s nose with his fingertips until his father woke up, sputtering and choking, looking every which way for his assailant before pulling Victor into a bear hug. It was the only thing that seemed to make his mother laugh before heading to her job at the motel in the afternoons.

In late summer, the grasses of the various parks throughout town were beaten flat and browned from the scalding Nebraska summer heat. Nonetheless, knobby-kneed men in mesh shorts and worn polos frequented the parks. Caravans arrived in the early evenings during the time between an early shift’s end and a late shift’s beginning. The men ran themselves ragged after soccer balls while dodging holes in the ground. Along the side of the fields, their wives were spread out on blankets, feeding their children curried rice, burritos, or greasy plantains from plastic Tupperware containers covered in foil.

In his earliest days in America, when Job was still a university student and he and Emeka were still friendly, they would shout and holler along the sidelines, teasing the losing team until one scrunch-faced defender would charge the sideline and demand that they join the game. Emeka always announced that he was too old. How could young men shame themselves by demanding that an old man with four daughters — one already grown — should run among them? Because he was just that, they always relented, focusing their attention instead on Job. From then on, he had tried his best to avoid the humiliation of running the field by not coming altogether. At his ripe age, as a father, Job could finally join the older men resting along the benches, sharing cigarettes, sipping from sacks of beer, and placing bets they would never be forced to pay.

One evening, Victor announced that he would play for the Super Eagles when he grew up. The ripple of pleasure that spread through the crowd of Nigerians filled Job with such pride that he made a point to purchase cleats, shin guards, and a small jersey. From then on, to the nods of onlookers, Victor stylishly paraded the fields, kicking and elbowing past the little boys in their miniature soccer game. Victor wasn’t exactly good, but the key, he had discovered, was to elbow, push, and pull the other players around, preventing them from scoring.

Only the mothers complained, confirming Victor’s certainty about the purpose of all mothers. He was neither resentful of nor charmed by this affirmation. He unquestioningly acknowledged this fact, as he accepted the fact that the sky was blue. At once he became the most hated child on the field by mothers and fathers alike. Mothers were straightforward in their contempt, attempting to revive their whimpering boys. To save face, fathers declined to intervene, sometimes siding with Victor, insisting that a scraped knee or a bloodied nose was the cost of a hard-fought game before reluctantly shoving their trembling sons back into battle.

Job felt the need to apologize to Cheryl for Victor’s behavior at the garage sale. His chance came one evening when Cheryl agreed to meet them at the soccer field. As Cheryl looked on, Victor huffed up and down the field, elbowing and knocking little boys out of his way. Although the crowd was primarily international, with representatives of India, Malaysia, Kenya, Brazil, and Nigeria, there were a few pink-faced, jeans-wearing American wives and girlfriends sprinkled throughout the crowd. Among them, Cheryl sat on a blanket with potato chips, slices of fruit, cold cuts, and juice boxes.

As is eventually destined to happen to all Goliaths, the Davids of the world — boys who nightly limped home swollen, bruised, and teary — launched an attack on Victor. In a wall they united, breaking one way, cutting that way, forcing their bodies into steely alignment each time Victor neared, knocking him to the ground, tripping him, elbowing. The onslaught happened from all sides and was thoroughly unexpected. In stubborn denial, Victor refused to acknowledge their blows, offering them a dull smile. Until then, he had assumed that the object of the game was for the other boys to fall. Not him. At one point, the great giant was knocked to the ground so viciously that groans issued from the crowd. Even the adult soccer game paused.

Job didn’t interfere. How can I? he thought. This is the duty of a mother. But Ifi was at work, at the motel. She had never even seen the soccer field. And the mothers along the sideline, ever vigilant, were suddenly distracted by the babies in their laps, the runny noses of younger children, the articles of trash.

Cheryl charged onto the field. Victor was limp with cries. She smothered him in the embrace he earlier denied her and carried him back to her blanket, where she fed him browning apple slices coated in peanut butter and raisins, where she burst open a juice box and encouraged him to sip.

He felt tricked. But there were no friendly faces in the crowd, not even his father’s, and so he allowed Cheryl to hold him, to speak to him.

“Is it true that you’re a smart boy?” she asked. “Have you been playing with your Big Wheel?”

Although Job had seen Cheryl’s subtle tenderness the nights and early mornings they had spent together — tucking extra pillows behind his back, running her fingers through the knots in his hair — her reaction to Victor was unexpected. For days afterwards, he lay awake in bed, thinking the moment over. It seemed strange seeing her there, his little boy paralyzed in her arms. The picture should have been a great comfort to him; frankly, it was not. He

hadn’t even wanted Cheryl to take part in these outings in the first place, but after the garage sales, she began to insist on the soccer field too. She wanted to see the boy. Just get to know another part of you. For the most part, it had never bothered Job. After all, Victor was too young to understand such “friendships.” But to see his Victor in her arms like this was suddenly disturbing.

From that day forward, he didn’t call things off exactly, but he answered the look in Cheryl’s eyes less and less each time they were together. Now, something was different. What, he did not know.

For the first time, as they lay awake in bed together one morning after his shift, Cheryl lighting a cigarette, Job asked her why she had not made good on her efforts to stop smoking. “In Nigeria,” he said, “smoking is for men.”

Cheryl didn’t even bother to put the cigarette away. He expected her to argue with him, to tell him that in America women were equal to men or something to that effect, to say she was not his slave. But she stared numbly at him. He never saw her smoke another cigarette again, yet he could smell the scent on her now, pungent as ever. That she had taken to smoking in secret, just before and after his arrivals, he was certain.