Traveling Light

She almost didn't tell her mother. She sat with that decision for the better part of a week, turning it over the way her grandmother used to turn over a mango to check it for ripeness, testing it from every side.

In the end it was the harmattan itself that decided her — the way the wind that week kept finding its way into the house no matter how many windows they shut, kept leaving its fine grey dust on furniture they'd only just wiped clean. Some things, she decided, were like that. You could keep the windows shut for fifty years. The dust still found a way in.

She showed her mother the box on a Sunday afternoon, the two of them at the kitchen table with tea going cold between them. Her mother read three letters, went very still, and then did something Abena hadn't expected: she smiled, small and sad and real.

"She used to hum a song," her mother said. "When she thought no one was listening. I always wondered where it came from."

They never found out what happened to Kwame Asante of Kumasi — whether he married, whether he kept his promise never to write again, whether he ever heard that the daughter he'd have had no claim to grew up to have a daughter of her own who would spend a dusty week thirty years later putting his letters in order by date. Some questions, Abena was learning, don't get answered. They just get carried, a little more lightly, once someone finally knows to carry them.

She kept the box. Not under a bed this time — on a shelf, in the light, where the next person who needed to find it would not have to reach so far into the dark.