They sat at the table and ate their chicken and potatoes. They had talked enough about the Molofololo case and were happy to speak about other things now. Mma Ramotswe was wary of raising the subject of Phuti and Violet Sephotho, but Mma Makutsi did that herself.
“I talked to Phuti when he came to eat last night,” she said.
Mma Ramotswe waited. “And?”
“And I said to him: How is Violet Sephotho doing in the shop? And he said, She is very good at her job-first class, in fact. So I said, Oh, I see. So she is a natural saleslady, is she? And he said to me, Yes, on the first day she sold four beds, and on the second she sold three. Then yesterday she sold two more. That is very good.”
“It seems that there are many people needing new beds,” Mma Ramotswe observed.
“So it seems. And then I said to him: Does she have far to travel to get to her work? And he looked at me in a surprised way-you know how his nose wrinkles when he is puzzled?-and then he said, No, she does not live too far away. So I said, Does she walk home then? And he said, That is a very strange question. Why are you so interested in this Violet person?”
“Surely he can tell,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Surely he can see what sort of woman she is?”
“Men are not very good at that, Mma,” Mma Makutsi said. “We all know how they cannot tell these things. And so I said, Did I not see her in your car?”
Mma Ramotswe held her breath. “And he said?”
Mma Makutsi popped a small piece of potato into her mouth. “And he said, Yes, I drove her home on that first day She said that she had to be back in good time to cook a meal for her sick aunt.” Mma Makutsi made her disbelief apparent.
“It is possible,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I had an aunt who was not very well and…”
“Oh, anything is possible, Mma Ramotswe. It's just that I cannot imagine Violet cooking for a sick aunt. But I can imagine her telling Phuti a story like that so that he thinks, This is a kind girl who is cooking for her aunt. I can imagine that all right.”
The important thing, thought Mma Ramotswe, was how Phuti had reacted to Mma Makutsi's questioning. Did he sense that she was concerned about Violet?
“I don't think so,” said Mma Makutsi. “But I am still very worried, Mma. What if she succeeds in making him fonder of her? What then? He is a good man, but even a good man can fall for a glamorous woman. That is well known.”
“That is very well known,” agreed Mma Ramotswe. “Look at Adam. Look how he fell for Eve.”
“Just because she had no clothes on, he fell for her,” said Mma Makutsi.
“That sometimes helps,” said Mma Ramotswe.
They both laughed. And then it was time for pears and ice cream, and the conversation shifted to talk about the first time that either of them remembered eating ice cream. “I was eight,” said Mma Ramotswe. “My father took me into Gaborone and he bought me an ice cream. I have never been so excited, Mma. It was a very great day for me.”
She closed her eyes. She was standing next to her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, that great man, and he was handing her an ice cream. He was wearing his hat, his battered old hat that he wore until the day he went into hospital for the last time. And he smiled at her from underneath the brim of that old hat, and the sun was behind him, high in the sky, and the ice cream tasted sweeter and purer than anything else she had ever tasted in her life. She would give anything-anything-to have her father back with her, just for a day, so that she could tell him about how her life had been and how she owed everything to him and to his goodness to her. It would not take long to tell him all that-about the same amount of time it takes to eat an ice cream or to walk the length of Zebra Drive. Not long.
Mma Ramotswe opened her eyes again, to see that Mma Makutsi was staring up at the ceiling. “Why do you think we like ice cream so much, Mma?” Mma Makutsi asked. “Or is that one of those questions that we can never answer?”
“I think it is,” said Mma Ramotswe, looking down at the table. There was one large helping of ice cream left-or two small ones. There was no doubt in her mind what was the right thing to do. “You must have that ice cream,” she said, reaching across for Mma Makutsi's plate. She hoped that Mma Makutsi would say, “No, we must share it, Mma.”
But Mma Makutsi did not. “Thank you very much, Mma,” she said. “You are very kind.”
SHE DROVE MMA MAKUTSI home in the blue van, dropping her off outside her lightless house. The evening was warm; night had brought little relief from the heat of the day, and the leaves of Mma Makutsi's two pawpaw trees, dark shapes against the moonlit sky, were drooping, as if with sheer exhaustion. The hot months were not easy-they drained the country of its energy, its vitality, crushing animals, people, plants under a sky that at times seemed like one great oven. And then, as the whole land became drier and drier and, in bad years, the cattle began to die, nature would relent, would remember that it was the time for rain. Great rain clouds, purple bank stacked upon purple bank, would appear above the horizon and then sweep in over the land with their longed-for gift of water. The temperatures would drop as the land breathed again; brown would become green; and the hearts of everything living would be filled with relief and gratitude. But that had not happened yet; it was still oppressively hot… and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was still not back from Lobatse.
Mma Ramotswe looked at her watch as she drove away from Mma Makutsi's house. It was almost twenty to ten; their easy, woman-to-woman conversation had made the time pass quickly. Twenty minutes to ten; if Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had finished work at eight o'clock-and surely it would have been unreasonable for them to keep him beyond that time-then he should have been back by nine fifteen. Of course he would have had to run Charlie home, and that could take, what? Fifteen minutes, perhaps. There was not much traffic at this hour, and none of those frustrating waits at traffic lights and intersections. If he had reached Game City at half past nine, allowing for a few minutes' delay at the police roadblock near the Mokolodi turn-off, then with fifteen minutes to get to Charlie's house and back… quarter to ten, then. But you always had to allow ten minutes or so leeway, so that meant that ten o'clock would be the latest she should expect him back. Now, if she took ten minutes to drive from Mma Makutsi's place back to Zebra Drive, then she should arrive back at the house at roughly the same time as he did.
She glanced in her rear-view mirror. Mma Makutsi had switched on a light, a single bulb outside her front door, and was waving. Goodnight, Mma: I am grateful to you. I am grateful to you for being my assistant and having all those peculiar ideas and insisting on them. I am grateful to you for being who you are: for standing up for ladies with large glasses and a bad skin and for everybody else who has had to battle to get where they have got. And most of all I am grateful to you for being my friend, Mma; I am grateful to you for that. That is the best thing that anybody can be to anybody else-a friend.
Her thoughts returned to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. Somewhere in this country, somewhere in Botswana that day, somebody had been given news that would end their little world. Somebody, some unknown person somewhere, was being told that somebody else was not coming back. And all that stood between that poor person and oneself was chance, and luck, and forces that we would never master or understand. What if it was she who would be the recipient of such news this night? No, she could not think about that, she would not. But it could happen, couldn't it?
She turned into Zebra Drive. Her hands were shaking now, and inside her, in that strange, indefinable region where the physical side of dread makes its presence known, she felt a sense of dreadful imminence, a rawness.
Her gate appeared before her, and beyond that, in the beam of the headlights, the four small pillars of her verandah. She swung the van round to negotiate the turn into the short drive and as the beam of the lights moved round she saw the back of the truck, the lights still glowing red. The other vehicle's lights went off, but it was now illuminated in her headlights, and she saw Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni step out and dust off his trousers, as he always did when he alighted from his truck. And she stopped her van where it was, some yards short of its normal place at the side of the house, and she got out and ran to him, the lights of the van still burning-to show the world, if anybody was walking in that darkness along Zebra Drive, if anybody cared to look, the reunion, after one day away, of a man and his wife, of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, returned safely from Lobatse, the finest mechanic in Botswana, and Mma Ramotswe, his wife, who loved him more dearly than she had ever loved anybody else before, with the possible exception of Obed Ramotswe, her father, retired miner, fine judge of cattle, now late.