WHILE PHUTI WAS wrestling with the question of Mr. Clarkson Putumelo’s new house, Mma Makutsi, along with Mma Ramotswe and Mma Potokwane, was sitting around an open fire, under the stars. They had finished the meal Mma Potokwane had prepared for them—a stew of beans, carrots, and tomato soup, all poured over a base of freshly cooked pap. Mma Ramotswe had pronounced it delicious, and Mma Makutsi had enthusiastically concurred. Mma Potokwane had accepted their compliments, but had added a remark to the effect that she would have more time to cook now that “nobody had any use for her.” This had been vigorously refuted by Mma Ramotswe, who had insisted that of all the citizens of Botswana—all two million of them—Mma Potokwane was without question one of the most useful. Mma Makutsi, without prompting from Mma Ramotswe, had agreed. “Nobody is useless,” she said heatedly, “and you are less useless than nobody else, Mma. Definitely.”

This remark was greeted with silence while Mma Ramotswe and Mma Potokwane had tried to work out what it meant. The spirit in which it was made, though, was clear enough, and Mma Potokwane simply thanked her. “You have always been very kind to me, Mma,” she said. “Always.”

“And you to me,” said Mma Makutsi.

Mma Ramotswe knew that this was not entirely true—indeed it was completely false—but was pleased that such good spirit was abroad, and said nothing to contradict what had been expressed. New friendships can be every bit as strong as old friendships, and of course became old friendships in due course. She thought of this in silence, watching the flickering light of the fire play across the faces of the other two women; three friends sitting out in the darkness in the immensity of the surrounding bush, with the Kalahari a stone’s throw away and the stars, silver-white fields of them, hanging high above, so dizzying, so humbling to look at.

“No,” said Mma Potokwane after a while. “I have made up my mind, you see. I have stopped working, and I am going to do some things for myself—things I’ve always wanted to do.”

Mma Ramotswe understood this. She knew a number of people who had stopped working with the same thing in mind, and they had told her that the decision had been the best decision of their lives. One had opened a poultry farm and now supplied eggs and chickens to many of the major shops in Gaborone; another, a mechanic friend of Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s, had taken to restoring old cars and had already sold a 1956 Pontiac to a collector over the border. There were so many things that you could do if you simply had the time, but most of us left it too late.

“I can see that,” she said. “What will you do, Mma?”

There was a silence. Mma Makutsi looked at Mma Potokwane with interest, as did Mma Ramotswe.