She wanted to say yes. She wanted to reassure this man who was obviously still so full of grief. But could she? She did not know—not in her heart of hearts—whether her father, the late Obed Ramotswe, could hear her. She addressed him often enough, drawing his attention to some unusual sight she encountered along the road; she addressed him as if he were sitting there in the van with her, but she thought that it was just wishful thinking, nothing more than that. She did not think that he had altogether ceased to exist, but of where exactly he was, where that place to which he had gone was located, she had no idea, other than it was somewhere above Botswana, or on the same level as Botswana but around some corner that one day we all must turn. Beyond that, she could not be certain. All she knew was that it would be a place of cattle bells and gentle, life-giving rain; a place in which all our tears would be wiped tenderly away.

“I am not sure about these things, Rra,” she said quietly. “But I think that they are watching over us somehow—the people who have gone before.” She fixed him with a gaze; the poor man in his sorrow. “Your late wife will know that you still love her, Rra. She will know that.”

CHAPTER NINE

THE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT OWN THE AIR

MMA RAMOTSWE had planned to spend the following day carrying out a number of minor tasks that for one reason or another she had been putting off. There were bills to be paid—a painful process for both her and Mma Makutsi, who had a special expression she adopted as she folded the cheques and placed them in their envelopes. “You have your bill-paying face on,” Mma Ramotswe remarked. “It is as if you were swallowing some bitter medicine, Mma. Or eating an aloe, maybe.”

Mma Makutsi acknowledged that she found the whole business of paying bills a difficult one. “There are just too many bills,” she complained. “If there were only one or two, then I could pay them without looking as if I had vinegar on my tongue. But look at them, Mma … electricity bills, the book-keeper’s bill, the stationery bill, the water bill … How much water do we use here, Mma? How can they charge us this much when all we do is take a little bit of water to make tea? And a little bit of water for the bathroom? That is all. But they charge us as if we’re the Victoria Falls. Look at that bill! Just look at it.”

“Water is very precious,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is not cheap.”

Mma Makutsi was unimpressed. “And soon there will be a bill for air,” said Mma Makutsi. “They will be saying: you have used so much of the Government’s oxygen this month—please pay us. Terms: thirty days net.”