“All of that is true,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But in this case, do you know what he asked for?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni tried to put himself in the position of the uncle from Bobonong. Such a man would be very impressed by the Double Comfort Furniture Shop. He would not know about overheads and bad debts and all the things that sapped the profits of a business. In the mind of an uncle from Bobonong, an uncle with an unsophisticated, broken nose, the owner of a large store would be unimaginably wealthy, and have many cattle. “Twenty?” he ventured. Twenty would be an outrageously large bogadi; far more than Mma Makutsi was worth.

“No,” said Mma Ramotswe. And then, with the air of one disclosing a scandalous fact, “Ninety-seven.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s eyes revealed his surprise. But then he remembered, and he began to smile. A wily uncle indeed; one who had absorbed the salient facts of family history.

“Because…” he began.

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Because.”

Then they both laughed.

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

COULD ONE REND THE HEART IN TWO?

HOW, Mma Ramotswe asked herself, do you put together the story of a life when you don’t know the very beginning—who your parents were?

She looked past Mma Makutsi’s unattended desk, out through the window and onto the branches of the acacia tree outside. It was the morning following the conversation with Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni in which they had discussed the absurd demands of Mma Makutsi’s uncle, and she was by herself. Mma Makutsi would be in the office that morning, but only later on: she had arranged with Mma Ramotswe to come in at eleven, after the delivery van had delivered her new bed.

“A new bed?” Mma Ramotswe had asked. “That is very good.”

She spoke without thinking why it should be particularly good to receive a new bed, but a moment’s subsequent thought justified the comment. Many people, she felt, did not have a good night’s sleep, and this was often because they did not have a good bed. And if you did not have a good night’s sleep, it showed in the way you behaved towards others. Some of her clients, she thought—the irritable or irascible ones—probably did not have a good bed, and would have been much improved by a night or two in a more comfortable place; not that she could tell them that, of course.

She imagined the scene. “I think I know the answer to your problem, Rra,” she would say. “It is in your bed. That is where the answer lies.”