“Daddy, leave Obinna alone. Wife wife wife all the time. We’re in secondary school for goodness’ sake. You would think we were in our thirties and still single.”

“Thirties? You must be joking. A man still without a wife at the age of twenty-eight is like that deflated piece of rubber—useless,” Eze’s father said, pointing at the bicycle tube.

“I’m fixing it, it’s not useless,” Eze replied.

His father laughed. How easily emotions were heightened between Eze and his father, and how quickly they returned to normal.

“You have to learn to talk about emotions, Eze!” his father would blurt out suddenly. “Not machines and politics and gadgets all the time. Otherwise you won’t find a good wife. You think women care about all that?”

And then shortly afterward, he and Eze would laugh together about something Eze’s dog had done.

When his father went back inside, Eze said, “Do you know my father used to be a theater actor when he was in university in Ibadan? Then he married my mother, and she told him he had to quit acting because married men who were actors were considered promiscuous. That’s why he now spends all his time juicing ginger and oiling his beard and watering the flowers in the garden. He doesn’t have a life.” Eze paused. “I’m never going to get married.”

Obinna stared at Eze. His own father might not talk about it as often as Eze’s did, but it was understood, of course, that marriage was the ultimate prize for a man. Everyone knew that. So how could a man just choose not to marry? It felt to him sacrilegious, but in the weeks after, he thought of Eze’s words often. Until then, it had not occurred to Obinna that he, too, could choose a life different from what was expected of him: graduate from university, get married, have children. He began to think of another possibility. Of going to America with Eze after university, where he would find a job and spend all his free time writing poems. He already knew what he would call his first collection: Dead Butterflies.

“I’ll spend most of my time with my folks in the East, but I hope I can stay in Lagos for a couple days, with you and Amara, if it’s okay,” Eze had said when he called, and there was a new formality to it all, his asking if it was okay rather than just assuming that it was, the slur of his American accent, that strange expression a couple days.