This evening on my way back home, I decided to buy maize from the same lady who mocked me for my poor command of the Luganda language back in late April. For weeks, I have been avoiding her after the embarrassment from our last encounter.
She had moved a stone's throw from her usual spot and camped somewhere else but along the same route leading home.
This time, my identity was a hard guess, my head wrapped in a scarf and my face half covered by a mask.
Additionally, it was resolved within me that I was to walk up to her and speak all the Luganda I know and so I did.
“Gyebaleko nyabo,” I opened our trade.
‘Kale nawe,’ she responded with her face looking down, her gaze steadfast on the maize set on fire.
“Mpaayo eya lukumi.”
‘Kale.’
She picked one of those that were partly ready and put it back on the fire while I stood there watching on and waiting.
Suddenly, my phone vibrated. I could feel it from the loud buzzing in my hand bag. In haste, I reached for it and it was a call from hubby.
‘Baby wangye, are you the one buying maize?’ he asks while chortling on his end of the call.
“Yeego. Ori nkahi?” I turn around, quickly scouting my surroundings with a gaze of a suspicion and bemusement.
Laughing further, he says, ‘I’m getting off the boda. Iwe guma oteerere kumpa right where you are.’
“Kale,” and I end the call with a smile.
However, like one returning to a default configuration, the thought of speaking my best Luganda had waned off shortly after I got off the call.
As this lady picked the maize to wrap it in its husks, I immediately stop her with a dissatisfied tone saying, “Ah naye nyabo omusooli gwangye nga teguyidde?” to which she burst out in such hard laughter before exclaiming:
“Eh, obwedda ye gwe customer wange kabuladda ow’omusooli!”
My wife had been dead for five years, but every month, I still sent $500 to her mother. I thought I was supporting an old widow in a coastal town. Then the bank told me the account had a problem....
Eleanor, The Pretty Woman From Havenport
Eleanor Voss had always been beautiful in the way that made people forget their sentences. Not just pretty—arresting. High cheekbones that caught light like marble, eyes the colour of wet slate, and a mouth that looked like it had been drawn by someone who believed in happy endings. In her small coastal town of Havenport, beauty like that was currency, and Eleanor spent it carefully.
She worked the night shift at The Anchor, a windswept diner perched on the edge of the pier. Fishermen, truckers, and the occasional heartbroken tourist came for the coffee and stayed for the way she moved between tables like someone who had nowhere else to be. She smiled at everyone the same way: warm, distant, untouchable. No one ever saw the calluses on her hands or the way she counted her tips twice before walking the three dark blocks home.
One rainy Thursday, a black luxury car pulled up outside the diner, sleek and out of place against the peeling paint and lobster traps. The man who stepped out wore a charcoal suit that cost more than Eleanor’s yearly rent. He was tall, sharp-jawed, and carried the kind of quiet exhaustion that money couldn’t quite erase. His name was Julian Hale, and he was in Havenport for one reason: to close the sale of the old lighthouse his company planned to turn into a boutique hotel.