The three of them sat on the back porch. It wasn’t much of a porch, just an extension of the concrete slab that the house sat upon, and an extension of the tin roof above the house. Beyond the porch was the dirt back yard where the kids played soccer. Billy and David sat in plastic lawn chairs. Martha sat on a straw mat on the concrete. Every Zambian had a straw mat, usually rolled up in a corner, that they brought out for company. They drank instant iced tea. Billy drank iced tea when he prepared his sermons for church. It helps you connect with God he said, and then he laughed. David hadn’t called Hannah back.
Above them, out the back, the Southern Cross watched the three. David stared at it for awhile before turning his attention to the tea. The same cinnamon smell was on the breeze. It was mixed with freshly tilled earth like a field in the spring. Hannah had loved the smells of Zambia. She would close her eyes and throw her head back and breathe deep breaths. Her lips would be in the faintest smile, and her face looked like she was having a pleasant dream. She smiled often then, on their first trip. She smiled less as the return grew closer, less as they talked not about weeks of stay but years. But she prayed with me, David thought, and we decided God wanted this for us. We did.
“Should I stay here, Billy?” The three had prayed together when David finally came out of the room. He had prayed for Hannah to come, and for the baby now inside her.
“Mmmm.” Billy took another sip of iced tea and the iced tinked in his glass. The crickets still chirped, now sadly, like his breath. Martha shifted. She would know what to do as a woman, but they did not ask her, and she did not speak her thoughts. “I do not know, my friend.” He took another sip.
“I don’t know what to do.” He was speaking to himself, or Billy, or the Southern Cross high above. “We were so happy here six months ago.” He looked at his glass in his left hand. “She wanted to help people here. She loved the people.” He did not mention the word: abortion.
“She is a good woman, David. But she has fear.”
David took a sip of iced tea, and his wedding ring chimed on the glass.
She met his father once, before the wedding, before he died. His father drove to Chicago from the wide fields of northern Ohio, where he had his church. They had dinner at a place downtown, but he couldn’t remember the name of it. It was small, with thick, roughly-hewn stone walls and darkly stained wooden tables. His father said that it could be a church. His hair was still dark and thick, before the chemotherapy rooted it all out and turned the farmer’s son turned preacher into a thin wisp of a man. His father liked Hannah, he told him afterwards. She is a good woman, son, he said. Then, he looked David in the eye and said that he was proud. The next time he saw him, his father was in a hospital bed.
“I miss her, Billy.”
Billy didn’t reply, but stared with him into the darkness. After a moment: “She is far away.” He smiled. “In truth, you are the one that is far away from her.”
“It’s different. She’s different.”
“She loves you, David.” He said it with his accent, luv-ess. “She luv-ess you.”
“I know.”
“She will come to here.”
David didn’t respond. He looked at his hands again. They were small. His dad’s hands were big and they had taken his church when he was divorced. Then he asked: “When do we go north?”
“The minibus will take us to the north on Wednesday. I have arranged for it.”
Hannah started getting sick a few days before he left. Was it a week ago? Neither of them even thought about the possibility of a child. He didn’t know how he felt about it now, drinking his iced tea that was supposed to connect him with God, bare feet on the cold concrete. She backed out the day before, and he couldn’t change her mind. A cloud slid across the sky, obscuring his view of the Southern Cross. Martha stood and excused herself, kissing her husband on the forehead, patting David on the shoulder, mentioning how the kids would be up early. God, he thought to himself, bless this decision. He said it and didn’t even think what the word bless might mean. He took another sip of iced tea, tilting it back, and and drew it down fast like he was an old gambler at a bar.
“We’ll go north.” He whispered it, but Billy heard it, and they stared into the sky where the Southern Cross had been, and sweet spice was on the breeze.
