Òyì nke e mepụtara

He says it the way a man says something for the first time. The way a word sounds when it has never before carried its full weight. The door closes. The shop is quiet. Clara reaches for the envelope, considers it, and sets it on the shelf beside the cloth bundle of her grandmother's broken pot. Not opened. Not refused. Just placed where she can decide about it later, when the morning is done and the flowers are arranged and the door is open and the neighborhood that is still — barely, stubbornl