Amaka has been planning her wedding for two years, and by ten o'clock on the morning of the big day, everything already was going wrong.
The cake arrived first, or what was left of it.
The baker stood at the door of the hall holding a box and wearing the face of a man at a funeral. Inside, the three tiers of white icing cake had slumped into one another like tired relatives at a very long church service.
"The van hit a pothole on Aba Road," the baker said. "I am so sorry, madam."
Amaka stared at the cake. Then her phone buzzed, the photographer with a message that he has a flat tyre while coming, the keyboard player was stuck in traffic near Rumuokoro. And outside that, the sky over Port Harcourt had turned the colour of wet slate.
By one o'clock the hall was full of guests in their finest aso ebi, and the rain was hammering on the roof so hard that nobody could hear what the MC was saying. Then the lights flickered and turned off. As if that was not enough, the generator coughed twice and went quiet.
Amaka slipped away to the bridal room and sat in her white gown, her mascara beginning to run.
"Two years," she whispered. "Two years of planning, and it is a nightmare."
The door creaked open, her grandmother, Mama Nkechi, came in leaning on her walking stick, her gele tied as proudly as ever.
"Nne, wipe your face," She said
"Nothing is going right, Mama. Nothing."
Mama Nkechi lowered herself onto the chair beside her with a small groan. "On my wedding day, the goat escaped, the bus broke down, and my mother in-law refused to speak to me until the soup was served. Your grandfather and I laughed about it for fifty years," she pressed a handkerchief into Amaka's hand, "nobody remembers the perfect weddings, my daughter. They remember the ones where people showed up for each other."
Amaka sniffed. "Nobody is showing up, the generator is dead."
"Then listen," her grandmother said.
Amaka listened. Beneath the drumming of the rain she heard voices, many of them, laughing and calling out to one another. She went to the window and her mouth fell open.
Uncle Emeka, the mechanic, was kneeling beside the generator under a wide umbrella, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, two of her cousins held the umbrella steady, three more held up phone torches so he could see.
Through the kitchen door she spotted Aunty Ngozi and the women from church. They had rescued the cake, the ruined tiers had been scooped into little cups and decorated with sliced strawberries, and the women were lining them up on trays like proud soldiers.
Just then the generator roared back to life, a cheer went up so loud that it shook the windows. The lights came on, and the little children in the front row clapped as if it were a magic show.
A moment later, a soaked figure came sprinting through the rain with a camera held high above his head. He had arrived on the back of an okada, wearing a plastic bag as a raincoat.
"I am here!" the photographer gasped. "I am not late! I am only wet!" He added.
Then the church choir, who had planned only a single hymn, saw that the keyboard player still had not come, their leader looked at the others, shrugged, and began to sing without any instrument at all. Soon the whole hall was singing with them, and the rain on the zinc roof kept time like a drum.
When Amaka walked down the aisle on her father's arm, nobody was looking at the decorations. They were looking at her. At the front stood Tobenna in his agbada, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, and when she reached him he leaned close and whispered, "I checked my pocket forty times, I still have the rings."
They exchanged their vows under the lights while the choir hummed and the storm rumbled softly outside.
Late that night, when the last guest had gone and the rain had finally stopped, Amaka sat on the steps of the hall with her shoes in her hand. Mama Nkechi sat beside her, humming one of the hymns under her breath.
"So," the old woman said. "Was it a nightmare?"
Amaka looked back at the hall, where her uncles were stacking chairs and singing off key, and her aunties were packing leftover jollof rice into foil for the neighbours. She thought of all the hands that had come to carry her wedding when it fell.
"No, Mama," she said, and rested her head on her grandmother's shoulder. "It was the loveliest day of my life."
Image by Google Gemini.
