There was one year the coffee paid, and my father became briefly, dangerously, a man of plans.
The cherries had come in red as anything, and the society weighed our sacks and the cheque, when it arrived, had a number on it that made my mother sit down. My father walked the rows that evening touching the bushes like they were livestock that had finally, after years of eating, produced. Next season we plant the far ridge, he said. Then a water tank. Then Wanjiru goes to the school with the laboratory.
He said my name into the future so easily. I was nine and I believed him the way you believe weather.
We ate meat three Sundays running. He bought my mother a headscarf the colour of the cherries and she wore it to church and pretended it was nothing, God is good, while her hand kept rising to touch it. He bought me a globe. An actual globe, spinning on a little axis, Kenya a small green shape you had to search for near the middle.
The next year the prices fell. The year after, the borer came, and then the rains failed, and the far ridge stayed grass. The globe gathered dust but I kept spinning it, finding the places my father had been going to send the money — none of them real anymore, all of them still turning.
He pulled up the coffee eventually, the whole shamba, and planted what would at least feed us. I was in the city by then. He called to tell me, matter of fact, the way he reported all defeats, as though they were simply weather.
The bushes are gone, he said. You remember the good year?
I said I remembered the headscarf.
Ah, he said, and I heard him smile down the line, forty years of a farmer's arithmetic in it. Your mother still has it. It doesn't fade, that one. They made things properly then.
He meant the scarf. I let him mean the scarf.