Her Boyfriend, My Husband

CHAPTER 62

Yusuf's POV

The ambience of the car was diffused with the strong musk of Zainab's perfume. I wasn't much of a fan of Arabian scents, I preferred subtle European ones and that mostly was influenced by how Zainab always wore a heavy and loudly conspicous dose of different musks that made me dizzy. And sadly, not the pleasant butterfly in your stomach kind of dizzy but the nauseous kind.

Which was a great inconvenience when we were confined in a car and we were only thirty minutes into our three hour journey from Abuja to Minna. Upon my sisters' insistance, I had requested Zainab to join me on my visit to my mother. It has been a little over a year since we started dating so it was only right for me to introduce her to my mother and get her approval before settling Zainab as the woman I was going to marry.

It had been a week since Mama was back from India after she recovered from her surgery. This wasn't her first health related trip to the country, I remembered when almost ten years ago, she had undergone a similar surgery and gotten a hysterectomy. And from the rough explanation she'd given me, I understood that what that means was that I was going to stay her first and last child forever. I understood enough to know that she'd never be able to give birth again.

Since I was faced with that fact, the pressure on me to hit all the marks of being an ideal son has been real but it still wasn't enough to make me completely let go of the fact that she once abandoned me for something I still don't know and can't understand. She'd made my father give her a divorce and if not because I was blessed with a step-mother like Umma, I would have grown through the rest of my childhood missing a mother's love.

But that was all besides the point, I reminded myself, now none of that matters. I was going to visit her to check up on how she was feeling and to introduce her to my potential future wife as well.

For almost the whole of the three hours, Zainab was chatting away and telling me stories that ranged from her childhood to her experiences on her first days in Paris and even when I only replied to her with a nod or a smile, she wasn't discouraged. I was always said to be a man of a few words but Zainab was extremely talkative making true that adage of opposites attract.

It was a little past 12 PM when the largest state in Nigeria welcomed us through it's grande white and brick red gates and the picturesque view of women balancing a tray stacked with yams on their heads as they walked along the road signified we were in the heart of Niger state.

Since I had visited about two other times before, locating my mother's house wasn't that hard even though I wasn't even familiar with the city of Minna. Twenty minutes later, I was parked within the premises of a large compound that had four buildings of detached duplexes, one for each of the owner's four wives.

My mother was his fourth wife, which was what further confused and infuriated me when she got married to him. Why would she leave a house where she only had one co wife for a house where she had three? But confronting her with that wasn't my place, it could never be so it was better I even stop thinking about it.

I turned off the ignition, extracted the keys and was about to step out of the car when I noticed Zainab made no attempt to. I watched as she brought out something small from her bag that had a mirror at the top and a flat compressed powder at the bottom and she started to apply something else with a bit of colour on her eyelids.

I rested my back on the car door as I turned to face her. "What are you doing?"

"I need to look my best for your mother." she replied, tilting her head towards the mirror and applying a stick of lipstick on her already red lips. "I need to make sure she loves me as much as her son does."