After annoying the handsome and kind man at the parking lot, I'd somehow felt way better than I'd ever felt in a long time. So after wiping away all traces of crying and hastily reapplying my makeup, I went back to the third floor of my ten-floor office building, where my office was.
As soon as I returned to my work station, I ignored people's glances at me, closed my eyes and then turned on my computer to finish up the work I'd started in the morning.
Although my company looked like a regular company, I and many of my colleagues knew it was not. We all knew that it was an unknown secret organization for the government. After all, the work of my team members and I involved monitoring CCTV cameras. Mostly, we focused on specific areas to search for suspicious behaviors and criminal activity.
While my job title was software developer, my work was mostly that of a security analyst and a CCTV software developer who was responsible for not only maintaining software used for capturing, storing and analyzing video footage from various unseen cameras around the city, but also occasionally combing through the video footage captured by my assigned cameras.
Once we closed for the day, I rushed out of the company to avoid my colleagues surrounding me to ask me why I had come in late to work because from my conversation with my team leader, Adaku had kept her promise and she hadn't told anyone my crazy serets.
After picking up my only daughter from her school, I headed back home, smiling and humming occasionally as I glanced at her happy face looking down at the new picture book I purchased for her this morning.
Unfortunately, my good mood was ruined as soon as I got home.
After pressing my car horn twice, I just sat in my car waiting for my gateman, Ali, who was hired to open and close our gate, to open the gate.
However, instead of opening the gate wide so I could drive my car into our compound, Ali opened the small side gate for regular people to walk through and rushed to my car window.
Ali was a smart, diligent and honest boy so when I saw him sneaking over to speak to me, I already knew what had happened and in response, my joy sank down to the pit of my belly.
I rolled down my car window before he could complete his hand gestures telling me to roll them down. As soon as I did that, he hastily warned me, "Madam, Oga mama dey house."
Yep, I was right. The only time Ali became sneaky around the house trying to warn me before I entered my own home was when my mother-in-law came visiting.
While my own husband was blind to how badly his mother treated me, despite witnessing it several times, our illiterate gateman was intelligent enough to stare at me with worried eyes.
Even if he'd never really witnessed how badly she treated me, he must have heard her yelling at me several times, which was why every time she came to visit like this without telling anyone, he would run out to inform me so I wouldn't be blindsided.
After a few seconds pause, I nodded and forced a smile that probably looked like a grimace. "Thank you, Ali. Quickly open the gate before she notices anything."
He nodded, "Okay Madam."
Then he ran off to open the gate, watching me with worry-filled eyes as I drove and parked in a different spot in my own home because my husband's obnoxious mother's driver had claimed my parking spot as usual.
After a few minutes pause, I left my stuff in my car including my daughter's new story book and led her into the house with the instruction, "When we enter the house, just go straight to your room after we greet grandma, okay?"
My daughter's face already looked troubled at the thought of her grandmother, but she was a sensible girl so she nodded, "Okay ma."
"Oya, let's go inside." I didn't carry her even though I would have usually carried her in but my mother-in-law was a master trouble-maker and the last time I'd carried her into the house, she'd complained for a long time about how I was treating my daughter like a disabled girl and how she would grow up to be lazy just because I carried her into the house while she was only four years old.
Soon enough, we walked in, our steps faltering as we opened the door and stepped into the house.
The TV was blasting in an unnecessarily loud volume that just showed how much my husband's mother was more uncultured than even my own parents who'd grown up and brought me up in the village. As far as I was concerned, because she was brought up in the slums of Lagos before she met my husband, Aderemi's father, she was even more uncultured than me and my family who grew up in a village a few miles from the capital city of Ekiti state.
She was clutching a cup of wine like a barbarian and forking a piece of meat into her wine-filled mouth when we walked in.
Without waiting to chew and swallow like the well-mannered woman she claimed to be, she started yelling as soon as she saw me. "Omolola, why are you just coming home now? Ehn?"
I resisted the urge to stare at the wine that spilled out of her lips and onto the rug in the living room. I knew that if we kept that rug with the stain on it, she would spot it the next time she came for one of her surprise visits and yell at me for it as usual.
I knelt down on the cold tile floor with my daughter. "Mama, good afternoon ma."
My daughter's quiet voice echoed mine.
"Answer my question first. Why are you just getting home now?"
"This is the time I usually get home mama. I finished work at 4 and then I went to pick Adesewa at school." I said.
"I've told you to quit that your yamayama job. Just stay at home and take care of the house for my son. Maybe if you're staying at home, you can finally bear Remi a son. Abi, do you want him to bring home another wife?"
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. "No mama, I don't."
"What's the name of your daughter again?" She asked, turning her attention to Adesewa.
"Adesewa." I reminded, wondering what kind of irresponsible grandmother didn't forgot their granddaughter's name as often as Remi's mother did.
"Move closer, let grandma see your face." She said.
She sounded nothing like a loving grandmother would have so I was not surprised when my daughter glanced at me with apprehension.
"Why are you looking at your mother? Come here quickly jare. This is what I was saying that you're spoiling this girl, Lola. Look at the way she's looking at me."
As my daughter took slow strides toward her paternal grandmother, my heart sank when she looked back at me with fear flickering in her eyes.
After staring at my daughter intently, all my mother-in-law had nothing good to say. "Why is she so thin? And why are her eyes so dark? You know, in my hometown, they say that people with dark eyes like this are witches."
I stood up and pulled my daughter away from her grasp. "My daughter is not a witch."
Ignoring her, I said to my daughter. "Adesewa go up to your room, change your clothes and do your homework, okay?"
"Yes ma," she said.
Without me having to say another word, she ran off up the stairs like a bunch of masquerades were chasing her.
"Why is she running so fast? It's not like as if I can eat her. Abi, can I eat her." My mother-in-law complained.
"Of course not, grandma." I responded quietly.
"Oya, I feel like eating your pounded yam, go and make it for me quickly."
I nodded, "Mama, let me just go and change my clothes and I'll be ready to make your pounded yam."
"Change what clothes? Just go and pound it joor! How long do you want me to wait before I now eat then? Hurry up and go and pound the yam jare. Your office clothes are already dirty. You people have washing machine, I'm sure it's nothing to clean it up. Don't forget to make that your efo riro ooo."
Unable to argue with her, I moved to the kitchen and even after a taxing day at work, I got started with making a separate meal for my mother-in-law while directing my househelp to help me make Amala and rice seperately for dinner.
We were going to eat Amala at night but after taking pounded yam, my mother-in-law was the kind of person that preferred to eat grains like rice so I prepared it for her ahead of time.