He's the one I call about my marriage

Please, let me explain the church first, otherwise none of this is going to make sense to you.

The parish is out on Bissonnet, past the Fiesta, in a building that was a carpet showroom before we bought it. Four hundred on the register, maybe two hundred and sixty who actually come out. Pastor Adeyemi is the senior pastor and he is over everything. Under him is Pastor Emeka, the assistant, and the couples are his portfolio, also the men's fellowship. There are four ushering teams and I am on team B, second and fourth Sundays, you come at seven for the first service and then you stay for the second one because there is never enough people for the second one. The building fund is on phase two now, which is the car park and the drainage, because when the rain comes the water reaches the door and Sister Bimpe has lost two pairs of shoes that way.

Sorry, this is long. Bukky says I explain too much.

Bukky is my wife. She leads the women's prayer on Thursday nights, on the phone, they moved it to the phone during the lockdown and never moved it back. Forty women on that line some weeks. She is good at it, and I'm not saying that because she's my wife. I sat on the stairs one Thursday and listened to her pray for a woman whose husband travelled home and didn't come back, and I thought, this person I married is a serious person.

She is the one who started the counseling. In January she said, you are in this house but you are not in this house. She wasn't shouting. She said it while she was cutting Demi's fingernails, she had his hand open on her knee, and she didn't look up when she said it.

So from February we are going to Pastor Emeka on Tuesdays, seven o'clock, in the small office behind the sanctuary. There's a window unit in that office that runs so cold the man wears a windbreaker indoors. He has a kettle back there and he takes Lipton with four sugars, four, I have counted. The phase two drawing is on the wall behind his head, laminated. He writes in a notebook with a biro that clicks, and when he is thinking he clicks it, and Bukky told him in maybe the third session that it was disturbing her, and he stopped, and now he only holds it.

I work nights, seven to seven, respiratory, at one of the hospitals in the Medical Center. So on a Tuesday I am sleeping from about ten in the morning till five, and I come to the church with my scrubs still on me and the badge in my pocket, and Bukky comes after she has dropped the children at her mother's place.

The first two months were about money. Then it was about my mother, who calls me on WhatsApp at four in the morning her time, which is ten at night here, which is the exact time I am clocking in, and Bukky asks why can't she call like a normal person, and I say because that is when she is awake, and that is an argument we have had maybe a hundred times and will have again.

Then around April it stopped being about anything in particular. We would come, and Bukky would say her own, and I would say my own, and then Pastor Emeka would ask me some small question and I would answer it far longer than the question deserved.

In June my mother fell in the bathroom. The neighbour's son found her and carried her to the hospital and she broke something in the wrist. The call came while I was in the garage at work, level five, still sitting in the car, I hadn't gone up yet. I sat there small. Then I texted Pastor Emeka.

I called Bukky after that. Twenty five minutes after. I've gone back and looked at the phone since then, so I'm not guessing, it was twenty five minutes.

The van scraped the pole in the church car park and he knew before the trustees knew. Demi's teacher sent a note home about him biting another boy and I took a photo of that note in the car and sent it, and then I went inside and showed Bukky the same note, and she said what did the teacher say, and I said ah, she said he is settling in fine.

Bukky put a photo in the family group of me in the pool at her cousin's place in Katy with the two of them hanging off my arms. I wear a t-shirt in water. I've worn a t-shirt in water since I was about nineteen, it is the chlorine and my skin. Pastor Emeka put a laughing face in the group, same as everybody else. Then maybe an hour later he texted me on my own and said, you don't swim? And I typed something and read it back. Then I deleted it and wrote, chlorine, long story. And he wrote, okay o.

In August Ireti had fever on a Tuesday and Bukky stayed home with her and said go, you go, tell him we will come next week. So it was the two of us in that office. Nothing happened. He made the tea. We talked about my father, who died in 2011, and about the fact that I was not there to bury him because of the visa, which isn't something I've said out loud to anybody, including Bukky. It went till twenty to ten. The cleaner opened the door and saw the two of us and said sorry sir and closed it back.

Then I drove home on Bissonnet the whole way instead of getting on the freeway, which adds about eleven minutes, and I can't tell you why I did that.

Two weeks ago Bukky said something to me in the kitchen. She was packing Demi's shoes into his bag for the next day. She said, you talk to Pastor more than you talk to me. And before I could open my mouth she said, it is fine, that is what he is there for. Then she asked whether I'd paid the phase two pledge for this month.

I said I'd do it on Friday. I did it on Friday.

The baptisms are the twelfth of December, both children the same day. We were waiting so my mother could travel and now she isn't travelling, because of the wrist. Sister Bimpe needs the names by the end of this month for the programme, the full names, spelled the way we want them printed. Pastor Emeka is doing the baptism.

Last Tuesday I walked him out to his car after. He drives an Acura, the old shape, silver. He was putting his bag on the back seat and I said his name. Only his name. He straightened up with the bag still in his hand. Then he waited.

And then I asked him whether phase two would be finished before the rains come in May.

He said he believes so, if the pledges come in. Then he knocked on the roof of my car two times, and he got into his own car and went.

You have been very kind to let me talk this long.

On Saturday we went back to Katy for the cousin's birthday and it was the same pool. I had the t-shirt on. Demi wanted me to count for him while he went under the water and he kept coming up before eight. The cousin's husband had made jollof in a pot that was too big for the burner, and Bukky said hers was better and he heard her say it.