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not?”
    “Better you send money back. Unless your father is big man? You have connections?”
    “I’ve found a job there,” she said.
    “You stay in America fifteen years and you just go back to work?”
    Aisha smirked. “You can stay there?”
    Aisha reminded her of what Aunty Uju had said, when she finally accepted that Ifemelu was serious about moving back—
Will you be able to cope?
—and the suggestion, that she was somehow irrevocably altered by America, had grown thorns on her skin. Her parents, too, seemed to think that she might not be able to “cope” with Nigeria. “At least you are now an American citizen so you can always return to America,” her father had said. Both of them had asked if Blaine would be coming with her, their question heavy with hope. It amused her how often they asked about Blaine now, since it had taken them a while to make peace with the idea of her black American boyfriend. She imagined them nursing quiet plans for her wedding; her mother would think of a caterer and colors, and her father would think of a distinguished friend he could ask to be the sponsor. Reluctant to flatten their hope, because it took so little to keep them hoping, which in turn kept them happy, she told her father, “We decided I will come back first and then Blaine will come after a few weeks.”
    “Splendid,” her father said, and she said nothing else because it was best if things were simply left at splendid.
    Aisha tugged a little too hard at her hair. “Fifteen years in America very long time,” Aisha said, as though she had been pondering this. “You have boyfriend? You marry?”
    “I’m also going back to Nigeria to see my man,” Ifemelu said, surprising herself.
My man
. How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives that we have imagined.
    “Oh! Okay!” Aisha said, excited; Ifemelu had finally given her a comprehensible reason for wanting to move back. “You will marry?”
    “Maybe. We’ll see.”
    “Oh!” Aisha stopped twisting and stared at her in the mirror, a dead stare, and Ifemelu feared, for a moment, that the woman had clairvoyant powers and could tell she was lying.
    “I want you see my men. I call them. They come and you see them.First I call Chijioke. He work cab driver. Then Emeka. He work security. You see them.”
    “You don’t have to call them just to meet me.”
    “No. I call them. You tell them Igbo can marry not Igbo. They listen to you.”
    “No, really. I can’t do that.”
    Aisha kept speaking as if she hadn’t heard. “You tell them. They listen to you because you their Igbo sister. Any one is okay. I want marry.”
    Ifemelu looked at Aisha, a small, ordinary-faced Senegalese woman with patchwork skin who had two Igbo boyfriends, implausible as it seemed, and who was now insistent that Ifemelu should meet them and urge them to marry her. It would have made for a good blog post: “A Peculiar Case of a Non-American Black, or How the Pressures of Immigrant Life Can Make You Act Crazy.”

CHAPTER 2

    When Obinze first saw her e-mail, he was sitting in the back of his Range Rover in still Lagos traffic, his jacket slung over the front seat, a rusty-haired child beggar glued outside his window, a hawker pressing colorful CDs against the other window, the radio turned on low to the Pidgin English news on Wazobia FM, and the gray gloom of imminent rain all around. He stared at his BlackBerry, his body suddenly rigid. First, he skimmed the e-mail, instinctively wishing it were longer.
Ceiling
, kedu?
Hope all is well with work and family. Ranyinudo said she ran into you some time ago and that you now have a child! Proud Papa. Congratulations. I recently decided to move back to Nigeria. Should be in Lagos in a week. Would love to keep in touch. Take care. Ifemelu
.
    He read it again slowly and felt the urge to smooth something, his trousers, his shaved-bald head. She had called him Ceiling. In the last e-mail from her,