Night Like That (rewritten)

twelve

Prominence and Ototi were one and the same. They were intertwined in a way that suggested one was the definition of the other in any dictionary you were to pick.

Take for instance Dr Ototi. Anyone worth a damn in the healthcare space knew what that name meant. They knew what miracles those hands held. They knew to listen raptly to anything he had to say because anything he had to say could be bottled and sold as miracle work. Should he have taken to being paid for dinner and advice - he would have taken it. It should be noted that in the nineties, he had but then it is rumoured that someone had asked something stupid and he took to rejecting all paid dinner requests altogether. It was speculated that he'd left the restaurant ranting about losing precious brain cells and it was going to do more damage to his future patients. He was to have no more of it. This, in Kenyan society, made him almost akin to a god because he had surpassed that dread-humbling scale such that no one could pull him back in. 

Mrs Ototi, PhD, succeeded at not only being a fantastic wife, but also a mother. She was the kind of mum who everyone would have easily said was born to be one. She was at one with it. Perfect with it. Even putting a temporary halt to her academic career did nothing to make her look less than. In fact, it could have been argued that she had been ecstatic about it. She focused right about everything on her two perfect angels until they were no longer under her roof then she went back to school. She mothered at the art of mothering and that could be substantiated by the white Range Rover at her garage and not the actual beings she was to mother. Those beings... well, those beings were alive and that was supposed to matter, somehow.

All this was a well-crafted fallacy as away from all that, the Ototi family was a down mess.

Pendo Ototi, the first-born child of the Ototi household, was yet again unemployed at the sweet old age of thirty-three. Both Dr Ototi and Dr Ototi, PhD, were terribly livid.

"We had let you have it, hadn't we? We even helped fund your passion. Do you know how many parents would go on to fund passions like that?" Dr Ototi, PhD, asked. 

When she got angry, she got angry in the way bulls did at the colour red. She became something sort of senseless then she became rabid and staying long enough, she would shoot out at right about anything. Ivy, who was sitting right next to her sister, was optioning escape options as she knew it was only a matter of time before they stopped focusing on her sister and zeroed in on her supposed 'anti-social' behaviour and inability to get a man. 

"And like everything else, it failed. It is as life should be, is it not?" Pendo answered defiantly because whether Dr Ototi, PhD, liked it or not, she had birthed a replica of herself in her firstborn and they were going to shoot at each other. 

At the head of the table, Dr Ototi studied his food intently, completely blocked out from the fight that was gaining momentum at the dining table. Ivy wished that her father would try to be stern with them as he always was with anyone outside of his household but like the two daughters, he was at the mercy of Dr Ototi, PhD, and she could not really find complete fault in that. 

"You're talking back at your mother?" She asked, hand over her chest, eyes wide. "So, not only are you not a responsible taxpayer but you are also a disobedient child? Did we not raise our daughters properly, Baba Pendo?"

This pulled him from whichever fantasy world he had been in. "We had," he answered quickly, straightening his spine because the other thing that Dr Ototi, PhD, hated even more than Pendo's lack of direction was slouching.

"Oh, then why do we have our firstborn daughter moving back home, again, with no business to speak of? We did wrong by allowing them passion. Look at them." She turned to look at Ivy. Ivy internally cursed. She should have escaped a while back. "One is unemployed and the other is... well, you know what you are."

A lesbian? Ivy wished she could say. But she knew what her mother was coming in on. Apparently, her job being the kind that seldom ever needed her to leave her house made her a complete menace to society and was setting her up to become the perfect serial killer. It was also making sure that her parents never saw hope in terms of grandchildren as their firstborn daughter had already declared, much like her, she was something sort of a sapphic. Something that spoke to intense lesbian tendencies that they would actually never see a child sired by her if it was the last thing on earth. 

"Well, things fail because your generation made sure of it," Pendo retorted, taking the spotlight away from Ivy to which Ivy internally thanked her for. "If anything, it is all your fault. Now, what are you going to do about it?"

Dr Ototi, PhD, slammed her spoon on the table, pushing her chair back. Her gaze was sharp and steel in the way it focused on her firstborn. It was half the same look she would have when either one of the girls came home from school with less-than-stellar marks in their exams. The other half came in when they became adults who did not exemplify prominence in the Ototi name much like their parents. Both were equal disappointments in their parents' eyes. 

"You have embarrassed us long enough. I am going to give you one week to turn your life around if you plan on staying in this house any longer. If you do nothing in the week, I will leave you out on the streets to fend for yourself. We have coddled you long enough and it is time you learn what hard work means."

It was a chilling thing, their mother, not shouting but instead speaking in a low and colder cadence. This was not her style. At this point, she was supposed to have been berserk, fighting anyone and everyone who dared. This time, she only looked somewhat lost and at the corner of Ivy's eye, she noticed that small shiver that passed through Pendo. It was small, almost negligible, but it was not hard to notice since nothing ever shook Pendo and so being an act out of the ordinary made it all the more noticeable. 

"Fine," Pendo said, voice cool. "Have it your way."

As though to assert dominance, she left the table first which made Dr Ototi, PhD, huff and leave second. All that remained were the two most quiet members of the house, mindlessly hitting at their plates, looking at anything other than each other. 

Pendo wished she had stayed home to sort out the Chastity situation. At least that would not need any sort of miraculous intervention to get back to normal.