Ten days before Dami’s wedding, the dining table had stopped being a table.
Reni had installed two computers, a power strip, three A3 sheets covered in boxes, the small vibrating device she used to check bass, a pack of markers, and the black headphones belonging to Folarin, her sister’s fiancé. Between the fruit bowl and the edge of the tablecloth, she had taped a straight line no one was allowed to cross with a cup.
Her mother watched her move the bowl of mandarins for the third time.
“Want to make a traffic plan for the oranges too?”
Bisi Adeyemi spoke and signed at the same time, as she had since Reni was little. Her voice sometimes moved faster than her hands. Reni could not hear the voice, but she knew the signs of the lag: the mouth already on the next sentence, the fingers still occupied with the previous one.
She answered only with her hands.
“If you spill tea on the router, you can tell me the orange was right.”
Dami, sitting on the floor against the couch, burst out laughing. She held up her phone so Reni could see: the family group had accumulated a hundred and forty-seven unread messages since morning.
“There’s the enemy,” she signed. “Not the oranges.”
Reni ignored the phone. On her computer, the wedding schedule filled the screen. Times were color-coded: cars arriving, photographs, the family’s entrance, blessing, meal, speeches, first dance. She had added a column the planner had not included: access. Interpreter. Captions on screen. Clear passage between tables. Enough light to read hands. No servers crossing in front of the small platform during speeches.
It was not perfectionism, she had explained. It was the difference between being at a celebration and watching people laugh without knowing why.
On that point, Dami did not argue. On everything else, she argued a great deal.
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