🌡️ Thermostat

The last time I saw Dad, he was bidding us bye as Kioko drove us home. He needed to stay behind to do some pastor things. I didn’t care for the details since I’m not a believer anymore. He and Mum and pretty much everyone associated with Christianity would call me a backslider, but what’s not to like about challenging the ubiquity of unidirectional slides?

I don’t think Dad is as dedicated to God as outsiders believe, either. I overhear Mum on muffled calls with church faculty and family friends, discussing his unfaithfulness. She gets pretty upset after, but it appears she’s enduring the humiliation to develop a foolproof enough dossier to justify separation. Redemption has this weird thing where even when the husband messes up, the blame lies squarely on the wife. There go my wedding plans.

Dad and I used to be close before I became old enough to identify the cracks in their marriage. Now we’re just... familiar, I guess. He’s okay as a father. He asks about school and attends my races. He makes jokes with me and tries to relate to my interests. It’s been challenging to reconcile these two sides of him, particularly when Mum takes her frustrations out on me. Being a 19-year-old thermostat is exhausting.

We called the police to report him missing. They’ve been dragging their feet because he’s “an adult who can disappear without notice.” To their credit, our Range Rover was discovered in the airport’s basement parking. That’s all they needed to declare him a voluntary goner. Shemeji is the last known person who saw him, and he says he just drove off that Sunday, presumably heading home. He would never tell Mum this, but I know Dad was dressed up.

I’d volunteer this information if it didn’t get Shemeji in trouble. And despite Mum’s blatant relief that Dad’s shadow no longer looms over us, she’s expertly played the role of the grieving wife at church. Does she even want him found? There’s a lot we don’t know about our parents.

Mum and Dad, both Education students, were college sweethearts. Dad taught Science while Mum took the Social Studies route. Five years into an illustrious career, he inexplicably cleared his Sunshine Primary desk and started Redemption. Heading a church had always sort of been a dormant dream of his, yet I don’t think anyone expected the sudden and complete pivot. Mum still teaches, albeit in a different school as we had to relocate from Sunshine’s locality. I’ve spent 12 years wondering what demons we were evading. Part of me doesn’t want to know.

Some Zambian pastor that once visited has become a Redemption staple now; it seems like many moons have passed since Dad vanished. I tell everyone he’d at least have contacted me if all was well. I’m just a kid, though, a kid who hopes her father is okay, a kid who hopes her mother didn’t have anything to do with this, a kid who hopes she can find tears for him.