That is the difference between the two: money, nothing; love, everything.”
Charlie frowned. Queenie-Queenie came from a family that had money—money and trucks. If you had money and trucks behind you, then it was easy to say that money was nothing—and trucks, for that matter. It was only too easy. But if you came from where he came from, which was nowhere, really, and you had no money at all, you would never say that.
Queenie-Queenie expanded on her theme. “If I had a choice, Charlie, between money, here on this hand, and love, here on this hand…” She held her hands out towards him, and Charlie saw how soft the skin was, and the carefully tended nails. He swallowed hard. These were not hands that had been obliged to do the laundry or mix the mortar for the wall of the lelapa, the low mud-wall that bounded the traditional Botswana household. These were not even hands that had needed to do the kitchen work that most women had to do, and in the more progressive households, was even expected of men. These hands had done nothing.
“If I had to choose between the two of them,” Queenie-Queenie continued, “what do you think I would choose, Charlie? You tell me. Think about it for a little while, and then you tell me what I would choose.”
Charlie sat back in his seat. Mr. Potso poked his head out from the kitchen to stare at Queenie-Queenie. Then he transferred his gaze to Charlie, curling an eyebrow as if to say, Her! What’s she doing with somebody like you?
Charlie echoed her question. “Which one would you choose?”
“Yes, which one?”
Charlie made a hopeless gesture. “Oh, I know that. I know that you would choose love. That is what you’ve already said. You said that money is not the big thing…”
Queenie-Queenie raised a finger. “No. Wrong. Money.”
Charlie could not conceal his surprise. “But you said…”
“I didn’t. I was talking about both. I never said that I would prefer love to money. I said that if I had money, then I would also like to have love. Love is more important than money—I did say that—but you can’t live on love by itself. You need money. You have to eat. So what you do is you make sure that you have money in the first place, then love will come. You say, ‘I am ready now for love, because I have money,’ and love will come.”
Charlie listened to this in silence. When she had finished speaking, he simply said, “Oh.”
“So you agree with me?” asked Queenie-Queenie.
He did not answer immediately, and so she said, “I’m glad that we agree about this important thing.”
He opened his mouth to speak, not knowing what he intended to say, but feeling that he should at least express a view. But before he could say anything, Queenie-Queenie continued, “That is why you do not need to ask me to marry you. I know that this is what you would like to do because we both think the same way about this thing.”
He struggled to make sense of what she was saying. He did not need to ask her to marry him: What did that mean? That he should not ask? Or that he should? Or did it mean that they did not have to talk about the matter any longer?
He said, “Well, that is very interesting, Queenie. But are you going to order some fried chicken?”
She looked at him reproachfully. “This is no time for fried chicken.”
Mr. Potso was staring at them again, this time more intently. “Potso thinks it is. Look at him. He is always thinking that we should order something. All the time.”
She did not follow his gaze. Potso was nothing to her.
“No,” she said. “You do not need to ask me to marry you, Charlie. These days, women can ask men to marry them. So if anybody asks us when you asked me, you can just say, ‘It was not necessary—we decided to get married and that was it.’ No need for formalities—not these days.”
“Ha!” he said. “But we didn’t decide, did we?”
This brought a flat rebuttal. “Yes, we did.”
“When?”
“Just a few moments ago. I said that we agreed, and you said nothing. You didn’t say, ‘I do not agree.’ You didn’t say anything like that.”
“I didn’t know that we had agreed. How could I tell, Queenie?”
She brushed this aside. “That doesn’t matter any longer. We don’t need to go over the past—unlike some people. They are always