The receipt was still in his pocket when Emeka buried his father.
He had forgotten it was there, tucked in alongside a folded tissue and a parking stub from Tuesday. It was only later, much later, when his sister Adaeze was gathering clothes to donate that she held up the shirt and felt something in the pocket.
“What’s this?” she said.
Emeka looked up from the floor where he had been sitting for no particular reason.
“Nothing. Just throw it.”
But Adaeze never threw anything away without looking at it first. It was a habit that had irritated him for thirty years and would apparently not stop now, not even in grief.
She folded it. Her eyes moved across the paper. Then she went very still.
“Emeka.”
“What?”
She crossed the room and held it out to him. It was a receipt from a pharmacy in Gwagwalada. The date in it was the fifteenth of March — eleven days before their father died. The items were listed in that thermal-print font that always faded too fast: two bottles of Ensure, a jar of groundnut butter, and a packet of Digestive biscuits. Emeka stared at it.
“That’s the stuff he used to bring you,” Adaeze said quietly. “When you were sick last year. Remember? You said you didn’t know where he was getting it from.”
Emeka remembered. He has been in bed for three weeks with typhoid and something the doctor called “exhaustion,” which was really just the name doctors gave a man who has been working sixteen-hour for days without stopping.
His father had shown up at his flat every three days with a small bag of things. Emeka had assumed his wife was sending them. He hasn’t asked. He had been too tired to ask.
“He never said a word,” Emeka said.
“You know how he was.”
Yes. He knew how his father was. Chief Okeke has been the kind of man who showed love the way some people paid tax — quietly, consistently, and with a deep personal conviction that acknowledgment would ruin the whole thing. He did not hug. He did not say I am proud of you. He showed up. He fixed things. He bought Ensure and groundnut butter and Digestive biscuits and left them at the door without knocking as he thought you might already be asleep.
“There’s something written on the back,” Adaeze said.
Emeka turned it over. It was their father’s handwriting. Shaky now, the way it has gotten in the last two years, but still unmistakably his. He had written a list — the kind of list a man makes when he is trying to keep track of something without admitting to himself why.
Emeka — biscuits, Ensure (chocolate). Adaeze — amoxicillin, Ribena, plasters (small). Chima — zinc supplements, glucose.
Their younger brother Chima lived in Enugu. Emeka had no idea his father had been sending him things too.
“He kept a list,” Emeka said. His voice came out strange. “Like a… he kept a whole list.”
Adaeze sat down on the bed.
“We never asked him,” she said. “Any of us. We just took what he brought and said thank you and moved on.”
“He didn’t want to be asked.”
“No.” She paused. “But maybe he wanted to be noticed.
”Emeka thought about the last real conversation he had with his father. It had been about the land in the village, some boundary dispute that needed resolving before the rain came. Practical. Concrete. The kind of conversation his father was comfortable in.
At the end of it, his father had said something odd. He had said, _You know, I am not always sure you children know how much I think about you. And Emeka, distracted, already reaching for his phone, had said, Of course we know, Dad.
He has not asked what prompted it. He has not looked up from his screen. That was for months ago.
Now he was sitting on his father’s bedroom floor holding a pharmacy receipt with a shopping list on the back, and the weight of what he had failed to say pressed on his chest like a stone.
“I should have told him,” Emeka said.
“We all should have,” Adaeze said.
They sat in silence for a while. Not the uncomfortable kind. This was another kind. The kind that comes after something has been understood that can’t be undone. It was the silence of people who have arrived too late and knew it and are choosing, for once, to sit with that fact instead of running from it.
Eventually Adaeze refolded the receipt carefully, like it was a document of some importance.
“I am keeping this,” she said.
Emeka nodded. “Keep it.”
She smoothed it against her knee. “He went to the pharmacy sick, you know. The pharmacist told me when I went to collect his prescriptions after. Said Dad came in every few weeks, sometimes looking really tired, but he always bought things for other people before he bought anything for himself.”
Emeka shot his eyes.
“Always,” she repeated, softly.
In the days that followed, Emeka found himself doing something he hasn’t done in years — calling his siblings. Not for logistics, not to discuss the estate or the funeral costs or who was taking which piece of furniture. Just calling. Asking how Chima’s knees were. Asking if Adaeze had eaten. Staying on the line a little longer than necessary. He could not explain it to his wife when she remarked on it. He didn’t try. Some things, he was beginning to learn, did not need explaining. They just needed doing.
He had the receipt laminated, in the end. It sat on his desk now, between a photograph and a smash potted plant that he was — against all his previous instincts — making a real effort to keep alive. It was, he supposed, the least he could do.
The things we carry without looking at them. The things we throw away. And the things we find, too late, that tell us everything the person never said aloud.
