The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon Read Online Free Page B

agreed. ‘No, there is nothing, Mma. And Rra Edgar was a happy man, I think. Except for one thing – he did not have any children of his own.’
    Mma Ramotswe held Mma Sheba’s gaze. And that is me too, she thought, although she had Motholeli and Puso, and she was grateful, and she loved them.
    ‘So when he became ill and knew that his days were not going to be very long, he came to see me. His wife had died a few years back and the nearest relative was his sister. There had been three of them in the family – Rra Edgar, this sister, and a brother who had gone to Swaziland and had married a Swazi woman. He ran a hotel in the Ezulweni Valley and never came back to Botswana. He and Rra Edgar had fallen out with one another and did not speak. He was killed in a car crash over in Swaziland – you know what their roads are like – and then, of course, it was too late for any reconciliation. I think that Rra Edgar regretted this and he got his sister to arrange with his brother’s widow, the Swazi woman, to send over his nephew, whom he had never met. He wanted this boy to come and stay on the farm during his school holidays, and that is what happened. Rra Edgar doted on him, as childless uncles can do. He picked up Setswana and became quite fluent in the language. Eventually he was just like a Motswana born and bred – you would never have known that he had been born in Swaziland.
    ‘The sister stayed on the farm. Rra Edgar built her a small house, and she settled in that. She had been married, but her husband had gone off with some bar girl from Francistown and that was it. They had no children, as the marriage had not lasted very long.’
    Mma Makutsi had returned to her desk by now, but was listening avidly. Now she intervened.
    ‘Men are always doing these things,’ she said. ‘Going off.’
    ‘That is true,’ said Mma Sheba.
    They waited for Mma Makutsi to say something else, but she did not.
    ‘About six months ago,’ said Mma Sheba, ‘Rra Edgar died. He dropped dead very suddenly and they found, when they opened him up, that his heart was not very good. They said that it was something of a miracle that he had lasted as long as he did – fifty-four years, Mma Ramotswe.’
    ‘It is very early to become late,’ said Mma Ramotswe. Obed Ramotswe had been only a year or two older, and she thought of all the years that her own father had missed. But then he had been a miner, and it was the dust that killed miners. It lined the lungs, so they said, and that lining turned, in due course, to rock.
    ‘He had asked me to draw up a will,’ Mma Sheba went on. ‘I had done it and now I had to put the will into effect. There were one or two small legacies: one to the government school in his village, another to Camp Hill, and a small amount to his sister, who was living on the farm when he died. The main asset, though, was the farm.’
    ‘That would have been worth a lot,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘And then there would have been the cattle. You must not forget the cattle.’ It was her father’s cattle that had made it possible to open the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Behind so many things in Botswana there lay cattle – it had always been like that.
    ‘The cattle were very valuable,’ said Mma Sheba. ‘They went with the farm. The will said: “the farm and all its stock and equipment”.’
    Mma Ramotswe thought she knew who got those. ‘The nephew?’
    Mma Sheba nodded. Behind her, seated at her desk, Mma Makutsi was silent.
    ‘But…’ Mma Sheba looked down at her hands.
    ‘Yes, Mma?’
    ‘But I’m not sure that the right person will get them.’
    They waited.
    ‘You haven’t found the nephew?’ asked Mma Ramotswe.
    ‘I fear that is true, Mma,’ said Mma Sheba. ‘You see, what has happened is that a young man has stepped forward. He has come into my office and has claimed to be the nephew. He has shown me his birth certificate and his passport too. They both say he is Liso Molapo.’
    Mma