The Name on the Receipt
"Sir, it was your younger brother who collected it. He said you told her to come for it."
The young lady who was behind the wooden counter held up the small white envelope, and I looked at it as if it had grown legs and walked out of my pocket. Inside this white envelope was the receipt for a microwave oven I had spent some couple of months to save up and buy. I had gone to the store that evening to carry it, only to discover that somebody had already been in the store a day earlier to collect it.
My younger brother, Mike, was the first person I placed a phone call to after messaging and no response. He picked up after the second ring, sounding cheerful in an unnecessary way.
"Did you come to pick up my microwave oven? I asked him.
He did not reply immediately; he paused and said, "Bro, I wanted to surprise you and ease up the stress."
I went quiet for some seconds. Mike had always been the brother who took my stuff without telling or asking for permission, returned it very late, and made fun of me as his big brother whenever I tried to warn him.
I have taken it as it is and decided to tag it as his nature. Besides, he is my immediate younger brother. In our family, that title always has a way of making every argument feel like a crime carried out by the older person.
“What surprise requires you to use my name?” I asked.
He told me that I mentioned it earlier, and he only wants to be the first to test out the oven at home. He has watched some random TikTok videos online on cooking, and he had thought he would use that opportunity to practice it out since I am not yet around. He did not bother to tell me because he knew I would say no, and since the store attendant already knows that he is my brother and we do come together, they let him carry it.
That last sentence hurt more than the missing microwave oven.
Looking from inside the store, watching a not-so-old woman arranging some mangoes into small heaps in bowls by the roadside. She sprinkling water and using the edge of her wrapper to chase away files, never losing count of the mangoes in front of her. I began to wonder how Mike could know me so deep to predict my answer and still behave as though what I told him did not matter.
When I arrived home, he was there waiting for me to come in. The microwave wave has already been put in the kitchen, still wrapped in the box it came with. He has not used it to do what he watched on TikTok and said he was waiting for me to unbox it first.
"I wanted to use it for what I watched online," he explained again.
I looked at the oven. Still intact. Not removed and repackaged. No single nylon had been torn. Anyone looking at it would have thought the matter was settled.
But Mike will not stop talking, explaining how he had intended to tell me, how everything went on so fast, and how he had only wanted to practice what he saw. I did not say a word and kept listening until he ran out of what to say.
Then I asked him a question I had not planned to ask.
"If you knew I was not going to allow you, why did you think I would be happy to discover you had done it anyway?”
He looked at my face, then looked away. This time, she was left with no quick answer.
I left the oven. In the kitchen without doing anything to it, and went to my room. Still that late evening, Mike came to my door, knocked, and asked if he could have some conversations with me. I told him to enter and sit on my bed.
We had all the conversation he wanted us to talk about that evening, but I still remember that first knock more clearly than anything he said.
Thank you for reading.
Images created by Gemini AI
