Larger

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 10: Larger

She woke on Friday morning at four-thirty-one, which was an hour and forty minutes later than her body had woken her every morning for the better part of two decades, and she lay still in the dark and let the day arrive at her slowly.

The day arrived.

The year was 2026. The day was Friday. The month was April. Marcus was coming home tonight. Yvonne had slept in the spare room. The bad morning had been yesterday and had been the worst of her life since the morning Eldridge had not woken up, and she had survived it, and the survival was its own small fact, and she did not need to celebrate the fact, but she could acknowledge it, and she did.

She breathed.

She turned her face toward the window. The window was the window that had been in this room for sixty-four years. The curtain was the curtain she had bought in 2014. The light was the four-thirty light of a spring morning in Memphis, which was no light yet, only the suggestion of it.

She knew the day. She knew the year. She knew the room.

It was enough.

She did not, this morning, get out of bed by herself. She had decided, sometime in the night between the lost morning and the present, that she would let Yvonne find her. She had told Yvonne to find her. The finding was the new shape. She did not need to invent the new shape this morning — she only needed to allow it.

She lay still and waited.

After a few minutes she heard the door of the spare room open. She heard her daughter's bare feet in the hall. She heard the small careful pause outside her bedroom door — the pause of a woman wondering whether to knock, and deciding not to, and turning the knob softly anyway.

The door opened.

"Mama?"

"I am awake, baby."

Yvonne came into the room. She was in the pajamas she kept in the spare room dresser for nights when she stayed over — the pale blue ones with the small white flowers, which had been a gift from Tiana three Christmases ago — and her hair was loose, and her face had the kind of unguarded morning quietness that Ola Mae had not seen on her daughter's face since Yvonne had been seventeen.

"Did you sleep, Mama?"

"I did. The whole night through. I have not slept the whole night through in a year. Did you?"

"Most of it. I checked on you twice."

"I know."

"You knew I checked on you?"

"I felt you in the doorway, baby. I have felt you in doorways since you were three days old. You did not wake me."

Yvonne sat on the edge of the bed.

She put her hand on her mother's hand. She did not say anything for a moment. Her mother let her not say anything. They sat that way — the daughter on the edge of the bed in pajamas, the mother under the covers in the gown — for the better part of two minutes, and the room held them both.

After a while her mother said: "Walk me to the front room."

"Yes, Mama."

"Find the page."

"Yes, Mama. Twenty-nine twelve."

"Good girl."

The front room was not yet the room of the day. It was still the room of the night — the lamp off, the curtains closed, the small accumulated stillness of a room that had been waiting eight hours to be entered. Yvonne turned on the lamp first. She drew the curtains second. She helped her mother into Eldridge's chair third.

She picked up the prayer book from the side table.

She held it in her hands a moment.

"Mama. Can I touch the inside?"

"You can. I am asking you to."

"I have not, Mama. Not since I was little."

"I know, baby. I have kept it private. The privacy was for me. The privacy is over."

Yvonne opened the book.

She had not, in her adult life, looked inside this book. She had seen the cover for forty years. She had brushed past the book on the side table a thousand times. She had heard the small turning of its pages at three in the morning from down the hall when she had been a girl and the house had still held all four of them. She had not opened it. The book had been her mother's, and she had honored that, and the honoring had been its own kind of love.

She turned to the first page.

The first page had her mother's verse from 1974: The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. The hand was younger than Yvonne had ever seen her mother's hand. It startled her.

She turned the page.

The active list began on the second page. At the top, in the same young hand: In thy hand are all things, and in thy hand is power and might. Underneath, the names — column after column of them, in handwriting that aged across the decades, in inks that had faded by the year. Yvonne had not, in her life, understood how long the list was. She had thought of her mother's praying as a thing her mother did, a daily task, a discipline. She had not understood that the discipline had a record, and that the record was four hundred and some names long, and that more than half of them were people Yvonne did not know.

She did not, this morning, look long.

She found the page she was looking for. She placed the book open on her mother's lap, the spine resting on Mama's wrists, the active list opened to its first page.

She sat down on the small couch.

She did not, at first, know what to do with herself. She had, in two minutes, become a witness to a thing she had been adjacent to for fifty-seven years and had never been inside of. She did not know whether to close her eyes. She did not know whether to bow her head. She did not know whether to speak.

Her mother, without looking up, said: "Baby. Just sit. The Lord knows you are here. You do not have to do anything. You just have to be in the room."

"Yes, Mama."

Yvonne folded her hands in her lap.

Her mother began.

Her finger went down the page. Yvonne watched. The names — many of them she knew. Yvonne. Carl. Marcus. Tiana. Pastor Honeycutt. The deacons by name. The praise team. The Sunday school teachers. James the custodian. Miss Renita. The white couple next door — Noah and Hannah. The neighborhood. The block. The city. The mayor.

The names rose, one by one, off the page. Yvonne could see it without being able to describe it — the small quiet lift, the way her mother's finger touched a name and the name went somewhere it had been going for years.

Her mother prayed for forty-three minutes.

Yvonne sat on the couch and did not move.

When her mother reached the end of the active list, she paused. She lifted her hand from the page. She looked up at Yvonne.

"Baby. The legacy pages. You read me the names today. I am going to listen. I am going to pray with you. You read."

Yvonne did not, immediately, trust her voice.

"Mama. I will not say them right."

"There is no right way to say them. You read them in your own voice. The Lord has been listening to your voice since you were eight days old. He knows what He is hearing."

Yvonne nodded.

She came over. She knelt on the carpet beside her mother's chair. She turned the page. She read the first name.

"Eldridge Tate."

Her mother closed her eyes.

"Patricia Mae Hawkins."

"Mm."

"Sammy Lee."

"Mm."

"Jerome Brooks Sr."

"Carl's daddy. With a date. I crossed him out Wednesday."

"I see."

"Keep going, baby."

She kept going. She read each name slowly. She read the crossed-out names with their dates and notes. She read the held names with no notes at all. She read the names she did not recognize — Brother Carlton's brother, who had died in 1981; a girl named Cheryl who had been on the praise team in 1992 and had moved to Chicago; a man named Dewayne who had been a teenager in the church in 1985 — and she read them with the same care she had read her own father's name, because her mother had taught her, in fifty-seven years of having her as a mother, that you did not give weight to the names you knew at the expense of the ones you did not.

She read for nineteen minutes.

When she finished the legacy pages, she closed the book.

She set her hand on the cover.

She looked up at her mother.

Her mother was crying. Not the crying of yesterday. A different crying. The crying of a woman who had, for the first time in fifty years, prayed her morning prayer with her own daughter on the floor beside her chair.

"Baby."

"Yes, Mama."

"That was the best morning I have had in a year."

"Mama."

"That was the best morning. The book is bigger when more than one person carries it. I knew that on a page. I did not know that in a chair until today."

She put her hand on Yvonne's head, the way she had put her hand on Yvonne's head when Yvonne had been sick at five years old, and she left it there for a long moment, and Yvonne did not move.

After a while her mother said: "Tiana is coming at ten."

"Yes, Mama. Carl called her last night."

"Help me up, baby. I want to be dressed when she gets here."

"Yes, Mama."

Tiana arrived at nine fifty-two.

Tiana Brooks was thirty years old and a nurse in the geriatric unit at Methodist Le Bonheur, and she had inherited from her grandfather Eldridge a quiet face and from her grandmother Ola Mae a way of sitting still in a room until the room told her what it needed. She had, in ten years on the unit, sat by the beds of one hundred and twelve dying people, most of them old, many of them women, and she had developed — without setting out to — a small private liturgy of arriving in a room where someone was being lost. The liturgy was: enter slowly. Do not speak first. Set your hands where the person can see them. Wait.

She used it this morning at her grandmother's house.

She came in through the kitchen door — she had her own key, which she had gotten in 2019 when she had moved back to Memphis from Nashville and Mama Tate had insisted — and she set the small bag she had brought on the counter without unpacking it. She walked to the front room. She stopped in the doorway.

Her grandmother was in Eldridge's chair, dressed, with the prayer book closed on her lap and the new composition book open beside her on the side table. Her mother was on the small couch with her hands folded.

"Grandma."

"Baby."

"Mom said yesterday was hard."

"It was."

"I'm sorry I wasn't here."

"You are here now. Come in. Sit down. Where is your bag?"

"Kitchen counter."

"Bring it. Whatever you brought, you brought for a reason. Let me see."

Tiana went and got the bag. She brought it to the front room. She sat on the couch beside her mother. She opened the bag.

She took out three things. She set them, one at a time, on the coffee table.

The first was a magnifier on a small flexible stand — the kind they used at the unit for elderly patients reading menus and consent forms, with a circular lens and a daylight LED ring around it.

"I brought this so you can see the small print, Grandma. It clamps to the side table. It folds. You don't have to use it. But it will be there if you want it."

The second was a black canvas pouch, zipped, the size of a paperback. She unzipped it. Inside, neatly arranged, was a set of pens — blue and black ballpoints, fine-tipped felt pens in three thicknesses, a thicker marker.

"These are the pens we use on the unit when we have to write things in big letters. You can pick the one you like. They don't bleed through composition paper. I tested them on the same brand you bought."

The third was a small hardcover notebook — leather, dark green, about the size of a paperback — with a thin elastic band around it.

"This is for you. Not for the names. For yourself. For the things that come up when you're praying that you don't want to put in the prayer book but that you don't want to lose. I have noticed at the unit that the women who pray the longest sometimes need a second small book just to hold what comes up. So I brought one. You don't have to use it. It is just there."

She closed her hands in her lap. She looked at her grandmother.

Her grandmother looked at the three things on the coffee table.

She did not, immediately, speak.

After a long moment she reached out and picked up the green notebook. She turned it over in her hands. She opened the elastic. She looked inside.

She closed it.

She looked at Tiana.

"Baby. You have brought me three things this morning that I would have asked for if I had known to ask."

"I know, Grandma."

"How did you know?"

"I have been the granddaughter who watched. I have been watching for a year."

Her grandmother nodded slowly.

"Tiana."

"Yes, Grandma."

"I am going to ask you for one more thing."

"Yes, Grandma."

"I do not want to ask you. I want to tell you that I have been thinking about asking you and that the asking is hard for me, because I have not asked for anything in fifty years and the asking is a muscle that I do not have."

"Grandma. You don't have to ask. You can tell me. I will say yes before you finish."

"Baby, you do not know what it is."

"I know what it is, Grandma."

"You do not."

"I do. Mom told me last night. You want me to be the one who writes the new names. You want me to sit at the table with you and write while you say. You want me to read them back to you. You want me to be the keeper of the new book."

Her grandmother did not, for a long moment, speak.

Then she said: "Baby. Did your mama ask you?"

"She did not, Grandma. She told me what happened yesterday. She told me you said you were going to ask Tiana for a thing this morning. She did not tell me what it was. I knew what it was on the way over. I had time to think. I had time to pray. I have my answer."

"What is your answer, baby?"

"My answer is yes, Grandma. My answer is yes. My answer is yes for this Saturday and yes for next Saturday and yes for every Saturday until I cannot anymore. My answer is yes for the Sundays you cannot make it to church and need someone to sit with you. My answer is yes for the bad mornings. My answer is yes for the page when you cannot find the page. My answer is yes for as long as I have hands."

Her grandmother began to cry.

It was a small dignified crying. Her grandmother had never cried loudly in her life and she did not begin now. The tears went down her face the way tears go down the face of a woman who has been carrying a thing for a long time and has just been told she does not have to carry it alone.

Tiana came around the coffee table. She knelt the way her mother had knelt yesterday. She put her hands on her grandmother's hands. She put her forehead against her grandmother's wrists.

She did not, for a long time, lift her face.

When she lifted it, she said:

"Grandma. I want to start now. Today. Not Saturday. Today. The bag has the pens. The book is on the side table. I have all afternoon. Mom, you can go home if you want. Carl said you should. Daddy said the school called and they understand. Mom, you go home and sleep. I will sit with Grandma. We will start now."

Yvonne did not move. She had been watching her daughter the way a woman watches the next generation of a family take a thing onto its own shoulders, and she had been crying without knowing it, and she did not, in the moment, have the resources to speak.

She nodded.

"You go, Mom."

"Tiana —"

"Go, Mom. Sleep. Pick Marcus up at six fifty-five. Bring him here for dinner. I will have us a roast in by then. Grandma and I will work all afternoon. We will be ready."

Yvonne stood. She walked to her mother. She kissed her forehead. She did not, at the door, look back, because she did not, at that moment, have the look in her to give.

She left.

The house held three people for a moment. Then the house held two. Then Tiana went to the kitchen and put a roast in the oven, and she came back to the front room, and she sat at the coffee table on the floor, and she opened the new composition book, and she picked up the thicker felt pen.

"Grandma. Where do we start?"

They started with Stephen Pruitt.

Mama Tate was clear. The new names go in the front of the new book. The names from the old book — the legacy ones — go in the back. We work toward the middle. The middle is where the books meet.

Tiana wrote it that way. She wrote Stephen Pruitt across the top of the first new page in two-inch block letters, and she wrote Brenda Pruitt his wife underneath, and then Calvin Pruitt Jr., 16, and then Ola Pruitt, 12.

She underlined Ola.

"Grandma. I want to write named for you by her name. Is that all right?"

"Write it, baby."

She wrote: named for Mama Tate.

Mama Tate watched her write. Mama Tate's hand was on the side table. She was not, today, doing the writing herself. She was watching her granddaughter do it. The watching was new. The watching was not a loss. The watching was the small reorganization of the work, the way a foreman sometimes steps back from the job he has been swinging the hammer on for decades and lets the younger man swing it, not because the foreman is finished but because the foreman is teaching.

She was teaching.

She had not, in fifty years, thought of the praying as a thing to teach. She had thought of it as a thing to do.

She was teaching today.

She said: "Tiana. The next ones are the ones from Houston. Patrice and her people. You write them. I will tell you their order."

Tiana wrote them. Patrice Williamson. Maurice Williamson her husband. Camille their daughter. Andre her husband. Ruth their daughter, age 7. Mama Tate paused her at Ruth and said underline her name too. Tiana underlined.

They worked through the morning.

By eleven they had filled four pages of the new book with new names — names Mama Tate had been adding to the old book in small print over the last week and which were now in the new book in letters two inches tall. They had also added, at Mama Tate's instruction, three names that were not yet in either book: Eunice Holcomb of Camden, Arkansas, who kept Carl's daddy first. Olufunmilayo Akinyele of Lagos, who kept Dr. Tobi. Mother Wells of Memphis, who has been a keeper for seventy years and who will, the Lord willing, finish her own race well.

Mama Tate had her granddaughter underline Mother Wells twice.

At eleven forty-five Tiana said: "Grandma. We've been at this two hours. You eat. I'll make you something."

"Make me what your mama would make me."

"I will."

She made her grandmother a small lunch — half a turkey sandwich, a quarter of a peach, sweet tea — and she sat with her at the kitchen table while her grandmother ate. Mama Tate ate the whole sandwich. She had not, in two days, eaten a whole sandwich. Tiana noticed and did not, in any visible way, react. She had learned at the unit that the body of an old woman returning to its appetite was a small private holiness that did not benefit from being announced.

After lunch Mama Tate slept in Eldridge's chair for forty minutes.

Tiana sat on the couch with the new book on her lap and read, slowly, every name they had added that morning. She did not say them aloud. She read them with her finger, the way her grandmother had been reading them for forty-six years. She did not, on the first read, know that she was doing it the way her grandmother did. She did know it on the second.

The second time, she let her own lips move.

She prayed. She did not know if it counted as praying — she had not, in her own life, prayed in any structured way since college; she had not, in her own assessment, been the praying member of the family — but she said the names in her chest, one at a time, and when she got to Ruth Williamson, age 7, her chest did a thing it had not done before, and she had to set the book down and breathe.

She understood, in that small interruption on the couch, what her grandmother had been doing for fifty years.

She picked the book back up. She finished the list.

Her grandmother slept.

The clock on the mantel said one twenty-eight.

The afternoon went the way good afternoons in old houses go — slow, full of small sounds, light moving across the floor an inch at a time. Mama Tate woke at two. They worked another hour on the book. At three Tiana put the roast on lower and took her grandmother to the porch, where they sat in the wicker chairs and did not, for a long stretch, talk. The pecan tree was full of birds. A car went down Park. Miss Renita's grandbabies were home from school and were calling to each other in the back yard.

"Grandma."

"Mm."

"Marcus comes at six fifty-five."

"He comes."

"You want to be sitting up when he comes through the door. Or you want to be on the porch."

"On the porch, baby. He should walk up to me on the porch."

"All right. I'll have you on the porch at six forty-five. Mom and Daddy will pick him up."

"Good."

"Grandma."

"Mm."

"You happy he's coming?"

Mama Tate looked at her granddaughter for a long moment.

"Tiana. Some things are too big a word for happy. Marcus coming home this weekend is one of them. I am not happy. I am — I have been carrying a small worry about that boy for two years, and the carrying is not over, but the carrying has changed shape this week, and tonight I am going to put my hand on his face for the first time in months, and I do not have a word for what that is. Happy is what you say about a meal. Happy is what you say about a sale at the store. What I am tonight is not on that shelf."

Tiana nodded.

"I will pick a different word, Grandma."

"You do not need a word, baby. You will know it when you see my face when he comes up the walk."

The car pulled in at six fifty-three.

Mama Tate was on the porch in the wicker chair. She was in the green dress and the small gold cross and the cardigan, and her hair was set, and her hands were folded in her lap. Tiana was in the second wicker chair beside her. The roast was resting in the kitchen. The composition book was on the side table in the front room with a hundred and twelve names in two-inch block letters, three to a page, the first new chapter of a forty-six-year-long book.

Mama Tate watched the car door open.

Yvonne got out first. Then Carl. Then, from the back seat, Marcus.

He stood at the bottom of the walk for a moment.

He looked up at the porch.

He looked at his grandmother.

His face did the thing his face had not done since he was sixteen and had stood at the same walk in 2014 when Mama Tate had picked him up from a track meet at Westwood and he had walked up to her with the second-place medal in his hand and she had said you ran your race, baby, that is what counted.

He came up the walk.

He came up the walk slowly, the way a man comes home when he has been away too long, and he did not stop at the bottom of the porch steps, he did not stop at the top, he came directly to her chair and he knelt on the porch boards in front of her — in his good clothes, on a Friday evening in April — and he put his head on her lap, the way he had put his head on her lap when he had been a small boy and had been frightened of something he could not name, and he did not, immediately, speak.

She put her hand on his head.

She did not, immediately, speak either.

The light on Park Avenue was the last gold of the day. The pecan tree shifted in a small wind. Yvonne and Carl stood at the bottom of the steps and did not come up, because they had read the moment and known it was for two.

After a long time Marcus said: "Mama Tate."

"Marcus Brooks."

"I came home."

"You came home, baby."

"I should have come home before."

"You came when you came. The Lord arranged the when. You did not. Stop apologizing to a clock that was never your clock."

"Yes, Mama."

"Lift your head, baby. Look at me."

He lifted his head.

She put both hands on his face. Her hands were eighty-two years old and they were the hands that had been on his face since he was four hours old in the hospital where Yvonne had birthed him, and his face was twenty-eight years old and was the face she had been praying for every morning since then.

She looked at him for a long moment.

She said: "You are tired, baby."

"I am, Mama."

"You are also carrying a small grief I have been able to feel from this porch since you were home at Christmas, and I have not said anything because you needed to bring it to me on your own time, and you have brought it now. We will sit together this weekend and you will tell me what it is. Not tonight. Tomorrow morning at the kitchen table after I have had my coffee and Tiana and I have done the book. You and I will sit. You will tell me. I will listen. The Lord will sort the rest."

"Yes, Mama."

"Now stand up. The boards are cold and your knees are not yet old enough to know that. Stand up. Hug your grandmother. Then hug Tiana. Then go inside and let Yvonne come kiss her mother before she falls down where she stands."

He laughed. It was a small wet laugh. He stood. He hugged her — the long careful hug a grown grandson gives to a small grandmother in a wicker chair — and she patted his back the way she had been patting his back for twenty-eight years, and he turned and hugged Tiana, who had stood up and was waiting, and Tiana hugged him hard, and the two of them stood on the porch holding each other for a long moment that was its own private cousin liturgy.

Yvonne came up the steps.

Mama Tate held out her arms. Yvonne knelt in front of her.

"Mama."

"You look tired, baby."

"I am tired."

"You did good. You came back. You brought the boy. Tiana made a roast. The book has its first new chapter. The keeping is being kept. You can rest tonight."

"Yes, Mama."

"Eat with us. Sleep here again. Go to the school in the morning if you have to, but come back for the afternoon. Tomorrow Tiana and Marcus and I will work on the book in the morning and you and Carl will come back at three and we will have all of us in this house together, Friday night through Sunday afternoon, for the first time since two thousand and seventeen."

"Yes, Mama."

"Now help me up. The roast is going to dry out."

The four of them — Carl had come up the steps without ceremony and had taken his cap off and had been kissed on the cheek by Mama Tate and had said Mama in the small gravel of his daily voice — went inside.

The house received them.

The kitchen was warm with the roast. The composition book was on the side table in the front room, a hundred and twelve names long. The prayer book was beside it, four hundred and some names long, with three new lines drawn through and three new dates and three new words. The lamp Eldridge had bought in 1981 was on. The chair he had bought in 1981 was where it had been. The pecan tree he had planted in 1968 was full of its small green hands, and the porch step Carl had built three days ago held under five sets of feet.

They ate the roast.

They talked about small things and one or two large ones. Marcus had a glass of red wine and Carl had a beer and Yvonne and Tiana had sweet tea and Mama Tate had the half cup of coffee she allowed herself on Friday nights when there was something to celebrate, even when she was not sure the word for it. They prayed before the meal — Marcus prayed; Mama Tate had asked him to; he prayed slowly, the way he had been taught at four years old by a woman who was now sitting across the table from him, and he did not falter — and they ate.

After supper they sat in the front room.

Tiana put on a low light. Carl took the small armchair. Yvonne sat on the couch. Marcus sat on the floor by his grandmother's chair the way he had sat on the floor by her chair when he was a child watching cartoons in the same room. Mama Tate had the new composition book on her lap. She had told Marcus, just before they had left the kitchen, that she would show him the new book tonight, and that he could read it as long as he wanted, and that tomorrow morning, after coffee, the two of them would sit at the table and talk.

She opened the book.

She did not, at first, hand it to him.

She held it on her lap and she ran her hand across the page. She looked, for a long moment, at the names her granddaughter had written that morning in two-inch block letters, the names of people her granddaughter had not, this morning, known.

She closed her eyes.

Lord, she said, in the front room, in the company of her family, in the small quiet light of a Friday night in April. Thank You. Thank You for the boy in front of me. Thank You for the daughter on the couch. Thank You for the son-in-law in the chair. Thank You for the granddaughter who said yes today. Thank You for the new book. Thank You for the old book. Thank You for the lost morning yesterday, which I did not want and which You used to gather these people under this roof. Thank You for being the kind of God who keeps the keeper when the keeper cannot keep herself.

She breathed.

I do not know how many of these nights You will give me. I am not asking. I am only saying — for tonight — thank You.

She opened her eyes.

She handed Marcus the book.

He took it. He opened it. He began to read, slowly, the names his grandmother and his cousin had written that morning. The room was quiet around him. Outside, the pecan tree shifted. The neighborhood went on with its Friday-evening business. Somewhere in Detroit a girl named Ola who had been named for the woman in this chair was eating dinner with her father, and somewhere in Houston a girl named Ruth who had not yet met any of the people in this room was already on the lap of a woman who was preparing to bring her north in the spring, and somewhere in Atlanta the apartment Marcus had locked at three that afternoon was dark and waiting, and somewhere in Lagos the grave of a woman named Olufunmilayo Akinyele had a small green plant beginning to push through, and the cloud of witnesses — the keepers and the kept, the named and the still-being-named — held the front room of the small brick house on Park Avenue as quietly as the front room held them.

Mother Tate sat in her husband's chair.

The keeping continued.

It was the end of one volume and the beginning of another, and she did not, this evening, need to know which. She knew only that the book was in her grandson's hands, and that her granddaughter had said yes, and that her daughter was sleeping under her roof, and that the morning would come, and that the morning would bring its own grace, and that the grace did not require her to find the page by herself anymore.

She closed her eyes.

She rested.

She did not sleep. There was a difference, at eighty-two, between the two. She had learned it.