Mother's Day

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 14: Mother's Day

The Williamsons left at three on Sunday afternoon.

They had eaten Sunday dinner with the family — the five Brookses and the three Williamsons around Mama Tate's kitchen table with the leaf folded out, eight place settings of the good blue plates, with Patrice's mother's pound cake again for dessert because Patrice had been emphatic that the rest of the cake was to be left in this kitchen and not flown back to Houston in a Tupperware — and Tiana had driven them to the airport while Yvonne and Carl began the dishes and Mama Tate sat on the porch in the May light watching the rental car back out of the driveway with Ruth's small hand waving from the back window the way Yvonne's small hand had once waved at her from the back of a Greyhound in 1976.

Mama Tate had waved back.

She had stayed on the porch for an hour after the car had turned the corner.

Yvonne had not, in the hour, come out. Yvonne had been at the kitchen sink with Carl, and the two of them had talked low — Mama Tate had heard the small steady voices through the screen — and Mama Tate had understood that her daughter was using the dishes to do the small private work of putting Saturday and Sunday into the rooms inside herself where they would live.

The hour had been quiet.

The hour had also been the hour that came before the second visit, and Mama Tate had sat in the wicker chair with her hands folded over her purse and had watched the corner of Park, because Mother's Day was not, today, finished. The Hightowers had been told they could come, if they wanted to, between four and six. The decision had been theirs. Marcus had not pushed. Sheryl Hightower had said, on the phone Friday night when Marcus had called from Atlanta, I'll talk to Reggie. I'll let you know. She had texted Sunday morning at nine: We will come at four-thirty if Mother Tate is up to it. Just for a short visit. Reggie will drive. Naomi will be in red sneakers because they are her favorite shoes and she has decided that important days require the shoes.

Mama Tate, when Marcus had read her the text at the kitchen table, had laughed wetly and had said: Tell Sheryl Hightower the red sneakers are welcome on this porch.

She watched the corner of Park.

The Hightowers' car turned in at four twenty-eight.

It was a silver Camry, several years old, clean. Reggie Hightower drove. Sheryl Hightower was in the passenger seat. Naomi was in the back in the car seat, in a yellow dress and the red sneakers and two small Afro puffs that Sheryl had clearly redone an hour ago.

Mama Tate sat very still in the wicker chair.

She had been told by Marcus on Saturday morning to expect her own face to do a thing. She had not, in two days, anticipated what the face would do. The face — when the car pulled in, when she could see Naomi's small head in the back seat through the rear window — did the small involuntary lift of a great-grandmother seeing her great-granddaughter for the first time, which was a different lift than the lift she had done for the porch on Saturday with Ruth, because Ruth had come to her as a granddaughter of a kept one and Naomi was coming as a kept one she had not yet been told about, and the difference was the small difference between meeting an heir and meeting your own.

She did not stand up. She had decided she would receive Naomi from the chair, the way she had received Ruth.

Marcus came out onto the porch. He was barefoot — he had taken his shoes off after dinner — and his face was the careful face of a son meeting a thing on his mother's porch in front of his grandmother. He went down the steps to the path. He did not run. He walked.

Sheryl got out of the passenger side.

Sheryl Hightower was sixty-one — Mama Tate would learn this later — and she was in a navy church suit with a small white pin at the collar, and her hair was set, and she carried herself the way church mothers carried themselves, which was to say: she carried herself like a woman who had buried a child six months ago and had not yet been allowed to put down the carrying.

Reggie was sixty-three. He was a little stooped at the shoulders. He had been, Mama Tate would also learn later, a tile contractor for thirty-seven years and had retired in 2019, and he had been recovering from a stroke since 2021 and walked with a slight drag on the right foot. He came around the back of the car to undo Naomi's car seat.

Sheryl met Marcus on the path.

The two of them did not, at first, embrace. They stood for a moment with the small respectful distance that two adults stand at when they have not yet decided what kind of family they are. Then Sheryl put her hand on Marcus's arm — Mama Tate registered this from the porch — and she said something low to him, and Marcus nodded, and Sheryl turned to look at the porch.

She looked at Mama Tate.

She did not, for a moment, move.

Then she put her hand to her own chest, and Mama Tate watched her do it, and she said — across the path, in a voice that was small but that carried — "Mother Tate."

"Sister Hightower."

"I have been hoping to meet you."

"And I have been waiting to meet you, Sister."

"I will come up. May I?"

"You come up."

She came up the steps.

Reggie was at the back of the car, lifting Naomi out of the seat. Naomi was talking the small steady stream of a four-year-old who had been told something important was happening today and who had decided to fill the silence around the importance with the names of every plant she could see in the front yard. Pecan tree. That's a pecan tree, Grandpa. Mama said pecan trees have green hands. Look at the hands. There's a bird.

Sheryl reached the top of the steps.

She did not, at first, sit. She stood by the wicker chair Patrice had sat in yesterday, and she looked at Mama Tate.

"Mother Tate. Before Naomi comes up. I want to say one thing to you."

"Tell me, baby."

"I have been afraid of this porch for two months."

"I know you have."

"I have not been afraid of you. I have been afraid of what coming here would do to me. To Reggie. To the small rhythm we have been building with Naomi since November. I have been afraid that bringing her here would feel like beginning to give her away."

"Sister."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Sit down. Bring your husband up. Then we are going to talk for about three minutes before Naomi comes up the steps. I do not want to talk about this in front of her. I want to set the table for her arrival. You all right with that?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Sheryl sat. She turned and called down to Reggie, who had Naomi in his arms now: "Reg. Bring her up the path slow. Mother Tate and I are going to talk a minute." Reggie nodded. He set Naomi down. He took her hand. He began the slow walk from the curb to the porch, with Naomi pointing at things and Reggie giving her the small grandfather-attention that meant the walk would take five minutes if she wanted it to, which gave the porch its three minutes.

Mama Tate looked at Sheryl.

"Sister Hightower."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You are not giving her away today."

"Mother Tate —"

"You are not giving her away. You are not, in any month of the next year, going to give her away. The little girl has lost her mama. She has not lost her grandmama. She is not going to lose her grandmama. She has a grandmama and a grandpa, and the grandmama and the grandpa are her primary keepers, and the primary keepers do not change because a great-grandmother across town has been told her name. You are her people. You will remain her people. I am the third grandmother. The third grandmother is a smaller chair than the first. I will sit in the smaller chair. I am eighty-two years old, Sister. I am not going to take anyone from you. I do not have time to take. I have time to receive what you give me, and to give back what I am asked to give. The arrangement, in this house, is yours to make. I will not press."

Sheryl Hightower did not, immediately, speak.

She sat with the words a moment.

Then she said, very quietly: "Mother Tate. I needed to hear that."

"I know you did."

"I needed to hear it from your own mouth."

"That is why I said it on the porch and not at the kitchen table. The porch is where the negotiation happens. The kitchen is where the family eats."

Sheryl smiled. It was a small wet smile. "Mother Tate. Aliyah said about you — she did not know you, of course, but Marcus had told her about you when they were together, in twenty twenty-one — that you were the kind of woman who, if she ever met you, she would feel three steps behind in the conversation. I am feeling three steps behind."

"You are not, Sister. You are exactly where you ought to be. You are the woman Aliyah trusted with her child. The Lord and Aliyah picked you for the job. You are doing the job. I am the woman walking up to the job late, with my hat on, asking if I can sit in the back. That is where I am sitting. The back."

"You will not sit in the back, Mother Tate."

"I will sit where I am asked. The asking will be slow. I am all right with slow."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Now. Reggie is almost here. Tell me one thing about Naomi before she comes up. The thing she does not like a stranger to know on the first visit. The small thing."

Sheryl thought.

"She does not like to be picked up by people she has just met. She will let you hold her hand. She will not let you lift her. Wait six months for the lifting. Reggie waited six months."

"Six months for the lifting. I will not lift her, Sister."

"And — Mother Tate. She does not like to be told she is a brave girl. Her mama told her she was a brave girl through the cancer, and Naomi has decided, on her own, that brave is a word for sick people, and that she does not want to be a brave girl. You can call her smart. You can call her good. You can call her a thinker. Do not call her brave."

"I will not call her brave."

"Last thing. She — she takes a long time deciding things. She is going to walk into your kitchen and look around for several minutes before she sits. Do not push the sitting. Reggie has learned to put a small bowl of grapes on the table where she can see it, and the grapes settle her. The grapes are her permission to be in a new room."

"Yvonne!" Mama Tate called, without turning.

The screen door opened immediately. Yvonne had been in the front room for the last three minutes, listening through the screen the way she had been told to. "Yes, Mama."

"Wash a small bowl of grapes. The green ones in the back of the refrigerator. Set them on the kitchen table. Put them at the chair by the door."

"Yes, Mama."

The screen closed. Sheryl looked at Mama Tate.

"You — you knew Yvonne was at the door."

"My daughter has been at doors I am sitting near since she was four. I always know."

Sheryl laughed. It was the first uncomplicated laugh she had laughed on the porch.

Reggie and Naomi reached the bottom of the steps.

Naomi looked up at the porch.

She looked at Marcus, who had come up to stand by the railing. She looked at Sheryl in the wicker chair. She looked at Mama Tate.

She did not, at first, climb the steps.

She held Reggie's hand at the bottom and looked up at the porch the way she had looked up the path, with the small careful four-year-old work of taking a new place in. She looked at the pecan tree to the left and the dogwoods across the lot and the porch boards and the small American flag Yvonne had stuck in a planter for Memorial Day already even though it was three weeks early.

Then she looked at Mama Tate.

Mama Tate did not, in any visible way, do anything. She sat in the wicker chair with her hands folded over her purse. She did not smile too big. She did not lean forward. She did not speak.

She looked back at the little girl.

For a moment they looked at each other.

The little girl was four. Her mother had been dead for six months. Her father was a man she had met twice and was standing on the porch of the woman the man had brought her to meet. The world had been arranging itself around her in ways she could not, at four, fully process, and she had been arranging herself around the world in the small steady ways a four-year-old arranges, which was: by reading the faces.

She read Mama Tate's face for a long moment.

Mama Tate let her read.

Then Naomi said, to Reggie at her elbow, in the small clear voice of a child who had decided: "Grandpa. I am ready to come up."

"Yes, baby."

She let go of Reggie's hand.

She walked up the steps by herself. She did them one at a time, with both feet on each step, the way four-year-olds do steps. She reached the top. She walked over to Mama Tate's wicker chair. She stopped a foot away.

She held out her hand.

She did not say anything.

Mama Tate, who had been told eight minutes ago not to lift Naomi and had been planning, in the eight minutes, to honor that instruction with everything in her, took the small offered hand in her own old hand. The hand was warm. The fingers were small. There was a small white scar on the back of the wrist where, Sheryl would later say, Naomi had fallen on a metal slide in her preschool yard the week after her mother's funeral and had, with the strange grace of small children in the worst seasons of their families, not cried.

Mama Tate held the hand.

She said: "Naomi Hightower. My name is Mother Tate. You are very welcome on my porch."

"Thank you, Mother Tate."

"Are you a thinker, baby?"

"Yes, ma'am. Grandma says I think too much."

"Grandma is wrong, baby. There is no such thing as thinking too much. You think exactly as much as you think."

The little girl looked at her with a small surprised look that was, Mama Tate registered, the same surprised look Marcus had given her at four when she had said something to him at this same chair that no other adult in his life had ever said.

"That's true," said Naomi, after a moment.

"Yes, baby. It's true. You think the way you think. You do not need anybody to tell you the size of your own thinking. You let your grandmama love you and you let her be wrong about that one thing. She is right about almost everything else."

Naomi looked at Sheryl, who had been watching the whole exchange with her hand pressed flat against her own chest, and Naomi said, with the small ratifying nod she had given on the path: "Grandma. Mother Tate says you are right about almost everything else."

Sheryl laughed wetly. "I'll take that, baby."

"Mother Tate."

"Yes, Naomi."

"Grandpa says you have grapes."

"I do, baby. They are inside. On the kitchen table. At the chair by the door."

"Can I go in?"

"You can. You take Yvonne's hand at the door. Yvonne is my daughter. She is going to walk you to the chair."

Naomi nodded. She let go of Mama Tate's hand. She walked to the screen door. The door opened from the inside — Yvonne had been waiting — and Yvonne knelt on the threshold the way Yvonne had been kneeling for two weeks and offered her hand. Naomi took it. They walked into the kitchen together.

The screen closed.

For a moment nobody on the porch spoke.

Sheryl Hightower had her hand over her face. Reggie had come up the steps and put his hand on his wife's shoulder. Marcus was leaning against the railing with both hands on it, looking at the porch boards, breathing carefully. Mama Tate was in the wicker chair with the small empty space on her hand where Naomi's hand had been, and she was not crying, exactly, but her eyes were doing a slow steady thing.

After a long while Reggie said, in his quiet voice: "Mother Tate."

"Brother Hightower."

"Aliyah used to talk about your hands."

"She did?"

"Marcus must have described them to her. She said your grandson's grandmother had hands that, when she put them on a face, the face stopped being afraid. She said it was a thing Marcus had told her about you when he was twenty-three and she had been crying about her father's stroke. She had remembered it. She told me, in October, two weeks before she went, that if Naomi ever met you she should be allowed to hold the hand. She said the hand would be enough."

Mama Tate could not, for a moment, breathe.

She nodded. She nodded a long time.

Reggie did not press. Reggie, like Carl, was the kind of man who said one true thing on a porch and then was quiet for the next ten minutes to let it settle.

The Hightowers stayed forty-five minutes.

Naomi ate the grapes at the kitchen table, slowly, three at a time, and after about eight minutes she walked over to Mama Tate — who had come inside and sat at the table with her — and she climbed into the chair beside her without lifting and sat very close. She did not climb into the lap. She sat in the chair that was beside the chair, and she put her small elbow on Mama Tate's arm in the way of a four-year-old leaning a little against a new adult to test the leaning.

Mama Tate let her lean.

They did not, in the forty-five minutes, talk much. Naomi told Mama Tate about her preschool. She told her about the dinosaur she had shown Marcus. She told her, with the small clinical seriousness of a four-year-old, that her mama was in heaven and that her mama had told her before she went that she would always be allowed to think about her mama at any time, and that she was thinking about her mama right now, on this porch, but that she was not sad, she was just thinking.

Mama Tate said: "Baby. Your mama is in heaven. She is being kept by the Lord. The Lord lets us think about people we love any time we want. There is no wrong time. You think about your mama in this kitchen as long as you need to."

Naomi nodded. She ate three more grapes.

After a while she said: "Mother Tate."

"Yes, baby."

"Can I come back?"

"You can come back, baby. Whenever your grandma and your grandpa say."

"Can I bring my dinosaur?"

"You bring your dinosaur."

"Okay."

She slid off the chair. She went over to her grandmother, who was at the kitchen counter with Yvonne, and she leaned against Sheryl's leg.

"Grandma. I am ready to go home."

"All right, baby."

The Hightowers gathered their things. They had not, in the forty-five minutes, sat for long. Sheryl and Reggie had moved between the kitchen and the porch with Naomi, the way the parents of a small child move at a stranger's house, attentive without crowding. They had not stayed for dinner — Sheryl had been clear at the door that this would be a short visit — and Mama Tate had not pressed.

At the door Sheryl turned to Mama Tate.

"Mother Tate. Thank you."

"Sister Hightower. You come back in two weeks if you want to. You come back when you and Reggie decide. The porch will be here. The grapes will be here. The pecan tree will be here. I will be here."

"Yes, ma'am."

Reggie shook Mama Tate's hand. He did not say anything. He did not need to.

Naomi looked up at Mama Tate from the porch.

"Mother Tate."

"Yes, Naomi."

"You have soft hands."

Mama Tate's eyes filled.

"Thank you, baby."

"Bye."

"Bye, baby."

The Hightowers went down the steps. Marcus walked them to the car. He helped Reggie buckle Naomi into the seat. He spoke, low, with Sheryl at the driver's window. Sheryl nodded twice. She put her hand on Marcus's cheek for a moment — Mama Tate saw this from the porch — and then she got in. Reggie waved from the driver's side. The Camry backed out. The Camry turned at the corner.

Marcus came back up the path.

He did not, at first, climb the porch steps. He stopped at the bottom with his hand on the railing.

"Mama Tate."

"Yes, baby."

"You all right?"

"I am better than I have been in twenty years, Marcus Brooks."

He came up the steps. He sat on the porch boards at her feet, the way he had sat in the front room on Friday night a week ago. He put his head against the leg of the wicker chair.

She put her hand on his head.

Yvonne came out of the screen door with two glasses of iced tea. She handed one to Marcus. She handed one to Mama Tate. She did not, for a moment, sit. She stood looking out at the corner where the Camry had turned.

After a while Yvonne said: "Mama. That was a Mother's Day."

"Yes, baby. That was a Mother's Day."

"You are tired."

"I am tired. I am also full. I am the kind of tired that comes from being given more than the day was supposed to hold and being grateful for all of it. That is the kind of tired the Lord forgives you for."

Yvonne sat. The three of them — Mama Tate in the wicker chair, Marcus on the boards at her feet, Yvonne in the second wicker chair — drank the iced tea slowly in the long late light of a Sunday afternoon in May, and the keeping continued, and Mother's Day, in the year of the diagnosis, was over, and a four-year-old in red sneakers had come to the porch and gone, and her name was in the book in two-inch letters with an underline, and the keeping had a face now, and the face would, in time, be back.

Mama Tate did not, that night, do the morning vigil from her chair. She slept early. Yvonne slept in the spare room. The house held them. Outside, the pecan tree shifted in the small night wind. Somewhere in Whitehaven a four-year-old in pajamas was sitting on her grandmother's lap on a couch being read to from a book she had read to her every night for two months, and the four-year-old, halfway through the book, said quietly to her grandmother: Grandma. I had a good time at Mother Tate's house. And her grandmother, who had been holding her composure all the way home, finally let the tears come, and held the child closer, and read on.