Yvonne

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 2: Yvonne

Yvonne let herself in at 8:57 with the spare key her mother had given her in 2009 and which she had carried on her keyring ever since, even during the years she had not used it because Mama had still been Mama and locking your door against your own daughter would have offended her on principle.

She set the bags on the counter. Two of them: produce from Easy Way, and the small one from Cash Saver with the cornmeal Mama liked and the tea bags she had been buying for forty years. Yvonne had stopped trying to vary the order. She had stopped trying to introduce things. Mama did not need oat milk. Mama did not need the fancy granola. Mama needed cornmeal and the tea bags in the green box, and Yvonne had finally learned, somewhere around her fifty-fifth birthday, that loving an elder is not the same as parenting a child. The work was not to expand. The work was to hold the shape they had chosen and not let it tip over.

"Mama?"

"Kitchen," her mother called back, which was a lie — the voice came from the hallway — but it was the lie of a woman who had been called to the kitchen for sixty years and had organized her location around the answer rather than the other way around.

Ola Mae appeared in the doorway. She was already dressed for the day. Pressed slacks, white blouse, the small gold cross at her throat that she had worn since 1971 and had not, to Yvonne's knowledge, ever taken off. Her hair was set. Her shoes were on. It was nine in the morning on a Saturday, and her mother looked the way her mother had looked on every Saturday Yvonne had been alive: like a woman who had given the day permission to begin.

"You didn't have to bring all this," Ola Mae said.

"I was at Easy Way already."

"You weren't at Easy Way at eight in the morning, Yvonne."

"I was at the gym."

"You were not at the gym."

They smiled at each other. It was a small, dry, unspoken thing — the same exchange they had been having for two years, and which neither of them was going to win because neither of them was actually trying to. The exchange was the visit. The groceries were just an occasion.

Yvonne kissed her on the temple and turned to put away the tomatoes.

She had developed, in the last two years, a system for arriving. The first ten minutes she did not look at anything but what she had brought. She put the cold things in the refrigerator. She put the dry things in the pantry. She put the bread in the breadbox that had been on the same counter since Yvonne was seven. She did this with her back to her mother because she had learned, the hard way, that the moment she turned around and looked too carefully at the kitchen, her face would do something her mother would see, and the visit would shift.

Mama did not need to be looked at like that. Mama could feel it.

So Yvonne unpacked.

She felt, somewhere behind her, her mother sit at the table — the slight scrape of the chair that was always second from the wall, the small exhale that her mother had begun making when she sat down and had not yet noticed she was making.

"You sleep all right?" Yvonne asked.

"I slept the way I sleep."

"That's not an answer, Mama."

"It is the only answer I have for that question, baby. You been asking it for two years."

Yvonne smiled at the inside of the refrigerator. She put the milk on the second shelf. She put the eggs in the door. She closed the door.

She turned around.

The first thing she saw was the prayer book.

It was open on the table. Mama had set her tea down beside it but had not moved it, which meant Mama had not been to bed. Or Mama had been to bed and gotten back up. Or Mama had carried the book in from the front room, which Mama did not do, because the book lived on the side table and the side table was where the book was prayed from.

"Mama."

"Hm."

"What's the book doing in here."

Her mother looked at it the way a woman looks at her own hands when someone asks her what she did with the keys. Briefly. With a small, careful expression that did not quite reach the eyes.

"I brought it in," Ola Mae said. "I wanted to look at something."

"Look at what."

"A name."

Yvonne sat down. She did not pretend she was not sitting down. She had stopped, in the last six months, pretending things were casual. The pretending had become its own injury. "What name."

Her mother did not answer for a moment. Yvonne watched her — watched the way her mother's eyes went briefly to the page and then briefly away and then briefly back, the way a woman who is trying to find north in a city she used to live in watches a corner she does not quite recognize.

"Calvin Pruitt," her mother said.

Yvonne knew, without looking, every name on her mother's active list. Some of them by repetition. Some by years of overhearing them at the kitchen table. Calvin Pruitt was not on the active list.

"Who is that, Mama."

"I'm working on it."

Yvonne's chest did a thing she had taught it not to do.

She had been keeping a list of her own. It was on her phone, in the notes app, under a heading she had typed in February and had never been able to bring herself to retitle: Mama things. Keys in the freezer (October). Tiana's name forgotten (December). Burnt the rice (January, twice). Asked when Daddy was coming home (March, once, she didn't repeat it). Pastor Honeycutt's wife's name forgotten on the phone (April). Calling Marcus by the name of her brother who died in 1962 (last week).

She had not added today yet. She had not opened the app this morning. She would not, she had decided, open the app in the kitchen. The app was for the car.

But she would have to add today.

"Mama, I'd like you to come see Dr. Akinyele next week. The new one Tiana likes. I told you about her."

"I remember."

"Tuesday morning. I can take you."

"I have church on Tuesday. The Mothers' Board meets."

"Mama. The Mothers' Board meets on Wednesday."

Her mother looked at her.

It was not a long look. It was not a frightened look. It was the specific look of an eighty-two-year-old woman who had discovered, in the company of her own daughter, that the calendar she had been carrying inside her had moved a square without telling her, and she did not have anywhere to put the moving down.

"Tuesday I'm free," her mother said quietly, after a moment. "I will go with you."

Yvonne could have cried. She did not. She had not, in front of her mother, cried since 1989, when her father had lifted her chin and told her — with a love so total it had not occurred to her to argue — that she was never to cry where her mother could see it because her mother already carried enough. She had honored that her whole life. She honored it now. She nodded and said, "I'll pick you up at nine-thirty," and she did not say anything else for a moment, because the inside of her throat had gone thick and she had to wait for it to stop.

Her mother reached across the table and put her hand over Yvonne's hand.

The hand was eighty-two years old. The skin was thin. The veins were close. The grip was still, somehow, the grip Yvonne remembered from being four years old and crossing Park Avenue.

"Baby," her mother said. "It is going to be all right."

"I know, Mama."

"It is going to be all right because the Lord is the Lord and I have been His for a long time. It is going to be all right because you are a good daughter. It is going to be all right because I am eighty-two years old and I have already had the life I prayed for and anything from here is His to do what He wants with."

Yvonne could not speak.

"You don't have to fix it," her mother said. "You only have to come on Saturdays. That is what you have to do. That is your part."

Yvonne nodded. She did not trust her voice.

Her mother squeezed her hand once, the small firm squeeze that had been her mother's punctuation since before Yvonne had words for it, and let go.

They sat at the table with cornbread and coffee for an hour. They talked about Tiana, who had switched to the day shift and was sleeping better. They talked about Marcus, who was thinking about coming home for Easter for the first time in three years. They talked about Mt. Calvary's fall revival, which had been moved up because Pastor Honeycutt's mother was finally coming in from Tupelo and they wanted her to be there. They did not talk about the book, which had stayed open on the table the whole time, and which Yvonne had not looked at again, and which her mother had not closed.

At ten-thirty Yvonne stood to leave. She had a parent meeting at eleven that she could push but did not want to. She kissed her mother on the temple again. Her mother walked her to the door — the way her mother walked everyone to the door — and stood on the porch in the cool spring sun watching her until the car was at the corner. Yvonne lifted her hand without turning her head, and her mother lifted hers, and the morning continued.

Yvonne sat in the car at the corner for a moment before she turned.

She opened the notes app. She opened Mama things. She typed: Asked who Calvin Pruitt was. Couldn't tell me. Said she's working on it. The book was on the kitchen table, which it never is. Forgot Mothers' Board is Wednesday.

She read it. She did not change anything. She closed the app.

She put both hands on the wheel.

She had become, in the last year, a woman who prayed in her car. It was not something she had planned. It was not something she would have predicted. She had been a steady woman of God her whole adult life, but the praying had largely happened on Sundays and at meals and at her bedside, and she had not, in any organized way, taken it into the Toyota. The car prayers had begun without her noticing. She had pulled out of a Walgreens parking lot one afternoon in October and realized she was already in the middle of a sentence.

She prayed now.

Lord. I cannot fix her. I am her daughter and I cannot fix her. You are going to have to be what I cannot be. You are going to have to be the floor when the floor goes. You are going to have to be the name in the book when she cannot read the name. I am asking You for things I have no right to ask. I am asking You for them anyway. She has been Yours longer than I have been alive, and I am asking You to be hers now in a way I cannot see and do not have to see.

Hold her, Lord. Hold what she cannot hold.

She sat for another moment. A truck went past on Park. A child rode by on a bicycle in a Sunday-school dress, two days early.

She put the car in drive.

In the kitchen, Ola Mae sat with the book.

She had not closed it because Yvonne had not asked her to and she had not wanted to. Closing it in front of Yvonne would have been an admission, and admissions in her own kitchen were not a thing she was prepared to make today. She did not yet know what she was prepared to make. She was eighty-two years old. She had time to figure it out.

She looked at the name.

Calvin Pruitt.

The name had not become more familiar in the eight hours since she had first failed to know it. It was still only a faint warmth behind her eyes, the residue of something that had once been hot.

She put her finger on it again, the way she had put her finger on it in the dark.

She closed her eyes.

The thing about memories, she had learned, was that they did not come when you called them. They came when you stopped calling. They came the way deer came to the back of her grandmother's garden in Mississippi when she was seven years old — not when she sat at the screen door watching for them, but when she finally gave up and went inside, and her grandmother said, Baby, look, and she looked, and there they were, three of them, eating the lettuce.

She breathed.

Eldridge was at the kitchen table with his hat off.

She could see this. She did not strain. She let it come.

The kitchen was the kitchen, but in the older form — the wallpaper they'd had until 1991, the pale yellow with the small green vines, and the curtains she had made herself the year before. It was night. Late. The clock above the stove read something past ten.

Eldridge had taken his coat off but not his tie. His tie was loose at the throat. He was tired. The kind of tired that sat in the shoulders. He had been at a deacons' meeting that had run long, and she had been at the meeting too — she had not been allowed in the deacons' part, the door had been closed for that, but she had sat in the kitchen with Sister Loretta and the coffee that was never any good and waited. Because what they were going to decide was about a young man they were going to decide about, and Ola Mae was not going to leave until they had.

The young man.

She could feel him in the room with her now, not as a face but as a temperature. The temperature of a person who was twenty-three and who had stolen and who had come back. He had stood up in the front of the meeting and said he was sorry. He had been thin. He had been wrong-skinned, the gray that the addiction made under the brown. He had cried. He had said he did not know if he could stop but he wanted to try and he was asking the church not to put him out because the church was the only floor he had left.

The deacons had not believed him.

She had believed him.

She had walked into the closed part of the meeting — she had walked past three men who had tried to step in front of her, and she had not stopped, because she had been twenty-eight years married to a deacon and she had been a woman of that church for fifteen years and she had decided in the kitchen, drinking the bad coffee, that there were rooms whose doors did not apply to her — and she had stood at the head of the long table and said —

The kitchen tipped.

The yellow wallpaper fluttered like a curtain in a draft. The clock above the stove began to move. The kitchen she was in now reasserted itself — the kitchen of 2026, with the white walls and the new refrigerator Yvonne had made her get and the sun in the window above the sink — and the kitchen of 1978 receded.

The young man receded with it.

She held still.

She did not chase. She did not press. She had, in the sixty seconds the memory had been with her, learned three things she had not known when she woke up: the year was 1978; the room had been the deacons' meeting room at Mt. Calvary; she had stood up and spoken when women were not yet supposed to. The fourth thing — the thing she had said — was already gone.

She sat with the gone.

After a long time she opened her eyes.

The kitchen was the kitchen. The cornbread plate was on the counter where Yvonne had left it. The book was open on the table.

She put her finger on Calvin Pruitt's name a third time.

I do not know what I said in that room, she told the Lord, in the quiet that was not quite words. I do not know what came of it. I do not know what You did with it. Eldridge is gone and I cannot ask him. The deacons are mostly gone and I cannot ask them. The young man is somewhere I cannot reach.

She breathed.

But You were in that room with me. You were the reason I stood up. You are the reason this name is in this book. I do not have to know the rest. I am too old to know the rest. I do not need to know the rest.

She paused. The next thing she said surprised her, the way the prayer in the dark had surprised her. It rose without her organizing it.

Just — let me know, Lord. If You want me to. Before I go. Let me know one thing came of it. Let me know one prayer in this book did its work. I am not asking because I doubt. I am asking because I am tired and I would like, if it is Your will, to put the book down with one name crossed through that I crossed through myself.

She sat with it.

She had not, in fifty years of praying, often asked the Lord for a thing for herself.

She closed the book. She set her hand on the cover the way her mother had set her hand on the cover of her own Bible, and the way her mother's mother had set her hand on the cover of hers — flat, light, the pressure of a woman saying I trust You with this without needing the words.

She stood up. Her hips made their announcement. She acknowledged it.

She put the book under her arm and walked it back to the side table in the front room, where it lived, and where it would be in the morning when she came back to it at the same hour she had come back to it for forty-six years.

The pecan tree outside was beginning to leaf. The light through the window had the green-gold cast that meant April in Memphis. She stood for a moment in the front room and let the light do its work on her face, the way she let everything do its work — patiently, without demand.

Then she went to wash the plates.

The day was long. There was no hurry. The Lord was the Lord, and the keeping was His, and somewhere in the city — or in another city, or in the ground — a man whose name she could not quite hold was being held by Someone who could.