The Bad Week

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 22: The Bad Week

The first morning Mama Tate could not find the kitchen was Monday, the thirteenth of July.

She woke at three oh two. The time was right. The body had remembered the time. She got out of bed the way she had been getting out of bed — slowly, with the acknowledgment of the hips — and she walked toward the doorway of her bedroom. The doorway was the doorway. She crossed the threshold. She turned right.

The hall was the hall.

The hall was also, this morning, longer than it had been yesterday.

She walked. She walked the way she had been walking the hall since 1962. The hall was sixteen feet. At the end of the hall was the kitchen, on the right, and the front room, straight ahead. The small light over the kitchen sink that she had left on before bed — as she had been leaving the light on for six months now, at Tiana's suggestion — should have been visible at the end of the hall. She looked for it.

She could not, at first, see it.

She kept walking.

She reached the end of the hall. There was a door. The door was, in her waking mind, where the door to the kitchen ought to have been. There was not, in her waking memory, a door at that location in this house. The kitchen had always been an open doorway. The door at the end of the hall was the bathroom, and the bathroom was on the left, not the right.

She looked at the door.

She did not, for a long moment, understand where she was.

She turned around. She looked back down the hall. The hall looked wrong. The hall was too long or too short or the walls were the wrong color. The small picture of Eldridge in his work shirt that had been hanging on the wall outside the spare room since 1997 was, tonight, on the wrong wall. She could see it. It was on the wall to her right. It had, for twenty-nine years, been on the wall to her left.

She stood in the hall.

The body that had walked this hall ten thousand times did not, this morning, know where it was.

She said, aloud, quietly: "Lord."

The voice came out in a way that was not her voice.

She stood for another moment. Then she did the thing Tiana had taught her to do, six weeks ago at the kitchen table, when they had sat together and Tiana had told her — gently, the way Tiana told her things now — that Grandma, when you get lost in the house, you stop. You put your hand on the wall. You breathe. You say my name or Mom's name out loud. Whoever is in the house will come.

She put her hand on the wall.

She breathed.

She said: "Yvonne."

It was a quiet call. It was not loud enough, she thought later, to wake a sleeping daughter in the second bedroom. But Yvonne — who had been sleeping in the house every night since the Fourth, at Mama Tate's explicit request, because Mama Tate had decided in the long quiet evening after the fireworks that she did not want to wake up alone anymore — had been, for two weeks, sleeping in the spare room with the door cracked, the way a mother sleeps with a cracked door when the child in the other room is four.

Yvonne heard.

Yvonne was at her side in less than a minute. She came out of the spare room in her pajamas with her hair wrapped and her phone in her hand. She came down the hall in the small fast practiced walk of a woman who had been preparing, since the Fourth, for any night it might be this one.

"Mama."

"Yvonne. I cannot find the kitchen."

"Mama. You're right here. The kitchen is on your right. Look, Mama. Look at the doorway. The light is on. See it?"

Mama Tate looked.

She looked at the doorway. The doorway was the doorway. The light was on. The light was the small low light over the sink that she had been leaving on for six months. The light was where it had always been.

"Yvonne. I — I do not know why I could not see it a minute ago."

"Mama. You could not see it because your brain is tired this morning. That is all. You are not lost. I am here. Come on, Mama. We will walk to the kitchen together. I will make you some warm water."

She took her mother's hand. She walked her slowly into the kitchen. Mama Tate let her. Yvonne filled the blue mug with water from the tap, warm not hot, the way her mother drank it in the mornings. She set the mug in front of her. She sat across from her at the table. She did not, at first, turn on any other light.

Mama Tate held the mug.

Her hands were shaking.

"Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"I do not think I can do the morning today."

"You don't have to, Mama. Tiana is coming at four. I texted her from the hall. She will be here in thirty minutes. She is going to do the morning."

"Yvonne. It is not — it is not just today."

"Mama. We know. We have been ready."

"I — I am going to cry, baby."

"Cry, Mama."

She cried.

She cried the small slow cry of an eighty-two-year-old woman whose hand had been on the prayer-floor for fifty-two years and who had, for the first time in that entire stretch, been unable to find the kitchen. She cried with the small dignified shoulder movement she had cried with at Mother Wells's bedside, and Yvonne did not, across the table, cry back. Yvonne kept her face still. Yvonne held her mother's hand across the table.

After a long while Mama Tate lifted her face.

"Baby. I am afraid."

"I know, Mama."

"The Lord is going to have to hold me more than He has had to before."

"He is, Mama."

"He will."

"He will, Mama."

Tiana came at three forty-one. She came in through the kitchen door with her own key. She did not, this morning, say anything for the first few seconds — she knew what she had been called for; Yvonne had texted her the sentence Mama got lost in the hall; the sentence had been agreed in advance as the sentence that would mean come now — and she came to the table and knelt beside her grandmother's chair and put her face against her grandmother's knee.

Mama Tate put her hand on Tiana's head.

Tiana was thirty years old and a nurse and had been at the unit for ten years and had been, in the last four months, the emergent primary keeper of the household. She let her face stay against her grandmother's knee for a long moment.

Then she said, without lifting it: "Grandma. I want to do the morning with you. I want to be the one who reads this morning. I want to sit in your lap-chair and read the names out loud while you close your eyes. You do not have to find the page. You do not have to hold the book. I will hold it. I will read. You pray along with me in your chest. The Lord will know. The morning will be done. You do not have to do it."

Mama Tate closed her eyes.

"Baby."

"Yes, Grandma."

"The Lord sent you."

"I know, Grandma."

"The Lord has been sending you for a year. I have been pretending I did not notice. I noticed."

"Yes, Grandma."

"You read this morning."

"Yes, Grandma."

They went to the front room. Tiana sat in Eldridge's chair, at her grandmother's explicit instruction. Mama Tate sat on the small couch, something she had not done in the dark morning hour in twenty years. She leaned her head back. She closed her eyes. Yvonne sat in the small armchair across the room, in her nightgown and the robe Tiana had bought her three years ago, and she did not do anything but be in the room.

Tiana opened the new composition book. She had been keeping it on the side table. She turned to the front.

She read.

She read in the voice Mama Tate had first heard her use on Ruth Williamson's name in May — the voice of a granddaughter who had been practicing the prayer-floor in secret for six weeks and who had found, in the practice, her own grandmother's cadence inside her. She read the active list slowly. She read every name. She read — at each name — with the small pause Mama Tate had learned to take after each name, the small breath that was the Lord's room to do what the Lord did.

She read for forty-seven minutes.

Mama Tate, on the couch, did not open her eyes for any of it.

She did not, in the forty-seven minutes, fall asleep. She was awake. She prayed in the small interior way she had been praying for fifty years, each name rising in her chest as Tiana's voice gave it to the room, and she noticed — somewhere in the middle of the list, around the names of the Williamsons — that the praying was, this morning, as whole as it had ever been. She had not lost the praying. She had lost the finding of the kitchen. The praying, it turned out, lived somewhere in her that was lower than the kitchen, older than the hall, further down than the place where the doors had begun to be in the wrong walls.

When Tiana finished the active list, she said, quietly: "Grandma. I'm going to do the legacy pages now. You keep your eyes closed."

"Yes, baby."

Tiana opened the prayer book. She read the legacy pages out of that book, slowly, with her finger on the names the way she had learned from watching her grandmother's finger for months. She read every line. She read Eldridge. She read the three names she had added in June from Mother Wells's green book — Lillian, James, Tamika. She read Daphne Crenshaw. She read Mother Wells, with the date in early June and the word Went home well.

When she finished, Tiana did not, immediately, close the books.

She set her hand on the cover the way Mama Tate always set her hand on the cover.

She said: "Lord. Thank You for this morning. Thank You for my grandmother. Thank You for the list. Thank You for being the Lord through her hands when her hands could write, and for being the Lord through my hands now that I am the one reading. Thank You for letting us walk the names together. We are Yours. The list is Yours. The people are Yours. The keeping is Yours. In Jesus's name."

"Amen," Mama Tate said, softly, from the couch.

"Amen," Yvonne said, from the armchair.

The three of them sat for a long moment in the small lamplight of the front room. Outside, the first bird had begun in the dogwood across the lot. The room was quiet.

After a while Mama Tate said: "Tiana."

"Yes, Grandma."

"That was the morning."

"Yes, Grandma."

"The morning is complete."

"Yes."

"I want to sleep. I want to sleep in my own bed for three more hours. Then I want you to make me biscuits. Then I will come back to the front room and sit in my own chair and we will have coffee and look at the pecan tree. The morning has been done. I do not need to do it again today."

"Yes, Grandma."

Yvonne rose. She helped her mother up. She walked her back down the hall. The hall was shorter this time. Mama Tate did not, this time, have trouble finding the bedroom. Yvonne helped her into bed. She pulled the quilt up.

At the door Yvonne paused.

"Mama. We will be in the kitchen if you wake up. Don't get up alone. Call one of us."

"Yes, baby."

"I love you, Mama."

"I love you, baby."

Yvonne went.

Mama Tate closed her eyes. She slept.

She slept for three and a half hours. When she woke, the light through the window was the light of a full summer morning, and the smell of biscuits was in the house, and the small steady voice of Tiana on the phone with someone in the kitchen was the first sound she registered, and she knew — in the small way her body knew things — that the kitchen was where the kitchen had been, and that the hall was the length it was supposed to be, and that the day, for the next several hours, was going to be all right.

She got up.

She walked down the hall. The hall was fine. She walked to the kitchen. The kitchen was fine. Tiana was at the stove, and Yvonne was at the table with a coffee, and the new composition book was open, and Mama Tate sat down at the table and drank the coffee Tiana poured her, and she did not, for the next several hours, have any more trouble.

Tuesday morning was a lost morning too.

Mama Tate could not, at three, remember what year it was. She knew the day. She knew the month. She knew Eldridge was dead. She did not, for forty minutes, know what year. She lay in bed trying to find the year. Yvonne came in at three-fifteen because Yvonne had been sleeping lightly since Monday and had heard her mother's breathing change, and Mama Tate told her: Baby, I cannot find the year.

Yvonne told her. Yvonne said the year quietly. Yvonne did not, today, try to walk her through it. Yvonne simply said Mama, it is twenty twenty-six; it is July; it is Tuesday the fourteenth; Eldridge has been gone eighteen years; Mother Wells has been gone six weeks; Naomi is four; Marcus is in Atlanta and is going to call at two this afternoon because he calls Tuesdays now as well as Sundays. She said it in the small flat helpful voice Tiana had taught her to use at the unit for patients who had lost the day. She said every important anchor. She did not moralize.

Mama Tate listened.

After a while she said: "Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"Thank you, baby."

"You're welcome, Mama."

"I have it now."

"Yes, Mama."

Tiana came at four. Tiana read the morning again. Mama Tate sat on the couch with her eyes closed. Yvonne made coffee. The morning went.

Wednesday was good.

Wednesday Mama Tate woke at three on the dot and got out of bed without trouble and walked to the kitchen without trouble and drank her warm water at the counter without trouble and put on her cardigan and went to the front room and knelt at her chair and did the morning herself. Her hand worked. Her eye worked. She walked the list in her own voice for the first time in three days. Tiana, who had come over at three-thirty anyway because she had decided that the household rhythm would include her at three-thirty every morning for the foreseeable future, came in and sat on the couch and watched and did not interrupt.

When Mama Tate finished, she looked up.

"Baby. Today was a good one."

"I see, Grandma."

"The Lord gives the good ones. I do not get to plan them."

"No, Grandma."

"Let's eat eggs."

Thursday was the worst one.

Thursday Mama Tate woke up at — she did not, later, know when — and she did not know where she was or who was in the next room or whose house this was. She sat up in bed. The bed was a strange bed. The room was a strange room. The quilt was a quilt she did not, at that moment, recognize, though it had been on her bed since 1998 and had been handmade for her by Sister Ettie May Crenshaw. The window was in the wrong wall. The closet door was not, in her mind, where it had been.

She did not, in the moment, know her own name.

She knew she was a woman. She knew she was old. She knew she had been asleep.

She tried to find her name.

Her name did not come.

She sat for a long time in the dark in the strange room. She did not, during the long time, move. She did not call out. She did not know whom to call. The body that had been calling Yvonne for two weeks did not, this morning, remember that Yvonne was a word.

Eventually Yvonne — who had been sleeping across the hall and who had been sleeping, for four nights, in the increasing lightness of a woman watching for a sound — heard the small long silence coming out of her mother's room the way a mother hears the silence coming out of a sleeping child's room and knows that the silence is the wrong silence.

She got up. She came to the door. She pushed it open.

"Mama."

Mama Tate turned her head.

Mama Tate looked at Yvonne for a long moment.

Then she said, in a voice that had the small confused politeness of a woman who had been raised to be polite to strangers: "Baby. I am sorry. I am not certain who you are this morning."

Yvonne did not, at the door, move.

Yvonne breathed.

Yvonne said, in the small flat voice Tiana had been teaching her: "Mama. I am Yvonne. I am your daughter. I was born in August of nineteen sixty-eight. I am fifty-eight years old. I am a principal in a school in Cordova. I have been sleeping in this house for two weeks. You are in your own bedroom. You are eighty-two. Your name is Ola Mae Tate. You have been in this house since nineteen sixty-two. Your husband was Eldridge. He is gone. I am your daughter. I am here."

She said it calmly.

She did not, on her own face, let her face do the thing it wanted to do.

Mama Tate listened.

Mama Tate listened for a long time, the way a woman listens to a stranger explaining a room she does not, immediately, recognize.

Then her face moved.

"Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama. I am here."

"Baby. You are here."

"I am, Mama."

"How long have I been — I have been gone, baby. I was gone. I could not find you. I could not find my own name."

"I know, Mama. You are back."

"Yes."

She reached out her hand. Yvonne came forward. She sat on the edge of the bed. She took her mother's hand. She held it.

Mama Tate closed her eyes for a long minute.

When she opened them her eyes were wet.

"Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"That was further than I have gone before."

"I know, Mama."

"I do not know how much further there is to go. The doctor said — Tobi said — summer. This is summer, baby. Summer is here. I think I am moving into the part of summer where the hand cannot find its own name. I was told this would come. I did not believe it would be today."

"Mama."

"I am not asking you to tell me it is not today, baby. I am asking you only to sit with me while I accept that it is."

"I am sitting, Mama."

They sat a long time.

After a while Mama Tate said: "Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"Call Tiana. Not for the morning. Tell her to come today after she is done at the unit. I want to have a conversation with her and with you tonight. I want to change the arrangement."

"Yes, Mama."

"The arrangement has to change. The morning — the morning can no longer be mine. Tiana will do the morning from now on. I will sit with her. I will pray. I will not find the page. I will not write. I will rest. The new arrangement begins today. The Lord has been preparing the arrangement for months. I have been keeping myself from fully receiving it because I did not want to put down the writing. I am putting it down today. Today is the day."

"Yes, Mama."

"And Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"I do not want you to be afraid for me. I am going to have more mornings like this one. I may, in the next months, have days like this one. I may not, in the next months, always know your face. Baby, listen to me. You listen good."

"Yes, Mama."

"If a morning comes when I do not know your face, you do not take it personally. It is not because I have forgotten you. It is because my body has had a bad night and has not come back yet. The part of me that knows you — the part of me that was formed by mothering you for fifty-eight years — is not in the part of the brain that this disease is eating. It is somewhere else. I will know you in the chest even when I do not know you in the face. The keeping is down in the bones, Yvonne. The keeping is not in the cortex. I learned this morning that the keeping is where the praying is. The Lord keeps the keeping. The brain can fail. The keeping does not."

"Yes, Mama."

"Now bring me water. I am thirsty. I am going to sit up for a while before it is light."

Yvonne brought her water. Yvonne sat on the edge of the bed with her while she drank. Yvonne texted Tiana the sentence they had agreed on for the morning Mama Tate did not know Yvonne's face — the sentence was it is further than before — and Tiana, at her apartment, read the sentence and did not, at first, cry, because Tiana had a shift at six and nurses did not cry before shifts. Tiana texted back I will be there at six tonight. I love her. I love you.

The Thursday went.

The four of them — Mama Tate, Yvonne, Tiana, Carl — sat at the kitchen table that night at seven-fifteen, after supper, with the new composition book open in the middle of the table and the prayer book beside it.

Mama Tate said what she had told Yvonne at five in the morning.

She said it in the voice of a woman who had been preparing what she would say for twelve hours. She said it once. She did not belabor.

The morning is Tiana's from now on. Tiana is the reader. Tiana is the finder of the page. I will sit with her. I will pray with her in the small interior way. I will not, from tomorrow, write. The writing is over. The writing has been over for a week; I had been pretending. I am not going to pretend now. Yvonne, you will continue to read the legacy pages on the Sundays you and I do them together, the way we did Saturday. You and Tiana will rotate. On the weeks Tiana cannot be here at four, I will wait. I will not do the morning myself anymore. The morning is over for me as the doer. I am, from now on, the sitter. I am the small old woman on the couch with her eyes closed. You will do the work I did. The Lord will know.

They nodded.

Nobody spoke for a long while.

Then Tiana said, softly: "Grandma. I want to ask you one more thing. I want you to pick your replacement on the couch."

"Baby?"

"I want you to tell me, before you cannot tell me, who sits on the couch after you do. When you are gone. I will do the reading. Mom will do the reading. Marcus will do the reading. Naomi will do the reading one day. But somebody has to sit on the couch. Somebody has to be the praying presence that holds the room while the reader reads. That is the quieter job. That job is yours now, Grandma. You are doing it as I read. When you are gone — Grandma, who sits on that couch?"

Mama Tate did not, for a moment, answer.

She had not, she realized, thought about it in these terms.

She thought now.

After a long while she said: "Tiana. The one on the couch is whoever the Lord sets on the couch that morning. It does not have to be the same person. It does not have to be planned. The reader reads. Whoever else is in the house on any given morning is the one on the couch. If it is only the reader — if the reader is alone — the Lord is on the couch. He will be on the couch. He has been on the couch all along. I am only warming the seat."

Tiana closed her eyes.

She nodded.

She said, quietly: "Yes, Grandma."

Carl, across the table, had been quiet through the whole conversation. He said now, in his quiet voice: "Mama. I will be on the couch on Saturdays. I am telling you now. I know you have not asked me. I am putting myself on the couch on Saturdays for whenever Tiana is doing the reading. I want that to be my place."

Mama Tate reached across the table and put her hand over his.

"Carl."

"Yes, Mama."

"That is right. That is the right shape. Saturdays will be yours. The Lord has been preparing you for that seat. I see it."

"Yes, Mama."

"And Yvonne — Sundays are yours and Tiana's together. Sundays the two of you will do the morning and then walk to Mt. Calvary for the service. That is the rhythm from now on. Carl will come with you sometimes. Marcus will when he is in town. Naomi will when she is old enough. The rhythm will stretch and pull. The rhythm is the rhythm. The Lord is the Lord."

They nodded.

She slept that night at nine-thirty, which was two hours earlier than she had been going to bed for sixty years. She slept deeply. Yvonne slept across the hall with the door cracked. Tiana slept on the couch. Carl had gone home — Yvonne had sent him; she had said baby, you go home tonight, I need you home tonight so you can come back tomorrow, and Carl had understood.

The house held them.

The pecan tree shifted in the small July wind. Somewhere down Park, a man was walking home late from a shift. Somewhere in Whitehaven, a four-year-old who did not yet know about the morning's difficulties at her great-grandmother's house was asleep in a small bed with a moon night-light.

In the house, Mama Tate slept.

The keeping, for the first time in fifty-two years, had been redistributed fully. She had not written her last name on Saturday. She had written her last name on Monday the sixth of July, when she had added Noah and Hannah, the white couple on the right, who have been in the book unnamed for nine months and had then written their full last name — Noah and Hannah Baxter — which she had finally asked for the Sunday before. The writing had ended there. She had not known, on Monday the sixth, that it was her last. She knew now.

She did not, tonight, grieve it.

She had known it was coming for months. She had been preparing. The preparation had been the work of the last six weeks. The writing had been given to the next hands. The keeping had been redistributed. The Lord had been the Lord.

She slept.

The long evening had moved, in the middle of July, into its deeper hour. There would be more lost mornings. There would be more strange rooms. There would be further goings. The Lord, who had arranged the earlier hours, would arrange these too, and the keepers — Yvonne and Tiana and Carl and Marcus, and the wider cloud on the other side — would hold the work through the hours Mama Tate could not hold them herself.

The keeping continued.

The Lord was the Lord.

The bad week, when Sunday came, would be over. The new week would begin. The rhythm, changed, would still be a rhythm.

Mama Tate slept.