Rosa

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 29: Rosa

Rosa came on Tuesday, November tenth, at ten o'clock in the morning.

She came in the small white Toyota Mama Tate had last seen parked on Saratoga Street on the first of June. She pulled up at the curb. She got out. She was carrying the same calm posture she had carried in Mother Wells's bedroom, and the small hospice tote bag that was, Mama Tate suspected, the same bag with the same contents. She walked up the path.

Mama Tate was on the porch in the wicker chair. Yvonne had bundled her in the small quilt. The November light was the low silver light of a Memphis fall that had not, this morning, decided whether it was fall or winter, and the pecan tree was mostly bare. The small green hands of the summer had dropped in October. The pecans had come down the last two weeks. Yvonne and Carl had gathered two bags of them already and had set them in the pantry, because Mama Tate had said, at dinner on the second Saturday of the month, Yvonne baby, the pecans are for Thanksgiving. Yvonne, you save them.

Rosa stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

"Mother Tate."

"Rosa."

"I was hoping I would see you again, ma'am. I was not hoping for it under these circumstances."

"The circumstances are what the Lord arranged, Rosa. I am glad to see you too. Come up."

She came up.

She sat in the second wicker chair, without being told where to sit, because Rosa was the kind of nurse whose body read a porch the way other people's bodies read a book. She set the tote bag down on the boards between her feet. She looked at Mama Tate for a moment — the slow assessing look a hospice nurse gives at the first minute of an intake, which was, Mama Tate noted, the same look she gave herself at the prayer-floor — and then she leaned forward and took Mama Tate's hand.

"Ma'am."

"Yes, Rosa."

"Curtis sends his greetings. Pamela does too. Curtis has been asking me about you. I told him I would see you today. He will call this afternoon."

"I am glad, baby."

"Mother Wells told me about you the week before she went. She told me, specifically, that if the Lord arranged for me to be the nurse when your time came, I was to accept the assignment even if I was working another case. I have been, for six weeks, rearranging my schedule to be the nurse at your door. My supervisor has been patient. Dr. Akinyele called me on Saturday. I am yours."

Mama Tate closed her eyes.

"Mother Wells."

"Yes, ma'am."

"She arranged this too."

"She did, ma'am."

"That woman is on the other side arranging the furniture for both rooms."

Rosa smiled. It was a small warm smile. Mama Tate had not, on the night of June first, seen Rosa smile. The smile this morning was the first of many small things the long evening was going to give her.

They did the intake at the kitchen table.

Yvonne made coffee. Tiana — who had come over after her shift to be in the house for the intake — sat beside her grandmother. Carl was in the carport fiddling with something, the way Carl fiddled on days when the household was doing a thing he did not need to be in the room for.

Rosa opened the small tote bag. She pulled out a tablet — a hospice-issued one — and a small paper folder with Mama Tate's name typed on it. She set them in front of her. She did not, for a moment, turn the tablet on.

"Ma'am. Before we do the paperwork. I want to say one thing."

"Say, baby."

"I am your nurse. I will be here three days a week to start. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Ninety minutes each visit. I will be on call twenty-four hours a day. Yvonne has my number. Tiana has my number. Dr. Akinyele has my number. If anything happens — if you spike a fever, if you stop eating, if the swallow gets worse, if you fall, if anything — you call. Do not hesitate. Do not wait until morning. The whole point of hospice is that you do not have to guess. You call. I come. I was at your friend's door three months ago. I will be at yours now."

"Yes, baby."

"Second thing. Ma'am. You are the boss of your own going. Hospice is not here to make decisions for you. Hospice is here to make you comfortable and to give your family the tools to care for you in the home you want to be in. You decide what medications you take. You decide how often. You decide what to eat and whether to eat. You decide whether you want music, whether you want the TV, whether you want visitors, whether you want the phone off. You tell me what you want. I execute. I advise when asked. I will not impose."

"Yes, Rosa."

"Third thing. Your daughter and your granddaughter are going to need more support than you are. That is always the shape of this work. You have been preparing for the going for two years. They have been preparing, but preparing is not the same as doing. I am going to be their support as much as I am going to be yours. I will be teaching them. I will be watching them. I will be the one who tells them when they need to go to bed and when they need to eat and when they need to take an hour to themselves. You are not going to be in a position, in the later weeks, to watch them the way you have been watching them. I will be watching them on your behalf. Is that all right?"

Mama Tate could not, for a moment, speak.

"Rosa."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You are going to be my keeper at the keepers' door."

"Yes, ma'am. That is the job."

"You are already doing it well, baby."

"Thank you, ma'am."

Yvonne was at the stove. Yvonne had heard. Yvonne put her hand to her eye and held it there for a moment. Tiana, beside her grandmother, did not move.

Rosa turned the tablet on.

The paperwork took an hour and twenty minutes.

Rosa went through the advance directive. She went through the medication list — the two blood pressure medicines, the new swallowing exercises, the small pain regimen, the emergency pneumonia protocol. She went through the equipment — the oxygen concentrator that would be delivered Thursday, the hospital bed that would replace the current bedroom bed in the second half of December if needed, the wheelchair Yvonne had been using to push her mother to the porch since late October. She went through the comfort kit — the small medications in the refrigerator that would be used in the last week for pain and breathing and anxiety, which Rosa walked them through one at a time, explaining what each one was for and when not to use it. She went through the crisis plan for the pneumonia they expected would eventually come. She went through the contact tree.

She went through the DNR, calmly, at Mama Tate's request.

She went through the burial arrangements — which Yvonne had filed with the funeral home in 2009 per her mother's instructions — and confirmed them.

She went through the small set of final preparations Mama Tate had been keeping in a manila folder at the bottom of her dresser drawer since 2012, which included a list of who to call, in what order, in the hour and the day after the going. Mother Wells had been at the top of the call list. Yvonne had, on a quiet evening in June, gently crossed Mother Wells's name off. Pastor Honeycutt was now at the top. Curtis and Pamela were second. Patrice in Houston was third. Stephen Pruitt in Detroit was fourth. The Hightowers were fifth. Tobi Akinyele was sixth. Folake in Lagos was listed at the bottom, with the small notation she does not need to fly in; call with the news at a humane hour.

Rosa read the list carefully.

She did not, reading it, comment on the names she did not know. She registered them. She wrote the list into her tablet. She saved it.

When she was done she closed the tablet.

"Mother Tate."

"Yes, Rosa."

"I have everything I need for today. I will be back Thursday at ten. I will come Saturday at ten as well. Before I leave — would you like a few minutes alone? I have found, in my years, that the first intake can be a heavy thing. The family sometimes needs a small break to settle."

"Rosa."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I want you to stay for lunch."

"Ma'am."

"Yvonne has soup. Tiana has bread. Carl is going to come in in ten minutes and is going to wash his hands and sit at this table, because Carl has been waiting in the carport for an hour and has decided that he has finished whatever he was pretending to do. You sit with us for lunch. That is what I want today."

Rosa looked at Yvonne. Yvonne had, already, brought out a fourth bowl.

Rosa smiled her small warm smile.

"Yes, ma'am. I will stay."

They ate.

Carl came in. Carl washed his hands. Carl sat. Yvonne served. Tiana said the blessing. Rosa bowed her head. They ate Tiana's soup — a vegetable soup Tiana had been making on Tuesdays since October because Mama Tate could swallow it in the thin form — and Yvonne's cornbread, which Mama Tate ate a small piece of, and small slices of apple Tiana had cut.

Rosa talked.

She talked, for the first time since Mama Tate had met her, about herself.

She had been born in Houston, she said, in 1968. Her mother had been a Mexican-American woman from El Paso who had married a Black man from Louisiana and who had moved with him to Memphis in 1972 when Rosa had been four. Her mother had been a church lady. Her father had been a factory worker. She had grown up in a Baptist church in South Memphis and had, at nineteen, decided she wanted to be a nurse. She had gone to community college. She had worked at Baptist Hospital for twelve years. She had moved to hospice in 1999. She had been at it ever since.

Her grandmother — her mother's mother, who had stayed in El Paso and whom Rosa had seen twice a year through her childhood — had been, Rosa said, the praying one of the family.

"She prayed the rosary, Mother Tate. Every morning at four. Sixty years. She taught me the rosary when I was six. I have been praying it, off and on, my whole life. I pray it more often now than I did at twenty-five. I — I find that the hospice work requires the rosary. I don't know another way to be in the rooms I am in, sixty hours a week, without the rosary holding me. My grandmother died in 2011. The rosary she gave me is in my pocket right now. It has been in my pocket every day I have worked hospice since she went."

Mama Tate did not, for a moment, speak.

Then she said: "Rosa."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Your grandmother and my grandmother and Mama Funmi Akinyele in Lagos and Lillian Wells in Greenwood, Mississippi. Four women. Four lists. Four languages. The Lord has been running the prayer-floor bigger than any one church all along. We have been taking turns, in different rooms, in different countries, thinking we were each the only ones. The Lord has been weaving us together, Rosa. Even when we did not know. Even when we could not have recognized each other in a grocery store. The weave was the weave."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Your grandmother is praying for you from the other side."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Tell her, when you see her, that I said thank you for sending you to my porch today. She sent you. I can feel it. The Lord arranges some things with the keeper on the other side. You are here today because some grandmother in El Paso stood up in the cloud and said that one. She is ready. Send her south. I know the arrangement. I have been on this floor too long not to see it."

Rosa put her hand over her face.

She did not, for a long minute, lower it.

When she did she said: "Mother Tate. I have been a hospice nurse for twenty-seven years. I have been at six hundred and forty-eight deaths. I have had many patients I have loved. I have had a few I have been told were the reason I was in the profession. My grandmother used to tell me — when I was a teenager and I was thinking about nursing — mija, you are going to meet saints in your work. You will not always know them. But some of them you will."

She paused.

"Mother Tate. I knew Mother Wells was one. I know you are one. I am going to be a better nurse in the months I am in your house. I am grateful."

Mama Tate shook her head.

"Rosa. I am not a saint. Do not say saint to me. I am an old woman who has been praying at a kitchen table for fifty years. That is not sainthood. That is practice. I have been granted many small mercies. I have not been granted sainthood. Do not use the word."

"Ma'am — my grandmother used the word. I am using it because I inherited it."

"Rosa."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Your grandmother was a good Catholic. I am a good Baptist. We do not use the word the same way. I will let you keep yours. Do not use mine on me."

Rosa smiled. The smile was wet. "Yes, ma'am."

"Now eat. Your soup is cold."

Rosa left at two.

She hugged Yvonne at the door — a real hug, a long one — and she hugged Tiana. She did not, at the end, hug Mama Tate, because Mama Tate was in Eldridge's chair and Rosa did not, she said, want to bend down on a day that had already been full. She took Mama Tate's hand in both of hers for a long moment and said Thursday at ten, ma'am, and Mama Tate said Thursday at ten, baby.

She went.

The small white Toyota disappeared at the corner.

Mama Tate sat in the chair for a long time after Rosa had gone.

Yvonne sat on the couch. Tiana sat on the floor at her grandmother's feet. Carl, who had been quiet through the lunch, went to the kitchen to wash the dishes.

After a long while Mama Tate said: "Babies."

"Yes, Mama," they said.

"The Lord has arranged this well."

"Yes, Mama."

"Rosa is the right one."

"She is, Mama."

"I was afraid, when the hospice was being scheduled, that the nurse would be a stranger. I did not know Rosa would be assigned. I had forgotten she had been Mother Wells's nurse. I had forgotten — I had forgotten the word the Lord uses when He is arranging things, which is already. The nurse was already in my life. She has been already since June. I did not see it at the time. The Lord had been setting up this table since the first night He sent her to Saratoga Street."

"Yes, Mama."

"The going is going to be all right, babies."

She did not, in the saying of it, convince herself. She did not need to. She had been, for two years, preparing to say the sentence. She said it now because the saying was the practice, and the practice was the keeping, and the keeping was the work.

Tiana, at her feet, wept quietly.

Yvonne, on the couch, wept quietly.

Mama Tate put her hand on Tiana's head.

She said: "Now. I want a small piece of pound cake. Yvonne, is there any left from Sunday?"

"There is, Mama."

"Bring me a small piece. I want to eat it on the porch. The sun is coming out. November is cold but the porch is sweet in the afternoon. I want to sit in the porch and eat cake."

"Yes, Mama."

Yvonne brought the cake. Tiana wheeled her grandmother to the porch in the small chair. Carl came out with his own piece and sat in his wooden chair. They ate the last of the pound cake Yvonne had made on Sunday.

The pecan tree was bare against the sky.

The Lord was the Lord.

The keeping continued.

Rosa — who was, at this hour, driving back to her office across town with Mama Tate's chart on the passenger seat — said the first decade of a rosary under her breath as she drove, in Spanish, for a woman in Orange Mound she had promised her grandmother she would sit with to the end.

The small threads of the long evening's weave were, this November afternoon, all in place.

The cloud, on the other side, watched.

The hour was the hour.

Mama Tate ate her small piece of cake slowly, on the porch, in the silver November light.

She did not, today, speak much more.

She did not need to.

She rested.