The Week After

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 35: The Week After

The first full week after her grandmother's going began, for Tiana, at three fifty-eight on Monday morning, the eleventh of January, in the kitchen of her own apartment across town.

She had decided, on Sunday afternoon at her mother's urging, that she would sleep at her own apartment three nights of the week from now on. Yvonne had said, Tiana, you are thirty. You are the keeper. You are not also the caretaker. I am here. Carl is here. You sleep in your own bed most nights. You drive over for the morning when you want to. You stay when you want to. Tiana had agreed. She had gone home Sunday night.

Her phone alarm went off at three fifty-eight. It was the small recording of Naomi's voice, which Yvonne had sent to Tiana's phone the day after Mama Tate had died, which said We bring good tidings of great joy, and which Tiana had kept on.

She rose.

She drove to Park Avenue.

The drive took eleven minutes. The streets of Memphis at four in the morning in January were empty and clear. The cold was the specific cold of a January between-storm — not bitter, but insistent on staying outside her coat for the six-step walk from the Civic to the front door.

She let herself in with her own key. Yvonne was asleep in the spare room, with the door cracked the way Yvonne had been keeping it for six months. The small light over the sink was on, as it had been since the night Mama Tate had gone, because Tiana had told herself the light over the sink would stay on around the clock in this house for as long as she was the keeper, the way the sanctuary lamp stayed lit.

She walked to the front room.

Eldridge's chair was the chair. The side table held the three books — the prayer book, the composition book, the small green book — and Naomi's crayon drawing, and the framed photograph of Mama Funmi. The lamp was off. The pecan tree was bare against the first gray of the coming day outside the window.

Tiana turned on the lamp.

She sat in the chair.

She set her hand on the composition book for a moment before opening it.

"Grandma. I am here."

She said it aloud, softly, because that was the small practice she had begun last week and which she was not going to break this week. She said Grandma, I am here every morning before she opened the book. The saying was the small acknowledgment that the chair had a history.

She opened the book.

She did the morning.

Yvonne heard her.

Yvonne had been awake since three-thirty. Yvonne had been lying in the spare room in the dark with her face turned to the wall, listening for the small sounds of Tiana's arrival. She had heard the car pull up at four-oh-eight. She had heard the front door open at four-oh-nine. She had heard her daughter's footsteps in the front room. She had heard the lamp click on. She had heard the soft Grandma, I am here.

She lay in the dark.

She listened.

She could not, from the spare room, hear the names Tiana was reading. The reading was in Tiana's chest this morning, not out loud. But Yvonne could feel, through the wall, the small quiet rhythm of her daughter doing her mother's work at four in the morning in her mother's chair, and the feeling was one of the two things Yvonne had been waiting for since Thursday.

The first thing had been the grief.

The grief had been in the house all week. She had cried four times so far on Friday. She had cried twice on Saturday after the funeral. She had cried on Sunday, mostly in the afternoon, in the bedroom her mother had died in, with the door closed and her face against the pillow that still smelled, very faintly, of the lavender powder her mother had been using for sixty years.

The second thing had been the small steadying knowledge that the keeping had not stopped.

She had the second thing now. She had had it, in the kitchen, at four on Tuesday, six days ago. She had it again this morning.

She closed her eyes.

She lay, not sleeping, and let her daughter's presence in the next room hold her.

At four-forty-nine she heard Tiana close the book.

She heard Tiana say, softly: Amen.

She heard Tiana rise and walk to the kitchen. She heard the small scrape of the blue mug being lifted down from the second shelf of the cabinet above the counter — the mug Tiana would, from this week forward, be lifting down every morning because Mama Tate had asked her to in December, in one of the small last conversations.

Yvonne rose. She put on her robe. She went to the kitchen.

"Baby."

"Mom."

Yvonne stood in the doorway. She did not, at first, say more.

Tiana was at the counter, pouring warm water into the blue mug. She had not, Yvonne saw, made coffee yet. She had been, Yvonne understood, doing what her grandmother had done — the warm water first, standing up at the counter, the small private first drink of the morning.

Tiana set the mug down. She turned.

"Mom. You sleep all right?"

"I slept about five hours. That is about what I am sleeping now. It is enough."

"Yes, Mom."

"The morning was good?"

"It was good, Mom. Grandma was — she was in the room."

"I felt her too, baby."

Tiana nodded. She did not, at first, trust her voice.

She poured Yvonne a mug of the warm water. They sat at the kitchen table. They did not, for the first five minutes, speak.

The mail came at ten-fifteen.

It came in a thick pile. The postman — who had been the same Black man in his late fifties for seven years, who had known Mama Tate by name, who had, on Saturday morning, taken the time to walk a condolence card up to the door himself and hand it to Yvonne with the small respectful nod of a man who had been delivering to this address for long enough to feel the house's losses — had brought today, Yvonne would count, seventy-four pieces of mail. Most of them were sympathy cards.

She carried them to the kitchen table. She set them down in a small stack. She did not, for a moment, open any of them.

Tiana had gone home at nine after a small breakfast. Carl had come over at nine-thirty on his way to the hardware store to fix something at the Cordova house, and had sat at the table for twenty minutes, and had left at nine-fifty. Yvonne was alone in the house at ten-fifteen.

She sat at the kitchen table with the mail.

She opened the first card. It was from a woman named Sister Agnes Maynard, who had been at Mt. Calvary in the seventies and had moved to Nashville in 1982 and whom Mama Tate had, Yvonne now recalled, mentioned once in a while over the years. The card was simple. It said: Mother Tate prayed for me in 1979 when I was a single mother with two babies and no money. I have not forgotten. God rest her. Tell her daughter I am still at the Lord's work.

Yvonne set it aside.

The second card was from a man named Albert Stinson, from Detroit, who had, he wrote, been a friend of Calvin Pruitt's in the last fifteen years of Calvin's life. He had heard about Mama Tate at Calvin's funeral last March. He had been meaning to write to her for ten months. He had decided, when Stephen had told him Mother Tate had gone, that he would write to the daughter. He wrote: Mother Tate carried my friend Calvin. Calvin carried me. The carrying line is long. Tell the family Calvin's friends in Detroit are grateful.

Yvonne set it aside.

The third card was from a woman named Lucille Turner, in Chicago, whose name Yvonne did not recognize. The card said: Mrs. Tate-Brooks, I was given your mother's name by my own mother in 1992 when I was seventeen and had run away from home. My mother had met your mother once at a women's conference in Memphis in 1988. My mother had been keeping me in her prayers and had asked your mother, at the conference, to add my name. Your mother did. My mother died in 2011. I did not know, until this week when a friend from Memphis sent me the notice, that your mother had gone too. I am forty-nine. I am back home. I have been a member of a Baptist church in Chicago for twenty years. I wanted you to know that your mother's prayer reached me in 1992 and has held me since. Please tell the next keeper.

Yvonne set it aside.

She set it aside and she put her face in her hands and she wept.

She wept for four minutes without trying to stop. She wept because she had not, in fifty-eight years, known that her mother had been at a women's conference in Memphis in 1988. She had been twenty in 1988. She had been at Rhodes College. Her mother, at one of the thousand small practices Yvonne had not been paying attention to in her own distracted twenty-year-old life, had met another woman from Chicago and had added the other woman's daughter's name to her own book and had kept the name for two decades and had never — Yvonne was sure — mentioned it.

The keeping had been bigger than the house had ever known.

It was still being revealed.

She kept reading.

She read for three hours. She did not, for the whole morning, make it through the pile. By noon she had read twenty-two cards. Sixteen of them were from people whose names were in her mother's book. Two of them were from strangers who had been touched through one of the people in the book. Four of them were from church folk writing their own general condolences.

Each of the first eighteen was a small receipt.

She set each one aside in its own small pile. She would, she decided in the kitchen at noon, keep them all. She would keep them in a box in the bottom of her mother's dresser drawer — the drawer that had held the Services folder — for the rest of her life.

Pastor Honeycutt came at two.

He had called at one to say he would like to come by. He had not, he had said, come by yesterday because yesterday had been for the family. Today was the first day of what he called the pastoral follow-up, which he had been doing for thirty years with every family who had lost a Mother of the Board, and which he took seriously.

He sat in the front room. Yvonne made him coffee. Carl, who had returned from the hardware store, sat in the small wooden chair by the door.

"Yvonne. Carl."

"Pastor."

"How is the house today."

"The house is — Pastor, the house is quiet. Mama is gone. Tiana did the morning. I have been reading cards. Carl has been fixing things."

"Yes. That is the pattern. Fixing things and reading cards and quiet."

"Yes, Pastor."

He drank his coffee.

He said: "Yvonne. I want to say one thing I did not say yesterday. I want to say it now. Saturday's service was one of the fullest services I have done in thirty-one years at Mt. Calvary. I want you to know the number. Four hundred and seventy-two people on the livestream. Four hundred and forty-one in the sanctuary. Eighty-six in the balcony. Twenty in the lobby. One hundred and twelve in the basement. That is seven hundred and fifty-nine. I have never had seven hundred and fifty-nine people at a Mother's funeral. I have had three hundred. I have had four hundred. I have not had seven hundred. Your mother moved the needle. I tell you this not because numbers matter but because I want you to know — I want your daughter to know — that the keeping had gone further than you realized. The cards will keep coming. They are coming to my office too. I am going to forward them to you as they come. I have, on my desk this morning, twenty-three. Some from people I do not know. Your mother was, Yvonne — your mother was a regional figure. I am using the phrase carefully. She did not, in her own life, ever use it. I use it now because the number requires it."

Yvonne could not, for a moment, speak.

"Pastor."

"Yes, Yvonne."

"Mama would not want us to make a thing of it."

"Yvonne. Mama is gone. You and Tiana and Carl are the stewards. The family is the one who gets to decide what shape the remembering takes. I am going to counsel you, gently, to allow the remembering to happen. Mt. Calvary is going to want, in the next year, to do some honoring of your mother. A plaque, perhaps. A dedication of a small room. A scholarship in her name. Whatever feels right to you. Some of the younger keepers will want it for their own formation — they will want a place to go when they need to be reminded of the work. I am not asking you to decide today. I am asking you to let the question breathe."

"Yes, Pastor."

"I will come back in two weeks. We will talk about it then. For today — for today I just wanted to sit with you and with Carl. That is the work of today."

He sat for another forty minutes. They talked about small things. Carl told him about the porch step he had built in April. Yvonne told him about Lucille Turner in Chicago. Pastor Honeycutt listened. He did not, at any point, hurry the conversation.

At three he rose.

"Yvonne. I love you. I loved your mother. I am going to love this family through this year."

"Yes, Pastor."

He went.

Rosa called at three-forty-five.

She had, as she had promised on the night of the fifth, been checking in every other day since the funeral. She called usually in the late afternoon. The calls were brief.

Today she said: "Yvonne."

"Rosa."

"How is the house."

"The house is — Rosa, we are in it. I read cards for three hours. Pastor came. Tiana did the morning at four."

"Yes, Yvonne."

"How are you, Rosa."

"I am — Yvonne, I have a patient who went yesterday. Eighty-three. She had no family with her. I sat with her alone at the end. My grandmother's rosary was in my pocket. I thought about your mother. I am all right. The work is the work."

"Yes, Rosa."

"Yvonne. I want to tell you one thing. Your mother gave me a gift in December that I did not tell you about, because she asked me not to tell you until the second week of January. It is the second week of January."

"Rosa."

"Yes, Yvonne."

"What gift."

"She wrote me a letter. Two pages, in her own hand. Written in early December when she could still write. I have it in my purse. I have carried it with me every shift since the day she wrote it because she told me to. It is addressed to me. I have not read it to anyone else. I am going to read it to you now over the phone because your mother told me to. She said Rosa, you read it to Yvonne the second week of January, so she knows what I said. I am reading it."

Yvonne sat down at the kitchen table.

Rosa read.

Rosa, my nurse,

I am writing this on the eighth of December. I can still write today. The hand is shaky but it is holding. I have been thinking about you every Thursday since you came into my house on November tenth. I have been watching you move through my house. I have been watching you watch my daughter. I want you to know three things before I am gone.

First. Your grandmother in El Paso is proud of you. I know you know. I am saying it again because the dying say a thing twice when the thing needs to be said twice. She is proud. She is at the floor on the other side. She prays for you. You will feel her more after I am gone. That is how it works.

Second. The rosary in your pocket is doing the work. Do not stop. Do not let a hospice supervisor or a patient's family or a Baptist pastor at any bedside make you think the rosary is decoration. It is not decoration. It is the keeping. You are a keeper, Rosa. Your grandmother made you one. The Lord confirmed it. I am the third witness.

Third. After I am gone — in the spring, or the summer, or whenever the Lord gives you the opening — I want you to add your grandmother's name to a book of your own. You may think you are not the book-keeping kind. You are. You have been keeping in your chest. You have not been writing it. I am asking you to write it. Go to Dollar General. Buy a composition book. The marbled cover. Start your own. Write your grandmother's full name on the first page. Write her dates. Underline her. Then add three names a day for a month, the names the Lord gives you, and at the end of the month look at the book. You will know. The book is a tool. You have been a keeper without a book for a long time. The Lord wants you to have the book now. I am the messenger.

That is all, Rosa. I love you. I am glad you came to my door. I will see your grandmother in the cloud. I will tell her about you. Thank you for the moisture on my lips in the last weeks. I can feel each one. Your grandmother is proud.

Mother Tate

Rosa stopped reading.

She did not, at first, speak.

"Yvonne."

"Yes, Rosa."

"I bought a composition book at Dollar General on Saturday afternoon, after the service, because I could not go home that evening without doing the one thing your mother asked me to. I wrote Abuela Carmen's name on the first page that night. I have been adding names every morning since Sunday. I have eleven names. I had to — Yvonne, I had to tell you. Your mother's letter was the last pull I needed. She got me over the line. I had been called since my grandmother died in 2011. I had not been writing. I am writing now."

Yvonne could not, for a long moment, speak.

Then she said: "Rosa. I want to meet your grandmother one day in the cloud."

"Yes, Yvonne. You will. My grandmother will have met your mother by then. They will be — they will be friends. My grandmother makes friends across languages. Your mother made friends across everything. They will have met. I am sure of it."

"Yes, Rosa."

"I will see you Thursday."

"Thursday, Rosa."

Rosa hung up.

Yvonne sat at the kitchen table with her hand on the phone for a long time.

At seven that evening, after Carl had come back over for supper and had eaten and had gone back to Cordova, and after Tiana had called to check in, Yvonne went into her mother's bedroom for the first time since the funeral.

She went in slowly. She turned on the small lamp on the nightstand. She looked at the bed. The bed was made. Yvonne had made it on Tuesday morning after the funeral, with the clean sheets Tiana had washed on Monday.

She looked at the dresser. The small framed photograph of Mama Funmi was on it. Naomi's drawing had been moved back to the side table in the front room after the funeral, because Tiana had said that belongs to the chair, Mom, and Yvonne had agreed.

She opened the bottom drawer of the dresser.

The Services folder was still in there. So was the manila envelope of letters from Mama Tate to Daphne Crenshaw — the ones Loretta had brought in April. So was a small wooden box Yvonne had not, in her life, opened.

She lifted the box out. She set it on the bed. She opened it.

Inside the box were small things. A lock of her own baby hair, in an envelope labeled Yvonne, 1968. A lock of Marcus's, in another labeled Marcus, 1998. A lock of Tiana's, labeled Tiana, 1996. A pressed dogwood flower. A small program from the 1962 wedding of Ola Mae Chambers and Eldridge Tate. A small black-and-white photograph of Mama Tate at seven, in Mississippi, in a cotton dress, holding a stuffed animal Yvonne had never seen.

At the bottom of the box was a small white envelope with her own name on it.

Yvonne.

In her mother's hand.

Yvonne held the envelope a long time before she opened it.

When she opened it, the letter inside said only, in her mother's careful writing:

Yvonne. This is for you. No one else. You are my daughter. You have been the best daughter a mother could want. I love you more than the words let me tell you when I am living. I am telling you now so the words have time to sit where they need to sit. Do not be afraid in the year after I go. The Lord will be the Lord. You will be held. I will be watching. I love you. Mama.

Yvonne sat on the edge of her mother's bed with the letter in her hand for a long while.

She did not, tonight, cry.

She had cried enough today.

She read the letter three times. She folded it. She put it back in the envelope. She set the envelope in the wooden box. She closed the box. She put it back in the drawer. She closed the drawer.

She turned off the lamp. She stood in the dark of the bedroom for a moment with her hand on the dresser.

She said: "I love you, Mama."

She went to bed.

The first week had one more day in it. The second week would begin on Monday the eighteenth. The mail would keep coming. The phone would keep ringing. Tiana would keep coming at four. Carl would keep coming at noon. The house would, slowly, begin to learn what it was without its keeper.

The Lord was the Lord.

The keeping continued.

Outside, the pecan tree was bare. The small light over the sink burned on.