David

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 53: David

Tiana said yes to coffee on the second Wednesday of February, after Bible study, on the small wet sidewalk outside Mt. Calvary at eight-forty in the evening.

She had been thinking about saying yes since Christmas Eve.

She had thought about it through January, which was the coldest January Memphis had seen in a decade and which had, by virtue of the cold, given her many evenings alone in her apartment to think. She had thought about it the morning after the two-year commemorative Sunday on January seventh, when David had sat two rows behind her in the sanctuary and had not, at any point, tried to catch her eye across the pews. She had thought about it the way a woman of thirty-two thinks about a decision she has been carefully refusing to make for eight months — not with pressure, but with the small gradual realization that the refusal had, at some point, stopped being discernment and had become avoidance.

On the second Wednesday of February, after Bible study — during which David had, again, not said a thing that was intended to move the relationship forward — she had walked outside with him and had said, on the small wet sidewalk, in her winter coat: "David. Coffee this Saturday."

He had stopped.

He had said: "Tiana."

"Yes."

"I am glad."

"Saturday at ten. The small place on Central. I know the owner."

"Yes."

"I will meet you there."

"I will be there, Tiana."

That had been it.

They had met, that first Saturday, for ninety minutes.

They had met again the next Saturday for two hours.

By the third Saturday David had told her — carefully, over coffee at the same small place — about his mother Felicia who had died in 2019 of an aggressive pancreatic cancer at sixty-one, about his grandmother Sarah Taylor who had raised him with his mother in a small duplex in Orange Mound from 1993 to 2005 before dying of lung cancer in 2012, about his uncle Michael Taylor whom David had never met because Michael had died on a motorcycle in 1987 at twenty-three when David's mother had been seventeen and pregnant with David's older sister.

He had told her, on the third Saturday, that his grandmother Sarah had, in her last months, mentioned a woman named Mother Tate on Park Avenue more than once. He had not paid close attention — he had been eighteen in 2012, a senior in high school, not yet a person who listened to grandmothers. He had, ten years later, regretted not listening.

He had told Tiana this carefully, and had then said: Tiana. I was going to bring this up on the first Saturday. I decided to wait because I did not want the whole conversation to be about my grandmother and your grandmother. I wanted you to know me a little first. Now you know me a little. I wanted you to know.

Tiana had said: David. Thank you for waiting.

He had said: Yes.

By April, they had been meeting for coffee on Saturdays for eight weeks.

They had moved, on the fifth Saturday, from the small place on Central to a bench in Overton Park, because they had discovered that they both liked benches and because the small place on Central had a small television above the counter that David found, he said, distracting in the afternoons when a Grizzlies game was on.

The bench they had settled on was a particular bench — near the oak stand in the small meadow beyond the playground, under a tree that was in April half leafed and in May would be the kind of tree that made a room of light around the bench.

On Saturday, April fourteenth, twenty twenty-nine, at two-fifteen in the afternoon, Tiana arrived at the bench to find David already there, with a small cardboard box on his lap.

She had, in the walk across the meadow, registered the box. She had not, before arriving, asked about it. David had been texting her Thursday night that he had a thing to bring on Saturday. He had said it is not urgent but I want to bring it. Tiana had said bring it.

She sat beside him.

The April light was the clean gold of a Memphis spring that had finally committed, the small breeze was from the south, and the meadow was busy in its ordinary Saturday way — children on the playground, two men with a dog, a woman reading under a different tree.

"David."

"Tiana."

"What is in the box."

"A letter. From my grandmother. I found it last Sunday at my mother's storage unit. I have been looking through her things for seven years. I have been finding small things. This is a large one."

"Yes."

"I want to tell you what it is before I hand it to you. So that you can decide whether you want to read it here or later. I do not want to push you."

"Tell me, David."

"My grandmother wrote this in October of 2010. It is dated on the last page. It was written two weeks after she got the stage-three lung cancer diagnosis. She had not yet started the chemo. She wrote the letter at her kitchen table in the small duplex in Orange Mound where she had been living since 1974. The letter is to Mother Tate. Your grandmother. I have read it. I read it last Sunday in the storage unit standing up next to my mother's boxes. I read it twice. It is five pages. It is in my grandmother's hand. It was never sent. I do not know why it was never sent. I have been thinking about that for six days."

Tiana did not, for a moment, answer.

"David."

"Yes."

"Your grandmother wrote my grandmother a letter that was never sent."

"Yes."

"And you found it last Sunday."

"Last Sunday."

"Have you told your sister?"

"I have not. I wanted to bring it to you first. The letter is addressed to your grandmother, Tiana. It is your letter to read before it is anyone else's. My sister will understand. I can bring it to her later. Today it is yours."

Tiana breathed.

"David. I want to read it here. On the bench. With you."

"Yes, Tiana."

He opened the box.

The letter was in a manila envelope, creased where it had been folded in a Bible for nineteen years. The pages inside were lined yellow legal paper, the kind Sarah Taylor had been using, David had told Tiana in March, for grocery lists and for the small writing she did at the kitchen table on Saturday afternoons.

Tiana unfolded the pages.

She read.

Dear Mother Tate,

I am writing this letter on the seventeenth of October, twenty ten, in my kitchen on Barksdale Street in Orange Mound, two blocks and change from your house on Park Avenue. I have been meaning to write to you since Michael went home in nineteen eighty-seven. That is twenty-three years. I have been a coward, Mother Tate. I am writing now because I am not going to have twenty-three more. Two weeks ago the doctors at Baptist told me I have stage-three lung cancer, and they have told me the number, which I am not going to write down in this letter because I do not want the letter to be about the number. The number will take care of itself. I am writing this letter because the number has made me a less cowardly woman overnight, and I want to tell you a thing while the unweakening is still holding.

I know you have been praying for me.

I have known it since January of nineteen eighty-eight. Your husband Eldridge came to my door the week after Michael's funeral. He was there on behalf of Mt. Calvary — at the time I had been a member for eight months and had lost my son and had stopped coming to services. He knocked on my door with a small covered dish and he sat on my porch for an hour and he did not, in that hour, speak for forty-five minutes of it. At minute forty-six he said, quietly: "Sister Taylor. My wife Ola Mae has been praying for you and the boy every morning since Michael went. She will not stop. She asked me to tell you. She did not come herself because she did not want you to feel looked at. She wanted you to feel carried."

Mother Tate, I have been carried for twenty-three years.

I did not come back to Mt. Calvary until 2001. I went to a different church for thirteen years — a small one on Lamar where I was anonymous, which was what I needed. I came back to Mt. Calvary the Sunday after my mother died in October of 2001 because something in me, for the first time since Michael, wanted the singing. I sat in the back pew. You were four pews up. You did not turn to see me. You did not, during the service, acknowledge my presence. I watched you. I watched the back of your head. I watched the small nod you gave when Pastor Briggs reached the second point of his sermon, which was the nod you were still giving for your husband's old pastor seven years into Pastor Honeycutt's tenure, and I thought: that is the woman who has been carrying me. I thought it three times during that service. I went home. I did not come over to your house. I was twenty-three years into not thanking you and I did not, then, know how to start.

I have been meaning to come for nine more years.

I am not coming now either.

I am going to write this letter. I am going to put it in my Bible. I am going to leave it there and I am going to not mail it, because I am, at sixty-one years old, still a woman who cannot quite make herself walk down Park Avenue in April with a letter in her purse and knock on the door of a woman who has been carrying her since eighty-seven. I am going to ask the Lord to arrange, at some point after I am gone, for you to learn of this letter's existence, because I am too cowardly to bring it myself and I think the Lord will honor the cowardice by making the arrangement in His own time.

What I want to say — and I am saying it now, in case the chemo takes the clarity — is thank you.

Thank you for Eldridge on my porch in January of eighty-eight. Thank you for the small nod he gave me when he left, which was the nod of a man whose wife had sent him on an errand he had understood completely. Thank you for not, in twenty-three years, ever approaching me. Thank you for letting the keeping be silent. Thank you for the mornings. Thank you for the days I was so far under that I did not know what was keeping me upright, and it was, it turned out, the small steady pressure of a woman two blocks and change away who was saying my name to the Lord at three in the morning.

Michael is in the cloud. I will see him soon. I am not afraid of the going, Mother Tate. I am afraid of the not-thanking, which is why I am writing this letter.

My daughter Felicia is forty. She has a son who is five. His name is David. He is a watchful boy. He is the kind of boy who is going to be a man who notices. If the Lord is kind — and the Lord has been kind, past what I deserved, for twenty-three years — David Taylor may, in his adulthood, find a way to meet you, or your daughter, or your granddaughter. If he does, Mother Tate, you tell him about his grandmother. You tell him I was carried. You tell him the keeping is real, because I am, if this disease goes the way I suspect it will go, evidence that it is. A woman does not survive the loss of her twenty-three-year-old son without being carried. I was carried. You did the carrying. I want David, in my own house in whatever room the cancer has left me the voice to say it in, and then — when the voice is gone — in a letter at the bottom of my Bible, to know.

I love you, Mother Tate. I have loved you from a distance for twenty-three years. I do not expect an answer to this letter because the letter will never leave my Bible. I am saying it anyway because the saying is the thing.

Sarah Belle Taylor October 17, 2010

Tiana finished the letter.

She folded it.

She did not, for a long moment, speak.

David said, gently: "Tiana."

"David."

"I am sorry. I know that is a lot."

"David. Do not apologize. Your grandmother did not apologize in this letter. She said the thing. I am receiving the thing. I am — David, I am receiving it."

"Yes."

She held the letter in her lap.

She looked out at the meadow.

The April afternoon was continuing. The children on the playground. The man with the dog. The woman under the other tree. The small breeze from the south.

She said, quietly: "David."

"Yes."

"Your grandmother wrote this nineteen years ago. She asked the Lord to arrange for us to find it. He has been arranging for nineteen years. He arranged that I would say yes to coffee in February. He arranged that you would go to the storage unit last Sunday. He arranged that you would bring the letter to me today on this bench. He has been arranging this afternoon since October of twenty ten."

"Yes, Tiana."

"That is — David, that is the keeping. Your grandmother knew. My grandmother did not know, until she went in twenty twenty-seven, that your grandmother knew. The keeping was mutual. It was silent for twenty-three years on your side and fifty years on hers. The Lord was — David, the Lord was holding both sides of it."

"Yes."

Tiana could not, for a moment, speak further.

She set the letter in her lap. She kept her hand on it.

After a while David said, carefully: "Tiana. I want to tell you one thing that is not in the letter. My grandmother, in her last month, did say one thing to me about Mother Tate that I remembered — specifically because it was the last thing she said to me with her full clarity. It was the week before she went. She said to me: David, when you are grown, if you ever meet Ola Mae Tate's family, you tell them the Jeremiah prayer worked. She did not explain what the Jeremiah prayer was. I did not ask. She went the following week. I have not, in seventeen years, told anyone that sentence. I am telling you now because the letter makes the sentence make sense."

"David."

"Yes."

"Jeremiah twenty-nine, eleven. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. My grandmother prayed that verse over specific names in her book — the long carries, the ones she had been holding for over a decade. She would pray it out loud sometimes in the kitchen when she thought no one was listening. I heard her pray it twice growing up. Your grandmother got that prayer. She got that prayer for twenty-three years."

"Yes, Tiana."

"The prayer worked. You will tell my mother when you meet her. She will cry. It will be the good kind of crying."

"Yes, Tiana."

They sat on the bench for a long time.

The April afternoon moved. The shadow of the tree shifted four inches. A small wind came up and went. Tiana, at some point, leaned her shoulder against David's shoulder — the first time, in eight weeks of Saturdays, that either of them had made physical contact more than a handshake or a hand briefly on a hand across a table.

David did not move his shoulder away. He also did not put his arm around her. He had been, in eight weeks, the kind of careful man Mama Tate would have approved of. He continued, on the bench with the letter on Tiana's lap, to be that kind of careful man.

After a while Tiana said: "David."

"Yes."

"I am going to bring you home to meet my mother next Saturday."

He did not, for a moment, answer.

Then he said: "Yes, Tiana."

"I am going to bring you home not because we have a thing that is fast. I am going to bring you home because the letter belongs at Park Avenue. My mother has the right to read this letter in her own kitchen, at the same table where your grandmother wrote it two blocks away in October of twenty ten. You are going to read it aloud to her. I am going to sit beside you. She is going to cry. You will have met her in that way first. The rest of what you and I are — that comes after. But the letter comes first. The letter has been in a Bible for nineteen years. It is ready to be in a kitchen now."

"Yes, Tiana."

"Next Saturday at noon. I will tell her tomorrow. She will have the weekend to prepare. She will make biscuits."

"Yes, Tiana."

He looked at her on the bench.

He said, quietly: "Tiana. Thank you for saying yes to coffee in February."

"David. Thank you for waiting."

"I did not know I was waiting until Christmas Eve, when I heard about you reading the commemorative testimony at the first-year service in January of twenty-eight. I was at that service. I sat in the back. I listened to you. I had come to Mt. Calvary in 2020 looking for Mother Tate. I had not found her — she had been at home recovering from something; I did not persist. I had stayed at the church. I had been there, quiet, for four years. You did not know I existed until I was across from you at Bible study in June. The Lord, Tiana — the Lord has been slow with me. I am, I think, finally learning to trust the slow."

"Yes, David."

"I am glad."

"I am too."

They walked back across the meadow at four-fifteen.

David walked Tiana to her car. He did not, at the car, try to kiss her. Tiana had not, in eight weeks, given him the signal that a kiss was the right next step, and David had been the kind of man who had, for eight weeks, been waiting for the signals she offered rather than forcing them.

She said, at the car: "David."

"Yes."

"I will see you Saturday at noon. At Park Avenue. Do not bring anything. Come hungry. Come ready. I will text you the address tonight."

"Yes, Tiana."

"Take the letter home tonight. You hold it until Saturday. You bring it in the morning."

"Yes."

"David."

"Yes."

"Drive careful."

"Yes, Tiana."

Tiana drove to Park Avenue.

She let herself in. Yvonne was in the kitchen with Carl, peeling potatoes for supper.

Yvonne looked up at her daughter's face.

Yvonne said, without preamble: "Baby."

"Mom."

"You look like a woman who has read a thing."

"I have, Mom."

"Come sit."

Tiana sat at the kitchen table. She did not, in the sitting down, trust her voice. She waited a moment. Carl, quietly, set his paring knife down and came around the table. He put his hand on Tiana's shoulder. He said only: Baby. He let his hand stay there for a count of three. Then he took his hand off and went back to the potatoes, because Carl Brooks was the kind of man who knew when his presence was needed for three seconds and when to step back.

Tiana told her mother about the letter.

She did not bring the letter itself — the letter was in David's hand now — but she told her the shape of it. Sarah Taylor. October 17, 2010. The unsent letter. The nineteen-year arrangement. The Jeremiah prayer.

Yvonne sat across from her daughter at the table and listened.

When Tiana was done Yvonne said, after a very long pause: "Baby. The Lord."

"Mom."

"I have been reading Sarah Taylor's name in your book every Saturday for two years. I did not know — Tiana, I did not know that Mama had prayed Jeremiah twenty-nine, eleven over her. I knew Mama prayed Jeremiah. I did not know which names got it. Mama did not tell me. The fact that Sarah Taylor got the Jeremiah prayer — that is a thing I am going to be sitting with for a few days."

"Yes, Mom."

"David is coming Saturday."

"At noon. He is going to read the letter to you in this kitchen."

"Baby. I am going to need to make biscuits and I am going to need to think for a week and I am going to need to not rush any decisions."

"Yes, Mom. I know."

"I am — Tiana, I am not going to say anything tonight about what this means for you and David. I am going to hear the letter on Saturday. Then I am going to sit with it. Then I will tell you what I think, if you want to know."

"Yes, Mom. I want to know. I always want to know."

"Good."

That night Tiana sat at her kitchen table with the composition book and the green notebook.

She added, in the green notebook:

April 14, 2029. David brought me an unsent letter from his grandmother to Mama Tate, written October 2010. Sarah Taylor knew. Mama carried her through Jeremiah 29:11 for twenty-three years. Sarah knew since January 1988 because Grandpa Eldridge went to her porch the week after her son died and told her, quietly, that Mama was praying for her. The whole keeping was mutual. It was silent for a combined seventy years. The Lord arranged today. David will read it to Mom Saturday. I am not arranging fast. I am, after eight weeks of not touching, leaning my shoulder against his on the bench. The Lord is arranging slowly. I am going slowly with Him.

She set down the pen.

She looked at the small framed photograph of Cornbread on her side table.

She said, to her kitchen: Thank You, Lord. Thank You for David's grandmother. Thank You for my grandfather on her porch. Thank You for the Jeremiah prayer. Thank You for the nineteen years of arranging. Thank You for the bench today. Thank You for David. Amen.

She closed the notebook.

She went to bed.

In Midtown, at his apartment off Union, David Taylor sat at his own kitchen table with his grandmother's letter on the table in front of him.

He had read it four times.

He was, at thirty-three, a man who had been — he would say later to Tiana on a different Saturday — waiting for his life to start for a long time. He had been at his job at Oakhaven Middle School for eight years. He had been at Mt. Calvary for nine. He had been single since the breakup in 2024. He had been watching, specifically, Tiana Brooks since he had first seen her at the back of the sanctuary on the first anniversary commemorative service in January 2028.

Tonight, for the first time in nine years, he felt the waiting become something else.

He did not, tonight, name it.

He did what his grandmother had taught him to do at her kitchen table when he was eight years old: he said a short prayer he did not give himself permission to analyze, and he went to bed.

He slept well.

The April night was warm. The pecan trees in Orange Mound, two blocks east, were in full leaf.

In her own apartment, Tiana was already asleep.

In the cloud, Sarah Taylor, who had written an unsent letter in October of 2010 and had asked the Lord in the last line of it to arrange — at some point after she was gone — for the letter to reach Park Avenue, was, Tiana would believe without claiming, at her own prayer-floor on the other side, receiving the news that the arrangement had been completed on a bench in Overton Park that afternoon.

The Lord had been, as Sarah Taylor had suspected He would be, kind.

The letter, after nineteen years, had come home.