Marcus

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 7: Marcus

Marcus Brooks called his grandmother every Sunday at two o'clock, which was a thing he had been doing since he had moved to Atlanta in 2019 and which he had, in seven years, missed exactly twice.

Both times he had called the next morning to apologize, and both times Mama Tate had said baby, you do not owe me an apology, you owe me a phone call, in the small dry voice she used when she was forgiving and instructing in the same breath.

He sat on his couch in his apartment in the Old Fourth Ward with the phone in his hand at one fifty-eight, and he ran his thumb over the home button without pressing it the way he had been running his thumb over it for three minutes. The apartment was small. The light through the south-facing window was Sunday afternoon light, bright and low, and the dog upstairs was doing the small Sunday thing the dog upstairs always did at this hour, which was scratch and shift and resettle for what would be his afternoon nap.

Marcus did not know why he was hesitating.

He had not, in seven years of Sunday calls, ever hesitated. He had called from cars and from offices and from the back of an Uber and from a beach in Destin and from a hotel room in San Francisco. He had called when he had been newly heartbroken, and he had called when he had been promoted, and he had called when his father had been in the hospital for the kidney stone in 2022, and he had called when he had not, in any direction, had a single thing to report. He had called because the call was the call, and Mama Tate was Mama Tate, and the conversation had its own architecture that did not require either of them to bring news.

Today he was hesitating because his mother had texted him at eleven in the morning.

Call Mama at 2 like normal. I want her to hear from you. Don't ask about the appointment. I'll call you tonight after she's asleep.

The text had sat on his phone for three hours. He had read it four times. He had not replied. He had not, in any direct way, asked his mother what appointment, because the texture of the text had told him already that the answer was the answer he had been not-asking about for a year.

He had been not-asking, in the way Brooks men did not-ask, since Christmas of last year when he had come home for four days and his grandmother had called him Carl twice without noticing and had asked, on the morning of the twenty-sixth, if Yvonne had mailed the package to her sister yet, although her sister had been dead nine months. He had not said anything to anyone. He had told himself it was the holidays. He had told himself it was nothing. He had returned to Atlanta and he had not, in four months since, called his mother to ask the question.

He pressed the home button. He opened the favorites. He tapped Mama Tate.

She picked up on the second ring.

"Marcus Brooks."

"Mama."

"You sound like you have been thinking too long about a call you make every Sunday."

He laughed. It was the small reflex laugh that her voice always pulled out of him, the one she had been pulling out of him since he was four years old. "Mama. How are you."

"I am sitting in your grandfather's chair. I have eaten my lunch. I have my book on my lap. I am as I always am at two o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. How are you, baby."

"I am all right."

"Tell me one true thing, Marcus."

This was the way she opened every call. She had been opening every call this way since 2020, when he had complained, in his second month in Atlanta, that the Sunday calls were starting to feel like updates instead of conversations, and she had said, we will fix that, you tell me one true thing first, then we can do the updates.

He thought.

"I went to the small church in Cabbagetown this morning. The one I have not been to since February. I sat in the back. I did not sing. I left during the last hymn. I do not know what it is about that church that is hard for me right now. I think it is that the people there are kind in the way you are kind, and I am — I am not sure I deserve to sit in a room of people being kind in the way you are kind. I am not in a place where I can give back the kindness yet. So I leave."

She did not answer at first.

Then she said: "Baby."

"Mama."

"You sit in that church next Sunday. You sit through the last hymn. You do not sing if you do not feel it. But you do not leave before the benediction. The benediction is what they are giving you. You let them give it."

"Yes, Mama."

"Now tell me about your week."

He told her about his week.

He told her about the project he was running, which was a brand strategy for a small Atlanta publisher that he liked working with. He told her about the dinner he had cooked for Wednesday night, which was the first time he had cooked since February — black beans, rice, the cornbread the way she had taught him when he was twelve. He told her about the haircut he had finally gotten on Friday after putting it off six weeks. He told her, briefly, that he had been thinking about coming home for Easter, but that he would let her know.

"Mother's Day is in two weeks, Marcus."

"I know, Mama."

"You decide soon. I do not want you flying in last minute. The fares are already ugly."

"Yes, Mama."

She told him about her week. She did not tell him about Tuesday. She did not tell him about the diagnosis. She did not tell him about Stephen Pruitt's visit — that one she would tell him in person, she had decided, because it was not a thing that would carry over a phone. She told him instead about the porch step, which Carl had fixed on Wednesday, and which had outlived them both already. She told him about Mt. Calvary's revival being moved up. She told him that Mother Wells had asked after him in the pew last Sunday and had wanted to know whether he was eating.

"I am eating, Mama."

"You tell Mother Wells next time."

"I will, Mama."

There was a small comfortable pause. Sundays at two had pauses. It was part of why he called. The world he lived in did not have pauses in it. The world Mama Tate lived in was made of them.

"Marcus."

"Yes, Mama."

"How is your father holding up at the post office?"

The room he was sitting in did not move.

He kept the phone against his ear. He did not, on his face, do the thing his face wanted to do. He had learned, on the morning after Christmas, how to keep his face still through this kind of moment, even though no one could see his face, because the face was a habit and the habit was practice for the thing he could not yet name.

His father had not worked at the post office for three years. His father had retired in 2023. His father was sixty-three years old and he had been a retired postal worker for the entirety of the last three years of Sunday phone calls, which his grandmother had asked about and acknowledged dozens of times.

Marcus said, gently: "Mama. Daddy retired. He stopped at the post office in twenty twenty-three."

Silence.

He could hear, through the phone, the small sound of his grandmother breathing the breath she breathed when she was assessing what had just happened to her. It was a measured breath. It was the breath of an eighty-two-year-old woman who had lived inside her own mind for sixty years and who knew, with a precision no one else could give her, when her mind had handed her a wrong card.

"Of course he did," she said, after a moment.

"Mama."

"I knew that, Marcus. I am sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry."

"I do, baby. I asked you a question that did not match the year. I am — I am working on a thing this week. I have been doing some forgetting. I do not want you to be afraid."

"I am not afraid."

It was, more or less, a lie.

He had been afraid since the text at eleven in the morning. He had been afraid, more deeply, since Christmas. He had been afraid at a slow distance for two years.

"I am not afraid, Mama."

"Tell me one true thing, Marcus Brooks. Now. Not the church one. A different one."

He breathed.

"I have not been calling you on Sundays only because of the call, Mama. I have been calling you on Sundays because if I do not call you, I am afraid that the next Sunday I might call and you might not — you might not — and I have been calling every Sunday partly to make sure that has not happened yet. I have been afraid of that for a year. I have not told anyone. I have not told Mom. I have not told my therapist. I am telling you now because you asked for a true one and that is the truest one I have."

The pause was longer this time.

When his grandmother spoke, her voice was the voice she used at funerals. It was not louder. It was not smaller. It was the voice that did not waste any of itself.

"Marcus."

"Yes, Mama."

"I am not going anywhere this week. I am not going anywhere this month. The Lord and I have an arrangement. He has not told me when, but I can feel that it is not yet. So you can stop carrying that one Sunday at a time. I am going to be here when you call next week."

"Yes, Mama."

"And Marcus."

"Yes, Mama."

"You were a brave boy to tell me that. You have always been brave when it counted. You were brave when your father was sick in twenty-twenty-two. You were brave when you broke up with that girl who was not for you. You were brave when you moved to Atlanta because Memphis was hard for you and you did not have words for why. I have known you were brave since you were three years old and you stood in my kitchen and told me that the iron was hot when I had told you it was cold. You have always been the one who tells the truth in the room."

He did not, in his apartment, trust his face.

"I love you, Mama."

"I love you too, baby. You call me back tonight if you need to. I will be up until nine."

"Yes, Mama."

"Now go and take a walk. The day is too pretty to spend on a couch."

"Yes, Mama."

"I will see you for Mother's Day."

She had not, ten minutes ago, said anything definite about Mother's Day. He had not, ten minutes ago, decided about Mother's Day. The sentence had arrived from her the way her sentences sometimes did — not as a question and not as a wish but as a small forward statement that her body had already arranged.

"Yes, Mama. I will be home for Mother's Day."

"Good. You bring me one of those cinnamon rolls from that bakery on Highland in Atlanta you like. The one you brought me at Thanksgiving in twenty-twenty-three."

"Yes, Mama."

"I love you, Marcus Brooks."

"I love you, Mama."

She hung up first. She had always hung up first. He had asked her about it once, when he was fifteen, and she had said, baby, an elder hangs up first because the elder is the one telling you it is over, and he had thought about that line for years.

He sat on the couch with the dead phone in his hand for a long time.

He did not take a walk.

He sat on the couch and he looked at the wall and he did not cry, because the crying he was doing was the kind that did not come out the eyes. It came out the chest. It came out the breath. It came out the way the body cries when the thing it is grieving has not yet happened and the body is grieving the not-yet, which is a different grief than the kind people teach you to recognize.

After a long time he picked up the phone. He called his mother.

She answered on the first ring.

"Marcus."

"Mom."

"How was the call."

"She called me Carl. Then she asked about Daddy at the post office."

"Oh, baby."

"Mom. What's going on."

Yvonne told him.

She told him about the appointment. She told him about Dr. Akinyele. She told him about the cognitive screens and about the diagnosis, which had a name now, and about the fact that the progression had been slow and was likely to continue to be slow but that they were now in the part of the road that had a destination, even if the destination was distant. She told him about the prayer book. She told him about Stephen Pruitt's visit on Sunday morning and the letter from Calvin Pruitt and the line his grandmother had drawn through the name. She told him about Carl's father and Eunice Holcomb. She told him, finally, about the composition books his grandmother had asked her to buy at the Easy Way after the appointment, and about the conversation she did not yet know the shape of that the composition books were going to begin.

She told him all of it because she had decided, in the parking lot of Dr. Akinyele's office on Tuesday, that her son was old enough not to be protected and that the protecting had been, on her own part, partly a way of avoiding having to say the words herself.

She finished.

Marcus did not, immediately, speak.

When he did, his voice was small.

"Mom. I should have come home for Christmas this year. I am sorry."

"You came home last Christmas."

"I should have come home for longer. I should have come home in February when I almost did. I should have — Mom, I should have called you about Christmas. About the Carl thing."

"You did not know what the Carl thing was."

"I knew, Mom."

"Marcus."

"I knew. I knew enough. I did not want to know more. I am sorry."

Yvonne breathed. He could hear her on the other end of the line, in her own kitchen in Cordova, doing the small steady breath she did when she was preparing to say a thing carefully.

"Marcus. I have been doing the same thing for two years. I have known and I have not let myself know. We do not have to do an inventory of each other's avoidance. We are in it now. The avoidance is over. That is what counts."

He nodded into the phone.

"Mom. I am coming home. Not for Mother's Day. This weekend. Friday after work."

"Marcus."

"I am coming home this weekend. I will be there Friday night. I will stay through Monday morning. I will get the Tuesday morning flight back to Atlanta. I am doing it. Do not talk me out of it."

"I was not going to."

"I want to sit with her. I want to sit with her in the front room and not have to do it in three minutes on the phone. I want to take her to lunch. I want to take her to the cemetery. I want to sit with you and Daddy and Tiana for a Saturday dinner. I want to walk her to church on Sunday."

"Yes, Marcus."

"And I want to read the book. If she will let me."

Yvonne paused.

"You will need to ask her, baby. The book is hers."

"I know."

"You ask her gently."

"I will, Mom."

"You ask her on Saturday morning. Not Friday. Friday she will be tired from your arrival. Saturday morning at the kitchen table after she has had her coffee."

"Yes, Mom."

He paused.

"Mom. Is she — is she scared?"

"She is, Marcus. She is also more herself than I have seen her in a long time. The two things are sitting next to each other in her, and the second one is the one she is leading with, because she is your grandmother. But she is scared. She is allowed to be."

"Yes, Mom."

"Come home, baby. Come home this weekend."

"I will."

"And Marcus."

"Yes, Mom."

"I love you. I am proud of you for telling her on the phone what you told her. Mama just texted me five minutes ago. She said, Marcus told me one true thing today. You raised him right. That is what she said. Word for word."

He did not, immediately, answer.

When he did, the word was small. It was the word an eight-year-old says when his grandmother has just hugged him in the kitchen.

"Okay, Mom."

He hung up. He walked to the kitchen. He drank a glass of water at the sink standing up. He walked back to the couch. He opened his laptop. He went to the airline app. He searched Atlanta to Memphis. He found a flight on Friday at six twenty-two in the evening, arriving at six fifty-five Central, and a return on Tuesday morning at six fifteen. He paid four hundred and seventy-three dollars for the round trip without looking at the price more than once.

He closed the laptop.

He sat with his hands on his knees.

After a long time he opened the small composition book he had been keeping for two years on the side table — a black-and-white marbled one, the same kind his grandmother had bought at the Easy Way two days ago, which was not a coincidence he had organized but which he registered in himself with a small private quiet — and he opened it to the first blank page.

He picked up a pen.

He wrote: I am going home on Friday. I am going home for the right reason. I am going home before I have to.

He closed the book.

He looked at the wall above his couch. He had a small framed photograph there — taken by his mother in 1998, when he was four months old, of his grandmother holding him in the front room of the house on Park Avenue. Mama Tate was wearing the green dress. He was wrapped in a yellow blanket. They were both looking at each other. Eldridge was in the background, out of focus, smiling.

He looked at the photograph for a long time.

Then he stood up. He put on his shoes. He went out for the walk his grandmother had told him to take, because Mama Tate had told him to, and because the walk was a small thing he could do today that was not avoidance, and because the dog upstairs had finally settled, and the day was, in fact, too pretty for a couch.

He walked to the park. He sat on a bench. He watched a man play with his daughter on the swings. He prayed — not the church prayer, not the kneeling prayer, but the bench prayer, the small Marcus-shaped prayer he had not, in two years, said out loud to anyone:

Lord. I have been at distance. I am sorry. I am coming home this weekend. Be with my grandmother. Hold what she cannot hold. Hold me too. Hold us.

The man on the swings pushed his daughter higher. The daughter laughed. The afternoon went on.

In Memphis, in a house on Park Avenue, an eighty-two-year-old woman set her phone down on the side table next to a prayer book and a composition book she had not yet opened, and she sat in her husband's chair and she said to the Lord, in the small interior voice the Lord had heard from her for sixty years:

Thank You for that boy. Thank You for the call. Thank You for not letting me hide my forgetting from him. He was going to find out. It is better he found out from me.

She closed her eyes.

The sun moved another inch across the floor of the front room.

The keepers, she was learning, were not only the old. The boy on the bench in Atlanta with the small marbled book — she did not know about the book; she did not need to — was already keeping. He had been keeping her for two years one phone call at a time. She had not seen it before today.

She saw it now.

She did not write his name in her own book. He was already in her own book. She had been writing his name on the active list every morning since he was six days old. But she resolved, in the small front room in the small afternoon light, to call him by his full name in her morning prayer tomorrow, and to thank the Lord aloud for him by name, and to do it twice, because the boy had told her one true thing and the truth had cost him something, and the Lord, she had learned, kept ledgers on the truth that cost.

She rested in the chair until the light went amber.

Then she got up to put dinner on, because she was eighty-two years old and she still made her own dinner on Sunday nights, and she would, for as long as the Lord let her, keep doing the small ordinary things that had been the shape of her life.

The keeping continued. The Lord was the Lord. The boy was coming home on Friday.

It was enough for the afternoon.