The Lost Morning

The Keeper of Hours

Chapter 9: The Lost Morning

She woke at twelve minutes past three the next morning and the room was wrong.

She lay still. She did not, immediately, understand what was wrong about it. The room was the room she had been waking up in for sixty-four years, and the ceiling above her was the ceiling Eldridge had patched in 1979 after the upstairs leak, and the curtain on the window was the curtain she had bought in 2014 to replace the one that had gone gray at the hem. None of those things had moved. The wrongness was not in the room. The wrongness was in her.

She tried to find the date.

The date was a thing she had been finding, for sixty years, the way other people find their car keys — automatically, without looking, the day-shape rising into the mind the moment the eyes opened. The day was always there. The year was always there. She had never, in eighty-two years, woken up and not known.

She did not know.

She lay still. She tried to slow it down. Yesterday. Yesterday I — yesterday I —

She could not get to yesterday.

She could get, very faintly, to a Sunday, and she could get to a hat that had been on the bed, and she could get to a porch step that had been broken or fixed — she could not tell which. She could get to a name in her book that had once been strange and was strange again now, in this moment, because she could not summon it. Calvin? She tried Calvin. The name did not light up the way the names of the held lit up. It hung there in the dark, half-known.

She sat up.

She sat up too fast. The room moved. She put her hand on the headboard. She breathed.

She thought: Eldridge.

She thought it without intention. She thought it the way she had thought it for forty-six years before he had died — the small first-thought of the morning, Eldridge, the name that meant the man asleep beside me, the man whose breath is in this room, the man I will be married to today. The name had been the morning's first verb, conjugated in his presence.

She turned, in the bed, to look at him.

He was not there.

The other side of the bed was as it always was: the white quilt smooth, the pillow undented, Eldridge's reading glasses on the nightstand where she had left them, in the case, in 2008.

She sat for a long moment looking at the empty side of the bed, and then she remembered.

She remembered the way you remember a thing you should not have to remember. She remembered the heart attack. She remembered the kitchen. She remembered Eldridge's hand in hers and the paramedics in the doorway and the long quiet drive in the back of the ambulance. She remembered the funeral. She remembered the eighteen years.

She remembered, and she sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap, and she did not cry, because the body that had cried for eighteen years was tired, and the body that was waking up this morning had not yet recovered from the discovery of the empty pillow.

She sat for a long time.

She did not know how long.

After a while she rose. Her hips made their announcement. She acknowledged it, slowly, one hip at a time, and she walked through the doorway of her bedroom and down the hall toward the kitchen, because the kitchen was where her body went when the rest of her did not know what to do.

The kitchen light over the stove was off.

She had left it on. She had left it on for sixty years, every night, because the small warm light over the stove was the way she had been taught by her mother to leave a kitchen, so that the first person up did not have to walk into a dark room to find the switch. The light was off. The light had not been off when she had gone to bed.

She turned it on.

The clock on the wall said three twenty-one.

She looked at the clock. She tried, again, to find the date. The clock said the time but the date was not on the clock. There was a calendar on the wall by the refrigerator — a free one from the funeral home, which was the kind of calendar a woman of her age kept whether she wanted to or not — and she walked over to it. The calendar was on the page that said April. She looked at the days. She tried to find the day she was on. She could not find it.

She knew, now, what year it was. She knew that Eldridge was dead. She knew that her name was Ola Mae Tate and that this was her kitchen. She knew that she had a daughter named Yvonne and a son-in-law named Carl and a grandson named Marcus and a granddaughter named Tiana. She knew that she went to Mt. Calvary on Park Avenue and that Pastor Honeycutt was the pastor and that Mother Wells was ninety-one and that the choir was singing something at the last service that she had not joined in on.

She did not know the day.

She looked at the calendar a long time and the days did not arrange themselves.

She walked to the front room.

The chair was where the chair had been since 1981. The side table was beside it. The lamp on the side table was off. She had not turned it off; she did not turn it off; she turned that lamp off only when she was leaving the house for an extended trip, which she had not done in five years. The lamp was off.

She turned it on.

The side table was empty.

She looked at it.

She looked at it a long time. The side table was where the prayer book lived. The prayer book had lived on the side table — that side table, that exact corner of it, six inches from the lamp base and three inches from the edge — since 2011, when she had moved it from the kitchen counter, where it had lived for the previous decade, because the kitchen had begun to feel like a place that the book did not belong in.

The book was not on the side table.

She sat down in the chair. Her body sat itself down without consulting her. The chair received her.

She tried to think about where she had put the book. She tried to retrace the day, but the day was gone, and the day before the day was gone, and what she had was a small bright fragment of a porch and a man named Stephen who had been in a suit, and a name on a page that had been answered, and she could not — she could not — connect those fragments to this morning. The fragments were in a room and the morning was in another room and the door between the rooms was, today, closed.

She got up.

She walked back through the house. Slowly. She looked on the kitchen counter. She looked on the kitchen table. The kitchen table had a composition book on it — black-and-white marbled, open to a page covered in large block-letter names — but it did not have the prayer book. She did not, at first, recognize the composition book. Then she did. Then she did not again. Then she did.

She left the kitchen.

She walked down the hall. She looked in the bathroom — she did not know why she was looking in the bathroom; she had never put the prayer book in the bathroom; she was looking in the bathroom because she had run out of rooms — and the prayer book was on the back of the toilet.

She stared at it.

The prayer book was on the back of the toilet.

She did not remember putting it there. She did not remember being in the bathroom with the book in her hand. She did not remember any reason a woman who had cared for the book like a relic since 1974 would have set it down on the back of a toilet.

She picked it up. Her hand was shaking. The hand had begun shaking somewhere between the side table and the bathroom, and she had not noticed because the shaking had started small and had risen up her arm the way water rises up a sleeve.

She carried the book back to the front room.

She sat in the chair.

She opened the book.

She tried to find the active list.

She turned the page. She turned the page. She turned the page. Each page had names she knew or had known, but the page she was looking for — the first page of the active list, the page she had opened to every morning for forty-six years, the page her finger went to without instruction — was not where her finger went.

She could not find it.

She turned the book over. She turned it back. She tried again.

Her hand shook harder.

She set the book down on her lap.

She closed her eyes.

Lord. Lord. I cannot find the page. I cannot find the page.

She breathed. The breath would not go all the way down.

Lord. I cannot — Lord, I do not know what day it is. I do not know what I did yesterday. I cannot find the page in my own book.

Her chest was tight. The shaking had spread to her shoulders. She had not, in eighty-two years, had a panic attack. She did not know what one was called. She knew only that the body she was in was beginning to do a thing it had not done before, and that the thing was running away from her, and that she did not have the tools in her own kitchen to call it back.

She opened her eyes.

She reached for the phone on the side table.

The phone was a cordless from 2009 that Yvonne had been telling her to replace for six years. She picked it up. She pressed the button. She tried to remember Yvonne's number. She could not remember Yvonne's number. She had known Yvonne's number for forty years, and she could not, this morning, find it in her hand.

She pressed the small green button that meant favorites.

The screen lit up. There was a list. Yvonne. Carl. Marcus. Tiana. Pastor. Sister Loretta (DO NOT CALL — DECEASED). The last entry was a joke Tiana had put in the phone for her two Christmases ago that they had both laughed about and that Yvonne had said leave alone because Mama, when you go to dial Sister Loretta accidentally one day it will save your dignity.

She had gone to dial Sister Loretta accidentally on three separate occasions in the last year, and the joke had, three separate times, saved her dignity.

She pressed Yvonne.

The phone rang.

It rang four times. She did not, in herself, have the resources to leave a message. She had decided, before the first ring finished, that if the voicemail picked up she would hang up and try Carl.

Yvonne picked up on the fifth ring.

"Mama."

The voice was the voice of a woman who had gone from sleep to her feet between rings. Yvonne had been a school principal for twelve years and she answered the phone, at any hour, the way a school principal answers the phone, which was the way a mother of an aged mother answers a phone, which was already standing, already holding her keys.

"Come."

That was the only word Ola Mae could find.

"Mama. I'm coming. I'm coming right now. Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Are you sick?"

"No."

"Did you fall?"

"No."

"Mama. Talk to me. I'm putting you on speaker. I'm getting in the car."

"Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama. I'm in the car. I'm pulling out. Twelve minutes. Talk to me."

"I lost a morning."

There was a small sound on the other end. It was the sound of a woman receiving the sentence she had been preparing herself to receive.

"I am coming, Mama. I am ten minutes away. Do not get up. Do not go anywhere. Sit in your chair. I am coming."

"Yes, baby."

"Hold the phone, Mama. Don't hang up. Talk to me about whatever you can talk about. Tell me what you see."

"I see the lamp."

"Tell me about the lamp."

"Eldridge bought it in 1981."

"Tell me more about the lamp, Mama."

She told Yvonne about the lamp. She told her about the day Eldridge had brought it home and about the argument they had had about the price and about the way it had been on the side table since the day they had moved it into the front room and never moved it again. She told her about the small chip on the base from when Marcus, at three years old, had hit it with a Tonka truck. She told her about the bulb she had replaced in 2018 with the LED that was supposed to last fifteen years and was now seven years in. She told her about the lamp because Yvonne had asked her to, and because telling Yvonne about the lamp was the only thing in the room that her mind, this morning, could still do.

Yvonne kept her on the phone for the whole drive.

Ola Mae did not stop talking.

Yvonne came in with her own key at three forty-eight.

She did not knock. She did not call out from the door. She walked straight to the front room with her phone still in her hand, and she dropped to her knees in front of Eldridge's chair, and she put her hands on her mother's hands, and she said, very quietly:

"Mama. I am here."

Her mother nodded. Her mother could not, at that moment, speak.

Yvonne did not, immediately, do anything else. She did not stand up. She did not move to the kitchen. She did not pick up the book on her mother's lap or comment on the lamp or ask about the morning. She knelt on the carpet in front of the chair Eldridge had bought, and she held her mother's hands, and she let her mother breathe.

After a long while her mother began to cry.

The crying was the crying of a woman who had carried a thing alone for too long and had finally been met. It did not have words. It did not need them. It went on and on, and Yvonne stayed on her knees, and her own face was wet, and the room held them both.

The clock on the mantel said four-oh-six.

Outside, the first bird in the dogwoods began the small announcement that meant the night was thinking about ending.

Yvonne stayed.

She did not go to school. She called the assistant principal at six-thirty and said she would not be in. She did not give a reason. The assistant principal, who had worked with Yvonne for nine years and who knew Yvonne's mother's name, said only: Take what you need.

She made coffee. She made eggs. She did not press her mother to eat. Her mother ate two bites of egg and a quarter cup of coffee and said baby, that is what I have today, and Yvonne accepted it, and she ate the rest standing at the counter.

She helped her mother dress. Slowly. Without comment. She helped her brush her hair. She helped her find the small gold cross — which was already around her mother's neck, where it had been since 1971, but which her mother had asked about three times that morning because the morning's questions were on a loop her mother could no longer break.

They sat together in the front room.

They did not, for a long time, talk.

Yvonne sat on the small couch. Her mother sat in Eldridge's chair. The prayer book was closed on her mother's lap. Yvonne had not asked about it. Her mother had not opened it.

After a long time her mother said: "Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"I cannot do the morning by myself."

"I know, Mama."

"I cannot find the page."

"I know."

"I have been losing things for a year and I have not lost the morning before. The morning was the one thing. The morning was the thing I could do."

"Mama."

"I know. I know I cannot fix it. I am telling you because I need to say it out loud once. I am saying it once. I am not going to say it again today."

"Yes, Mama."

Her mother closed her eyes.

"I am not asking you to do it for me. I am not asking anyone to do it for me. The morning is mine. But I am going to need someone to sit with me when I do it. I am going to need someone to find the page when I cannot. I am going to need someone to read the names out loud when I cannot read them. I am going to need —"

She stopped. Her face moved.

"— I am going to need help, Yvonne. I do not know how to ask for it. I have not asked for help in fifty years. I have been the helper. I do not know the words."

"You don't need words, Mama. I am here. Carl is here. Tiana is here. Marcus is coming tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow night, Mama. Friday."

"Marcus is coming tomorrow."

"Yes, Mama."

"I had forgotten."

"That is all right, Mama. He's coming."

Her mother nodded slowly.

"Tomorrow he comes. Tomorrow we will tell him."

"Yes, Mama. Tomorrow we will tell him."

Carl came at five after work.

He did not, at first, say anything. He hung his cap on the hook in the hall. He came into the front room. He sat in the second chair — the small armchair that had been Eldridge's only when Eldridge had read the paper, which had been a complicated piece of furniture in the marriage and which had, for the last eighteen years, been the chair anyone but Mama Tate sat in when they came to talk in this room.

He looked at his mother-in-law.

"Mama."

"Carl."

"You want me to call Pastor?"

"No, son."

"You want me to call Tiana?"

She thought about it. She thought about it for a long moment. Then she said: "Tomorrow. Tell Tiana to come tomorrow morning."

"Yes, Mama."

"I am going to need her tomorrow morning. Not tonight. I am going to sit with you and Yvonne tonight. Tomorrow I am going to ask Tiana for a thing."

Carl nodded. He did not ask what. He had been around long enough to know when not to ask.

The three of them sat in the front room as the light went amber and then gray and then dark, and they did not, for long stretches, speak. Yvonne made supper at seven — a simple thing, soup from a can with bread Carl had picked up — and they ate at the kitchen table with the composition book pushed to one side, and Mama Tate ate half a bowl of soup and a quarter slice of bread and said that is the most I have had today and that is what I have, and Yvonne and Carl accepted it.

After supper Yvonne washed the dishes. Carl dried. Mama Tate sat at the table with the prayer book in front of her unopened and the composition book in front of her unopened, and she looked at them both for a long time.

Then she said: "Tomorrow I am going to write the names larger."

"Yes, Mama."

"I am going to write them so big my eye cannot lose them. I am going to write them three to a page. I am going to ask Tiana to help me write the new ones."

"Yes, Mama."

"I started yesterday. I started before — before the morning. I had started. I did not finish. The composition book on the table — that is the new book."

"I see it, Mama."

"The new book is going to be slower than the old book. The new book is going to be uglier than the old book. The new book is going to be the book that lasts."

Yvonne came to the table. She sat down. She put her hand over her mother's hand.

"It is going to be the book that lasts because more than one of us is going to write in it."

Her mother looked at her.

For a long moment her mother did not speak.

Then her mother said: "Yes. That is right. That is what I am saying."

Yvonne nodded. The tears were moving in her face again, but they were a different kind of tears than the morning's, and her mother — who had, in the morning, been too far away to register tears in the room — saw them now, and reached up, and put her thumb under Yvonne's eye, and pressed gently.

"Baby."

"Yes, Mama."

"You are going to be all right."

"I know, Mama."

"You are going to be more than all right. You are going to be the daughter who carried me. You will not get to skip the carrying. I am sorry. I am sorry that I cannot give you a clean death the way my own mother gave me one. I am giving you the long one. I am giving you the one with the lost mornings. I am sorry."

"Mama. There is no clean death."

"No, baby. But there are two kinds. The kind where the elder goes in her sleep and the kind where the elder goes a piece at a time. I am going the second way. I have known it since November. I am sorry that you are the one who has to be in the room while it happens."

"Mama, do not apologize."

"I am apologizing because I love you. The apology is the love."

Yvonne pressed her mother's hand against her cheek. Carl, standing at the sink with the dishtowel in his hand, did not move. His own face was wet. He did not pretend it was not.

The kitchen held them.

After a while Mama Tate said: "I want to go to bed."

Yvonne walked her down the hall. Yvonne helped her undress. Yvonne sat on the side of the bed while her mother put on the nightgown that had been folded under the pillow. She helped her mother into bed. She pulled the covers up.

Her mother caught her wrist before she could turn off the lamp.

"Yvonne."

"Yes, Mama."

"You sleep here tonight. In the spare room. I will sleep better if I know you are in the house."

"Yes, Mama."

"And in the morning. In the morning. You come and find me. Even if I am awake. Even if I am up. You come and find me, and you walk me to the front room, and you sit with me. I will do the praying. I do not need you to do the praying. I need you to find the page."

"I will, Mama."

"You will know which page. The first page of the active list. It has the title written at the top. The title is In thy hand are all things, and in thy hand is power and might. That is from Chronicles. Twenty-nine, twelve. You will find it."

"I will find it, Mama."

"Tomorrow night Marcus comes."

"Tomorrow night Marcus comes."

"And Saturday Tiana comes and we begin."

"Yes, Mama."

"All right, baby. Turn off the light."

Yvonne turned off the light. She kissed her mother's forehead. She stood for a moment in the dark by the bed, and she watched her mother's eyes close, and she watched her mother's breathing settle, and she watched her mother — without intending to, without knowing she was doing it — mouth a small private sentence in the dark that was the last sentence of the day's prayer her mother had not been able to say in the morning, and she could not hear the sentence but she could see the shape of it on her mother's lips.

Then Yvonne walked to the spare room. She lay down in her clothes on top of the covers. She put her phone on the nightstand. She did not close her eyes for a long time.

In the next room her mother slept, and the house held them both, and outside the pecan tree shifted in the small wind, and the keepers — the two who were under this roof tonight, and the others who were sleeping in their own houses across the city, and the further ones in Houston and Detroit and Atlanta, and the ones whose names no one in this house yet knew — kept their own watches in their own rooms, and the Lord was the Lord, and Thursday, which had been the longest day of Mama Tate's life since 2008, ended.

The morning would come. The morning always came. Mama Tate had been telling her own children that for fifty years.

In the spare room, Yvonne finally slept.

In the next room, Mama Tate dreamed of the river where she had been baptized, and of Eldridge's hand on her arm in 1978 as she had walked into the closed part of a meeting, and of a small girl named Ruth in a city she had never been to whose face she could not yet see, and the dreams were a kind of keeping too, and the keeping continued.