Kiara listened to the tapes over a year.
One a week.
Sunday one in April, Sunday forty-four the following spring.
She listened to them on the porch, in the chair, in the army jacket, with the watch on her wrist, and she did not let me be there for most of them, and I understood.
Some things are one by bl*od.
But she asked me to sit with her for the last one.
Sunday forty-four.
Two weeks before he passed.
His voice was thin by then, and he mostly held my hand, and near the end of the tape there’s a long silence with only the street in it, and then his voice, very quiet, and I had forgotten he’d said it.
“Baby girl, whoever you are — and I’ve always known — you gave an old man something to wait for.
When Kiara comes back, you tell her that.
Tell her I never once stopped listening for her car.
And tell her I heard the other one, too.
The one that came.”
Kiara stopped the tape.
We sat on the porch for a long time.
Then she took off the watch — Loretta’s watch, the one that ticks as steady as he did — and she put it in my hand, and closed my fingers over it.
“Sundays,” she said.
“Kiara, no. It’s yours. It’s in the will—”
“It’s in the will that it comes to me. It doesn’t say what I do with it after. Wear it on Sundays. I’ll wear it the rest of the week. That’s the arrangement, and he’d have liked it, and you know he’d have liked it.”
I wear it on Sundays.
The last thing I want to tell you is about the ramp.
The badly built one.
Somebody put it in years ago, half-level, with a rail that wobbled, and Mr. Booker had never once complained about it, because a man who’s been to w*r doesn’t complain about a ramp.
Kiara and I rebuilt it last fall.
Neither of us knew what we were doing.
A neighbor across the street, Mr. Delgado, who had been watching this house from his porch for twenty years and had never said a word, came over on the second Saturday with a level and a box of screws and said, “Clarence would’ve wanted it square,” and stayed until dark.
It’s square now.
Uncle Otis came to see it in October.
Eighty years old, in the suit older than me, driven over by a grandson who waited in the car.
He walked up the new ramp with one hand on the rail, testing it, the way his brother would have, and at the top he stopped and looked at the chair.
“Clarence and I built the first one,” he said. “1994. Neither of us could hold a level. He said, ‘Otis, it’s a ramp, not a church,’ and I said, ‘A ramp’s the only church some folks get to,’ and we left it crooked out of spite for thirty years.”
He sat down on the top step.
“He called me. After the second Sunday. Said, ‘Otis, Patrice has hired a girl to be Kiara, and I’ve decided to let her.’
I said, ‘Why in God’s name?’
He said, ‘Because she’s kind, and she’s tired, and I want to find out what she does with the money.'”
Otis looked at me.
“He found out.
The brother’s medicine.
He found out by the fourth week, and he told me, ‘Otis, I’m not letting this one go.'”
There’s a plaque on the rail — small, brass, the kind you have to bend to read.
Kiara chose the first line.
I chose the second.
CLARENCE BOOKER SAT HERE.
HE WAS BLIND, NOT DEAF.
The neighbors think it’s a joke.
It’s not a joke.
It’s the truest thing anyone ever said in that house, and the last thing a c*n artist expected, and the first thing two granddaughters agreed on.
He heard everything.
He heard the ticking.
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