“Tell me the one about the tenth car.”
“You’ve heard the one about the tenth car.”
“Tell me again. Do the sulk.”
I do the sulk.
My mother came once, in June, on her one Sunday off, and stood on the porch for a long time looking at the chair and the green blanket, and then she sat down in the chair — the only person besides Kiara and me who ever has — and folded her hands on the blanket and listened to the street.
“He asked about Jaylen every week?” she said.
“Every week.”
“And he didn’t have to.”
“He didn’t have to, Mama.”
She was quiet for a while.
“I’d have liked to tell him thank you,” she said. “In person.”
“He heard you,” I said. “He heard everything. It’s on the plaque.”
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.”
