Chapter 81
His mother gave him the notebooks when she was seventy-eight.
She had been keeping journals since she was fourteen. There were eight notebooks in total spanning sixty-four years wrapped together in a length of the printed cloth she used for her sewing, tied with a piece of ribbon.
She put them on the table in front of him on a Sunday afternoon and sat across from him and folded her hands.
'I said I'd give them to you when I got to the ending,' she said. 'I'm not at the ending. But I think it's time.'
He looked at the notebooks.
'Why now?'
'Because I want to see you read them,' she said. 'I've been thinking about it and I want to be there. I want to see your face.'
He understood. He picked up the first notebook its cover soft and faded, her handwriting from when she was fourteen, younger and slightly less certain and held it for a moment.
'Mama,' he said.
'Read it at home,' she said. 'Not all at once. There's no rush. But I want you to have it. Everything I thought and felt and observed and hoped. It's all in there.' She paused. 'It's mostly about you.'
He looked at his mother. Seventy-eight years old. Her white hair. Her hands. Her eyes, exactly as they had always been.
'Also about Nia,' she said. 'And Elise and Joseph. And Beverley. And some things about God and the neighbourhood and what it means to grow old in a body you've worked hard. And what I think about things. What I've always thought.'
He held the notebooks in his hands and felt the weight of them sixty-four years of a life documented with the care and honesty of someone who took her own experience seriously, who had always known that what she thought and felt and observed was worth recording.
'I don't know what to say,' he said.
'You don't have to say anything,' she said. 'Just read them. Carefully. The same way you read everything.'
He read them over six months. He read them slowly, in the mornings before the run, at the kitchen table with coffee. He did not take notes the reading was enough. He moved through sixty-four years of his mother's inner life: the girl at fourteen trying to understand what she was for, the young woman at twenty-three holding a newborn and feeling the world reorganize. His childhood from the other side. His leaving, and what it cost her, documented in clear and unflinching language. His return. His children. Her life as she had lived it from the inside the fears she had not shown him, the joys she had written toward, the ongoing conversations with God, the long account of loving him.
He wept twice while reading. He had not wept often in his adult life not from hardness but from the particular emotional discipline of a man who had been careful for a long time. He wept reading the entry from the night before he left for England at nine years old. He wept reading the entry she had written the day he came home for good.
He called her when he finished the last notebook.
'I read them,' he said.
She waited.
'Every word,' he said. 'Every single one.'
She was quiet.
'You gave me a life worth writing about,' he said. 'You know that? Everything I am came from what you gave me. I could never account for it properly.'
'You don't need to account for it,' she said. 'You live it. That's the accounting.'
He held the phone in the familiar way the way he had held it for fifty years of Sunday calls.
'I love you, Mama,' he said.
'I know,' she said. 'I love you too. And I always knew you knew.