I look over at my uncle, who senses trouble, and begin to hum a tune.

She listens carefully. My uncle frowns.

She says she doesn’t know what the song is and asks me to hum it again.

I do, three times.

“I don’t know that song,” she admits.

“It’s the Black national anthem.” My uncle groans in dismay.

She says, “There’s a Black national anthem?”

We never even make it to her office.

Chapter Twelve

Gather

I know going into Mom’s bedroom will only make it hurt more. But that is exactly where I find myself. It’s a little after midnight, and the urge to be around her things has become irresistible. I stand in front of her closet and run my fingers through her clothes. They have her scent, and each item comes with a memory. They aren’t big, dramatic moments; they’re small ones that I would’ve dismissed before all of this.

When I was a kid, she read and reread many books to me in here. It took us weeks to get through The Bluest Eye. But that was to be expected of a Toni Morrison novel. We’d pull her words apart and rearrange them so that us mortals could understand them. Then we’d put them back the way she wrote them and marvel at her brilliance.

This is also the room where my mom let her guard down and was like the rest of us, especially when it came to reading horror stories. If books are food for thought, then Stephen King books are the dessert we gorge ourselves on. We read Cujo here in this room, and every time we got to scary parts, we’d both dive under the covers. It’s because of Pet Sematary that we never got any pets in the house; thanks to The Shining, we’d cross the street anytime we see twin kids. And there was no way in hell anyone in this house would ever, ever go to the circus. It kept us up for days.

I get up on her bed and reach for what I know is there—a book on her nightstand. She was reading Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine. I pick it up and read the handwritten notes she made for herself. I start reading, and soon my eyes get heavy and sleep takes me.

I wake up half an hour later. I see her Cookie Monster slippers looking back at me from the open closet.