The block called her Mother Dear. Her own children called her Mama — and for forty-two years, Cierra was proud of the difference. Three weeks after the funeral, Cierra comes to her mother's house with her own trash bags, because she knows better than to expect anybody else to bring any. Her sister comes with a realtor's folder. Her brother comes with a level. And in a hatbox on the top shelf of the hall closet, under a hat, is loose paper in a handwriting all three of them recognize. What those pages say will make Cierra rebuild her mother from scratch — and then rebuild herself, because she had built the one out of the other. A woman who did not come to the funeral has a hundred reasons why. A child who stopped being in that house one Wednesday has a name nobody has said out loud in thirty years. And a house on a block where they shot into the corner store in March turns out to be the only thing that will hold three grown siblings in one room long enough to say what they have never said. MOTHER DEAR is a novel about the people a mother raises without being asked, the children who watched her do it, and what gets passed down in a family without one word of it spoken out loud. Sometimes the wisest woman on the block never said a thing. She just left it where you'd find it.