The Woman Who Called Me Her Granddaughter

Pretend You’re My Granddaughter

Headlights swung around the curve a few minutes later, a dark sedan polished clean enough to throw back what was left of the sunset. A man got out from the driver’s side, sixty some years old, moving careful the way people do when they have done a job so long it lives in their bones.

“Miss Tammy,” he said, coming around to open her door. “I was starting to worry.”

“I made a friend, Alfred,” she said, and rose with her cane in one hand.

Then she turned back toward me and lowered her voice so only I could hear it.

“When we get in that car,” she said, “pretend you’re my granddaughter.”

I blinked at her. “What?”

“Your husband left you here believing nobody in this world would notice you were gone,” she said. “I’d like him to find out how wrong he was.”

I do not fully know why I agreed. Maybe because I had nothing left to protect that hadn’t already been taken from me that evening. Maybe because for the first time all day, sitting next to this woman, my hands had finally stopped shaking.

Alfred cleared his throat as he held the door. “Miss Tammy, are you up to something?”

“Alfred,” she said, settling into the back seat and patting the space beside her for me, “this is my granddaughter. She’ll be staying with us a while.”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror a beat longer than he needed to, the way a man looks when he is deciding whether to argue with a woman he has clearly never once won an argument with. Then he nodded, and pulled the car back onto Route 9, headed away from town instead of toward it.

I sat very still in that back seat, still holding the coat closed over the pocket where my phone used to be. The old woman beside me hummed something low and slow under her breath, a hymn tune I could not place at first, and the coat she had wrapped a little tighter around herself smelled like peppermint and rosewater.

Both of those things snagged on something in me. Not a clear memory yet. Just a pull, like a hook set deep and not yet felt.

“What’s your name, dear?” she asked me.

“Stacey,” I told her.

She went quiet again, the way she had gone quiet after I told her about Sherwood, like she was turning a small stone over in her hand to check both sides of it.

“That’s a good name,” was all she said.