The Woman Who Called Me Her Granddaughter

The House on Persimmon Road

The house sat back off Persimmon Road behind a stand of pecan trees, a two story white farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a porch swing that still had a quilt folded over the rail against the evening chill. It was not a mansion. It did not need to be. Everything about it, the fresh paint, the mended screen door, the neat row of canning jars visible through the kitchen window, said money that had been handled carefully for a very long time, not money that had been thrown around to prove a point.

A woman met us at the door, gray haired, an apron still tied over her dress. “Miss Tammy, I kept your supper warm,” she said, then looked at me. “And who’s this.”

“My granddaughter,” Tammy said again, easy as breathing, like she had said it a thousand times before instead of twice. “She’ll need the blue room made up.”

The housekeeper’s eyebrows went up half an inch, but she did not argue either. She just looked at me a moment longer, taking in my swollen eyes and my empty hands, and something in her face softened. “Well, come on in out of the cold, then,” she said, and held the door.

Supper was chicken and dumplings and greens cooked with a ham hock, more food than I had eaten sitting down in longer than I wanted to admit, because Sherwood had taken to commenting on my portions the same way he commented on everything else. Alfred ate with us at the same table, which told me something about how this house actually ran, whatever the county assessor’s records might have said about who owned what.

Afterward, Tammy walked me up the stairs herself, one hand light on the banister and the other resting on my arm, guiding herself as much by memory as by me.

The blue room had a four poster bed and a quilt on it older than I was, hand stitched, the kind of thing that gets made across a whole winter by women sitting up late with a coffee can full of thread. There was a framed photograph on the dresser, black and white, faded at the edges: a diner counter, a cash register, a young woman standing behind it in an apron, dark glasses already on even then.

“That’s me,” Tammy said, when she heard me stop in front of it. “Forty two years ago. I ran that diner from the time I was twenty five until my eyes gave out on me for good.”

“You could see back then?”

“Some. Enough to keep books and pour coffee and not much else, even then. Glaucoma. It takes its time about most things.” She smiled, faint. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll figure out what your husband thinks he’s gotten away with.”

I lay awake a long while under that quilt, listening to a house that was not my own settle around me, trying to place the hymn she had hummed in the car, and the smell of peppermint and rosewater that kept catching at the back of my mind like a name on the tip of my tongue.