The Woman Who Called Me Her Granddaughter

Miss Tammy Odom

I learned who she was properly the next morning, mostly from Alfred, who drove me into Bellhaven to buy a change of clothes since I owned nothing but what I had been wearing when Sherwood put me out.

“Folks around here just call her Miss Tammy,” he said, both hands loose on the wheel, “but her name’s Tammy Odom, and there isn’t hardly a building on Main Street she doesn’t own some piece of. The old feed and seed. The building the pharmacy rents. Half the houses on Willow Street, though she’d skin me for telling you that part, because she never once raised a tenant’s rent in the thirty years I’ve known her.”

“And the diner in the photograph?”

“Odom’s, on the square. She ran it herself for near forty years, best pie in three counties, before her eyes finally quit on her and she had to let it go to somebody else to run. She still owns the building. Won’t sell it. Says the town needs a place people can sit down together regardless of what’s in their pocket.”

I asked him, carefully, why a woman worth what she was worth was riding a back road cane in hand instead of sending somebody to fetch a stranded stranger.

Alfred was quiet a moment, the way people get quiet when they are deciding how much of somebody else’s story is theirs to tell.

“She likes to walk that stretch most evenings,” he finally said. “Has for years. I follow along behind in the car in case she needs me, but she won’t hear of riding the whole way. Says the road keeps her honest about what the town actually looks like, not just what people tell her it looks like.”

“And the granddaughter thing?”

He almost smiled at that. “Miss Tammy doesn’t have any grandchildren, ma’am. Never had children of her own to speak of, past one grown son who moved off to Jackson a long time back and mostly calls when the money’s tight. I expect that’s exactly why she said what she said to you last night. It wasn’t a lie so much as it was a wish she finally had a reason to say out loud.”

I did not know what to do with that. I still did not know why, out of every soul who must have passed that bus stop, she had chosen to stop for me. I only knew that something about her kept catching on the same locked door in my memory, and I could not yet get it open.

A Hymn I Didn’t Know I Remembered

It came open two nights later, over pie.

Tammy had the housekeeper make a buttermilk pie for dessert, and when she set my slice in front of me and hummed that same low hymn tune under her breath while she found her seat by feel, something in me went very still.

I knew that tune. Not from church, though I have heard it in church a hundred times since. I knew it from somewhere much smaller and much further back.

“You keep humming that,” I said. “What is it?”

“I’ll Fly Away,” she said. “Habit. I used to hum it at the register at Odom’s, keeping time with the ledger while I added up the day. Folks used to tease me that they could tell how good business had been by how fast I was humming it.”

And there it was. The locked door came open all at once, the way memory does when it finally decides to.

A back booth at a diner on the square. A little girl, maybe eight years old, sitting alone with a slice of pie nobody at the table had ordered, while her mother wiped down tables two aisles over in an apron that did not quite fit her. A blind woman at the register, dark glasses even indoors, humming while she worked the ledger, always finding a reason there had been “an extra slice going to waste” right about the time a certain little girl’s stomach started growling.