The Quilt With My Name

Three counties over

I took my dad’s truck the next morning before it was full light.

Savannah is about ninety minutes from us if the road through Waynesboro is clear, down along where the land starts tipping toward the Tennessee River. Three counties, like he said. Lawrence to Wayne to Hardin. I had a name, Edna Pruett, and a town, and a tank of gas, and the scrap of paper on the seat beside me.

I stopped at the Savannah post office first because that is what you do in a small town, you ask the post office. A woman there knew three Pruetts and figured the one I wanted was Edna out on the Olive Hill road, the widow, on account of she was old and alone and had bought a yard-sale quilt off a Lawrence County woman, which the postmistress had somehow also heard, because that is how a small town works and anybody from one knows it.

She drew me a map on the back of a hold-mail slip.

It was a white house with a deep front porch and a tan Buick in the drive, just like Carla said, and a flower bed gone to seed for the season, and a flag by the door, and two rocking chairs. The kind of house my grandmother would have lived in. The kind of house my grandmother did live in.

I sat in the truck a minute and got my words straight. Then I went up and knocked.