She spent most of her time in her study, reading the celebrity tabloids she loved, with the twenty-four-hour prayer line channel on the television in the background. She seemed to see no conflict between the two. She just happened to be every bit as entertained by the despair and brokenness in the lives of famous people as she was by con artists offering to pray on someone’s behalf in exchange for a modest donation and a promise of ongoing financial support.
But she wasn’t in her study. I set my handbag down in the foyer and locked the front door behind me. I stepped over stacks of records and magazines and picked up a couple of carryout food containers as I passed. I walked into the kitchen, which was the biggest travesty of all the travesties in her home. It was enormous. Gorgeous. A marvel of marble and stainless steel and perfectly situated islands (yes . . . plural). It looked like something straight out of Better Homes and Gardens. At least, it would, if the marble countertops weren’t hidden under stacks of papers and the islands didn’t serve as my grandmother’s makeshift office. And if all those shiny new stainless-steel appliances weren’t being wasted in the home of a woman who hadn’t cooked in thirty years.
A lot of chefs—especially the Southern ones—probably got their start in the family kitchen, testing out recipes passed down from generation to generation with more reverence applied to them than actual physical heirlooms. I hadn’t experienced any of that. At least not with her. My dad liked to cook, but he had been no master. We’d had fun together in the kitchen, and he had passed on some impressive skills with the barbecue grill, but that had pretty much been the extent of it. Well, apart from the hours and hours he and I spent watching cooking shows together.
My own mastery had actually come about because my grandmother preferred takeout. My mother was only occasionally around—and couldn’t hard-boil an egg when she was—and my dad was often working or, during the bookends of my life with him, incapacitated—either by bad choices or, later, the illness caused by those earlier bad choices. I’d learned out of desperation, and in the process, I’d discovered the great love of my life.
“Where are you?” I called out, once I had peeked into all of the rooms and come up empty.
“In the attic.”
The attic? She’d been living in the house in Belle Meade for five years, and my apartment was only ten miles away. I was at her house a lot. And yet I’d had no idea she had an attic.
I followed her voice, and it didn’t take me long to realize why I hadn’t been aware. It wasn’t really so much an attic as a glorified crawl space in which the previous owner had seen fit to lay carpeting. It stretched almost the length of the house and had to be accessed by a set of hidden stairs that you pulled down from the ceiling with a hook through a cord—as seen in many of the coolest movies and TV shows of my childhood. And the access was from a spare bedroom, which was only used for storage.
I crawled up there to join her and laughed at the sight. She was sitting on the floor, leaning against a tiny window—don’t ask me why I’d never questioned the location of that window from the outside—with her legs crossed in front of her. Bent over almost at the waist, I went and sat beside her.
“I didn’t know this was here,” I said, still laughing. “Do you come up here often?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes. It’s quiet.”
“You live alone, Meemaw.”
“I know, but this is a different type of quiet. Here, I’m choosing it.”
I pulled my knees up against my chest and spoke softly. “You okay?”
She laughed and brushed off my concern. “Of course I’m okay. Did you just get back into town?”
“A couple hours ago.”
“Good week of taping?”
I nodded. “I think so. I don’t know. Sometimes I bore myself, you know? I don’t understand why anyone would want to listen to me prattle on about food, or anything else.”
“It’s funny what entertains people, isn’t it?”
She didn’t intend to insult me, I knew. It just wasn’t in her nature to think about how her words might make someone feel before she said them. I think she thought she’d earned the right to not have to bother with stuff like that.
“The network sent me an enormous bouquet of flowers. They were waiting for me when I got home. That was nice, I thought.”
“What kind of flowers?”
“I don’t know. A mixture. There are some roses, for sure. Lilies, I think. Then there are some that look like tulips, but I’ve never seen tulips that color.” Flowers were always nice, but as little time as I spent at home, I couldn’t help but think I would have appreciated the gesture even more if they’d sent me some fresh herbs. Some rosemary or sage around the apartment would be lovely. “Oh, and they sent chocolates too.” Now that was useful.
My grandmother began laughing. Cackling, more like. It was an unsettling sound that transported me a little too quickly to thoughts of Margaret Hamilton threatening Judy Garland, and her little dog too.
“What?” I asked, more than a little worried that her cackling was caused by the thought of me trying to fit into my bridesmaid’s dress for my cousin Mandy’s wedding in two weeks, after I’d eaten a box of truffles.
“This is perfect!” She squealed in a way that didn’t at all help put my Wicked Witch trepidation to rest. “Was there a note?”
A note? What were we even talking about here? “You mean with the flowers and chocolates?”
“Yes.”
I looked at her in confusion. “Yes. I told you. It was from the network.”
“But did it say anything else?” she asked impatiently.
I guess I hadn’t paid too much attention to anything else. Once I knew the chocolates were from a trusted source and therefore could be ingested without fear of poison, it hadn’t really occurred to me that anything else mattered.
“Um . . . let’s see.” I closed my eyes and tried to picture the card in my mind. “It was pretty basic stuff, I think. Something like, ‘With affection from your grateful and devoted Culinary Channel family.’ Or something of that sort.”
She stood from her spot against the window and began pacing across the space—something she could get away with, with her tiny five-foot-nothin’ stature. I’d have been decapitated. “Grateful . . . grateful . . . yeah, okay,” she muttered. “Grateful in the long term? In the short term? Both, most likely. And devoted, did you say?”
She’d transformed from Margaret Hamilton to Nicolas Cage, trying to interpret the card—a less fragile, rose-scented stand-in for a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. My grandmother’s version of the Wicked Witch of the West somehow came across as less unhinged than her version of Nicolas Cage.
Well, any version of Nicolas Cage, really.
“This is perfect, darlin’. Don’t you see what they’re doing?”
I instinctively knew that she was not looking for the answer I wanted to give—that they were expressing their affection, gratitude, and devotion.
“Why don’t you tell me, Meemaw?”
She stopped on the spot and turned to face me. “They’re bribing you!” She cackled again. “We’ve got ’em exactly where we want ’em.”