North of Nashville

Corinne Cordasco-Pak

I’m in the ladies’ room at Our Lady of Perpetual Endurance, waiting for the funeral to start, when I hear my grandmother walk in. I’m still locked in the stall, but I know it’s her from the familiar swish of her worn rubber-soled slippers. By the time I scrunch back into my pantyhose, she’s sitting on a sink, lighting a cigarette. She exhales and the whole bathroom smells like smoke.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to smoke in here,” I say.

I don’t know why I said that when there were so many other things I could have said to her. It isn’t, as my parents would often remind me, very polite to correct one’s elders. But in the moment, Grandma doesn’t seem to mind. She puts the cigarette out in the burnished gold cremation urn on her lap. She puts the lid back on, cutting off the smoke that trails from inside.

Everyone likes to imagine how they would react if they saw a ghost — not to mention if that ghost were their dead grandmother, smoking in the restroom at her own funeral—but my grandmother always seemed to exist outside of time. She rotated through the same few faded housedresses each week and maybe it was fifty-something years of smoking a pack a day, but her face hadn’t changed much either. There’s a picture of her holding me at my christening and another of her next to me at my college graduation; though they were taken twenty years apart, her smiling face is fixed in the same craggy topography.

I pinch myself. My grandmother is still there. She laughs.

“You’re not dreaming,” she says and hops off of the sink. “I’m getting out of here. Want to come?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer, and I have to move quickly to catch the bathroom door as it starts to slam behind her. It’s not too hard for us to sneak out — almost everyone else is in the chapel, waiting for the service to begin — but, just in case, I follow my grandmother’s lead, ducking to avoid being seen as we cross the parking lot. She’s faster than I remember, running so quickly ahead of me that she loses a slipper. I hand it to her when I catch up.

Through the chapel windows, I can see the rest of my family already in the pews, where I’m supposed to be. My brother is seated in the front row. He’s going to say a few words about what my grandmother meant to him. My dad asked me to do it, but I told him I was too busy with work to write something good. Really, though, I didn’t know what to say. Grandma had always been kind to me, but I didn’t know her very well. I was too young and, then, too caught up in my own life to make much of an effort. I never felt bad about it until a week ago, when my father called to tell me she was gone.

But now, it seems I have another chance. My grandmother passes my car, the same sedan I’ve driven since college, and I remember that she doesn’t know what it looks like.

“This is me,” I say. She pulls the handle as she waits for me to open the door, looking over her shoulder back at the church. I back out of the parking spot before I realize that I don’t know where to go, so I stop at the parking lot exit.

“Turn left,” my grandmother says. I hit my blinker and turn. We’re heading toward the highway. The whoosh of the road fills the car. I glance at my grandmother. She’s making herself comfortable, reclining the seat and propping her feet on the dash.

“So…uh,” I try to figure out the right way to ask what I want to ask.

“You want to know why I’m here?” she asks. She says the words like she’s just shown up unexpectedly at my house for a visit, not materialized from beyond the grave to sit in my passenger seat, casually holding the urn that contains the remnants of her earthly form plus a few cigarette butts. I wonder how long it’ll be before someone notices that her remains are missing, notices I’m missing, or puts the two disappearances together. They’ll probably notice the urn first.

“Yeah,” I say. “I thought you were dead.”

“I am,” she says. I search my Sunday school memories for a precedent for her reappearance, but I was never a great student.

“So, are you…resurrected?” I ask tentatively.

My grandma lights another cigarette. She holds it in the corner of her lips and talks around it. “Not exactly,” she says. The end of the cigarette catches and she takes a deep drag.

“You probably don’t remember this, but when you were a kid, you made me a promise. I guess you could say I’ve come to collect.”

My grandmother was not the kind of grandmother that you had sleepovers or tea parties with. I had one of those, too, on my mom’s side; she lived on our block and baked cookies and let me wear her quilted bathrobe as a princess gown—but that grandmother is still alive and well, having never touched a cigarette.  

This grandmother, the one who came back from the dead, lived six hours north of us in a rowhouse on a one-way street. Growing up, we saw her once or twice a year, usually because we stopped by for an afternoon on our way to somewhere else. Sometimes my father would drive up and bring her to our house for a few days around Christmas or some other family occasion.

Grandma was widowed before I was born. She lived alone with her dog Pumpernickel, a fifteen-pound knot of fur that yapped at anything that moved. Grandma smoked her first cigarette at fourteen and never looked back, so my brother and I usually spent visits to her house chasing Pumpernickel around the weedy rectangle of the backyard behind her house. When we had to go inside, we’d pull our shirts over our noses to filter out the smell or puff our cheeks, holding our breath for as long as we could. For hours afterward, we could smell smoke on our clothes, following us even after we’d left her behind.

We visited less as I got older, but every so often my father would pass me the phone and mouth “Say ‘hi’ to Grandma!” Even after I moved out, he reminded me to call on her birthday and holidays and a few times throughout the year. “Just call her sometimes,” he’d say. “It means so much to her.” I called when he asked me to, but the conversations were always short.

“How’s school?” she’d ask. She’d tell me about her neighbors, how they were always blocking her driveway, or about the movies that played on TV during the day. I’d talk about my favorite subjects or about my most recent swim meet. I answered the same questions for the bank teller and my parents’ coworkers — there was no intimacy there, no depth. It never occurred to me to ask her about her life, and she didn’t volunteer much. I’m ashamed to admit this, but in my mind, she was always at home, dormant, like a motion-activated figure waiting for an audience.

In the car, I knew exactly what promise she was talking about. I was ten. We stopped to see my grandmother for a few hours. My family went to pick up lunch for us and left me to keep Grandma company.

We sat on the porch, drinking Coke out of glass bottles (her favorite) and listening to records play through the screen door. Her record collection was all classic country. She asked me about school (fine), boys (ew), and what I wanted for my birthday (a puppy, lipstick, a few CDs), and having exhausted our usual topics, we watched Pumpernickel chase a fly around the steps and listened to Dolly Parton croon. My grandmother hummed along with the song. When it ended, she looked over at me.

“If you could go anywhere on vacation,” she asked me, introducing a new topic to our usual repertoire. “Where would you go?”

I listed out half a dozen destinations that I don’t remember now. Cities I was eager to visit, a few tropical islands. Paris, Hawaii. Places that sounded exciting to a preteen from a sleepy suburb. “Where would you go?” I asked her.

“Nashville,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to.”

“You’ve never been?” I couldn’t comprehend how an adult couldn’t just go wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted.

She shook her head. “Nope, never been. I was supposed to go once, but it just didn’t work out.” She took a breath, like she was about to say more, but instead she just lit a cigarette.

I don’t know what came over me. Maybe I picked up on the longing in her voice or was seduced by the song — Dolly, extolling the delights of her mountain home, the earnest fiddle and lilting harmonies. I pictured myself, older and cooler, wearing makeup and maybe even a miniskirt, going dancing at a bar. The fantasy was complete.

“Grandma, I’ll take you to Nashville one day. I promise.”

“Cheers to that,” she said. We clinked our Coke bottles.

“A promise is a promise,” Grandma says as we hurtle south down the highway. Newark disappears behind us, a gray smudge in the rearview mirror.

It’s a good enough reason for me. I look over at her. She’s smiling.

“I have one more question. Other people can see you, right?”

“Yes,” she says, and I merge into the HOV lane.

My grandmother offers to drive, but she doesn’t have her license or her glasses, so I decline. Instead, I tell her that co-pilot gets to pick the music.

She finds a country station, some cowboy singing about his broken heart in a thick southern twang. She sings along, knows every word. She knows the next one too. She sings them all in her clipped Jersey accent, dropping consonants here and there, shortening vowels at will. I wonder how we look to the cars that we pass — a belting grandmother in a housedress and her silent twenty-something chauffeur, dressed for a funeral. Our windows are down, so I’m sure they hear her. Even over the noise of the highway, it would be hard not to.

By the time we stop for gas, her throat is scratchy. I buy her a pack of Marlboros and a bottle of water. I buy her a Coke, too, even though they only have plastic bottles. She drinks the soda quickly but ignores the water. 

Grandma stretches her legs. Even stiff from the car, she seems to be moving faster than she did when we left the church. She does laps around the pumps as I check my phone. I’d turned the ringer off before the funeral and now I have 27 missed calls, most of them from my father. I have text messages, too, and I think I can guess what they say. I open one from my brother. Did you take Grandma’s ashes? it says. Dad is PISSED. The message is several hours old. As if he can tell that I’m reading it, he texts again. We had to postpone the funeral! I didn’t get to do my speech!

Chill out. I text back. I just needed to do something.

Typical, he replies. Always making things about you.

I start to reply, but my grandmother opens the passenger door.

“Everything okay?” she asks. I shove the phone in my pocket and start the car.

When we lose the signal for the country station, she finds another one. It occurs to me to wonder why my New Jersey grandmother is so obsessed with country hits from 50 years ago, but when I ask her, she just smiles and keeps singing.

We’ve been in the car for a few hours before we lose the second country radio station. At this point, we’ve broken the record for the most time we’ve ever spent together, just the two of us. I rack my brain for topics.

“Cows!” I yell as we drive past a field of big black and white animals munching grass, milling about.

We pass another field of cows. “Cows!” I say again.

A few minutes later I say it again. This time, there’s only one of them.

“Are you going to say that every time we see cows?” she asks.

I shrug. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

“That’s what you do on a road trip.”

We’re coming up on another field.

“Cows!” my grandmother says as we approach.

“Actually, Grandma. I think those are horses.”

We’re both wrong. They’re gigantic goats. The sound of her laughter startles me. I’ve never heard her laugh like this before. It’s a high, girlish giggling. I laugh too.

We’re almost exactly halfway to Nashville when we stop for the night. A sign on the freeway reads “Troutville, 10 miles,” and, at the exit, there’s another sign announcing a Pizza Hut, a gas station, and two hotels, the Troutville Inn and the De Luxe Stay and Play.

We pass the Stay and Play first. On the neon sign out front, the “P” has burnt out, so it reads “Stay and lay.” I decide on the Troutville Inn.

My grandmother is already half asleep, so she waits in the car as I go inside. It smells like coffee and Pine-Sol. There’s no one behind the desk, so I ring the tarnished bell.

Ding ding! The sound hangs in the air, but nothing moves.

While I wait, I check my phone. There’s a new series of texts from my dad, variations of my name in all caps and Call me now!!! and one from my brother: Dad is going to kill you. I’ve never seen him this mad. I close my phone and ring the bell again. A man in a dingy polo shuffles out. He looks at me, one eyebrow cocked, but doesn’t say anything.

“Do you have any rooms for tonight?” I ask.

“One king room left,” he says. “Ninety-nine dollars for the night, checkout by 10:00 am sharp.”

“That’s fine,” I say. I hand him my license and debit card and he passes me a key. I just got paid, so I’m not too worried about the room charge, but I wonder how long Grandma and I will be on the road. Will I miss work on Monday? Something tells me that my boss has never heard “road trip with a ghost” as a reason for calling out before. Probably best to just call in sick.

“Room nine, around the corner.” He tilts his head to his right and turns toward the door.

“Thanks,” I say, but he’s already gone.

When I return to the car, my grandmother is asleep, head lolled to the side. For a second, I worry that something’s wrong with her, but when I open the door she shifts in her seat. I drive slowly around the perimeter until I see a door that’s marked with a worn reflective 9. I reach for my grandmother’s shoulder, then pull my hand back.

“Grandma,” I say loudly. “We’re here.”

My grandmother follows me, carrying her urn. She’s almost sleepwalking, silent and slow. She starts to unbutton her dress almost automatically, still facing me and I turn around. She’s never undressed in front of me before. I go into the bathroom and splash water on my face. By the time I come out, my grandmother is in bed snoring, eyes closed, urn on the bedside table. Her dress is folded over the desk chair and the covers are pulled up to her chin.

I feel a little shy. I’ve never shared a bed with a ghost before. I haven’t even shared one with my grandmother. I briefly wonder if it would be rude to put a line of pillows between us before I decide to just crawl in next to her. There’s plenty of space in the wide bed. The sheets are yellowed and scratchy, but all the driving has worn me out. Before I know it, I’m asleep.

When I wake up, my dead grandmother is spooning me. Her body is glued to mine, with her arms wrapped around me so that my head rests on her shoulder. She’s snoring and her morning breath smells like the greasy drive-through hamburgers we grabbed for dinner. To my relief, her limbs are warm and pliant; you wouldn’t know from touching her that she’s been dead for a week.

I try to peel her off, but she holds on. For someone so thin, she’s surprisingly strong. She nuzzles in deeper, her face buried in my armpit.

“Pete?” she murmurs. Her lips kiss at me. “Pete?”

“No, Grandma. It’s me,” I answer. My grandfather’s name was Earl. I shake myself free and my grandmother spreads her limbs to take up more of the bed. “This bed is amazing,” she says. She rubs her face on the pillow like a kitten and the sheets slip down to reveal the worn foam cups of her bra. I nod and retreat into the bathroom, giving her time to get dressed.

By the time I’m done in the bathroom, she’s disappeared. I panic for a second before I catch sight of her through the window, smoking her first cigarette of the day. Maybe it’s the sunlight, but she looks great. There’s color in her cheeks. A few tendrils of hair have escaped from her low bun. They frame her face, glowing silver in the morning light. I step outside.

“Morning!” Grandma says.

“Ready to go?” I ask her. “I’m starving.”

She nods. “Don’t forget my urn.”

I grab it from the nightstand and close the door behind me.

“I can’t believe you’ve never eaten at Waffle House,” I say. My father’s decision to raise a family south of his home state has resulted in yet another gulf between me and my grandmother, but at least this one is easily remedied. The booth we’re sitting at is sticky with spilled syrup, but there’s already a mug of hot coffee in front of me. Grandma sips Coke through a straw and studies the menu like she’s cramming for an exam.

The waitress has been to our table twice already, but my grandmother keeps saying she needs more time.

“What do you usually get?” she asks and I tell her.

When we finally order, I go first. “Same for me,” she echoes, then proceeds to list off more food: a patty melt, hash browns, an extra waffle topped with blueberries, two fried eggs. Oh, and another Coke. She’s already slurping the air at the bottom of the last one.

The waitress clearly has had plenty of practice letting people know she’s judging their choices without being too overt. She scribbles down Grandma’s order.

“That all?” she twists her mouth into a knot.

Grandma beams up at her. “That’s all.”

The waitress turns and walks away, and my grandmother looks at me. She motions me to come closer, closer. Closer. She looks around to see if anyone is listening to us, but everyone is too busy drowning their food in syrup or waving their mugs for coffee refills. 

“Calories don’t count when you’re dead,” she whispers. She laughs, the same giggle from the car. I can’t remember her ever having told me a joke before.

When the food comes, she eats every bite. She’s ordered three times the food that I have, but we finish our meals simultaneously. The waitress is incredulous. As she clears our table, her eyes scan my petite grandmother and flicker. Grandma orders another meal and a Coke to go. The waitress takes her order and writes it on her notepad, face washed in begrudging respect.

When we pull back onto the highway, she starts into the food immediately. The car smells like syrup and smoke, and I catch myself wondering how long the smell of my grandmother will stay with me, and then I wonder how long my grandmother will stay with me. 

Grandma hasn’t been able to find a radio station that she likes since yesterday evening.  “This isn’t my style,” she says to Top 40, gospel, a man screaming about politics. Finally, she exhausts the options and snaps the dial off. We drive in silence again, except for the sound of her chewing. I try to think of something to say.

“Have you ever played the license plate game?” I ask her. When she says no, I explain the rules. We make our way through the alphabet, all the way to the “Ns.” Grandma points out a Nevada license plate emblazoned with Vegas landmarks.

“Ever been to Vegas?” she asks me, and I shake my head.

“Me neither,” she says.

“That was the theme of my senior prom,” I say. “I think my dad sent you pictures? I wore that gold glittery dress?”

“I remember,” she says. “I put it on my fridge. You looked so grown up. ”

“The dress was fun,” I say. “The prom was just okay.”

Grandma chuckles.

“Did you go to your prom?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “I couldn’t.” She doesn’t volunteer details, but I can feel her thinking about them. I take a breath.

“Why not?” I ask.

“I was pregnant.”

“Oh,” I say. In my head, I do some quick math. My father is her oldest child, but he’s not that old.

“The baby died.”

“Oh,” I say. I don’t know what to say. “I’m sorry” feels inappropriate and way too late.

“I dropped out of school anyway,” she continues. “And then I started waitressing. And that’s how I met your grandfather.” I can sense her attempt to put a period on the story, to find a bright spot to end on.

We pass a field full of goats. They are definitely goats: short, horned creatures. Two of them are fighting, their heads lowered at each other, hooves tossing up clouds of dirt.

“Cows!” Grandma shouts. Her giggle fills the car and I can’t help but join in.

We’re almost to Nashville. On the outskirts of the city, a warehouse rises from the emptiness on the edges of the highway. It’s painted like a barn, red with white trim outlining a broad bank of sliding glass doors. A billboard in front of the warehouse says in foot-high letters: Big Dave’s Boot Barn & Cowboy Supply. A smiling animatronic caricature of Big Dave waves to us with one robotic arm, beckoning us in.

“Can we stop?” my grandmother asks without peeling her eyes away from the building. I pull off the highway.

Inside, the warehouse is lined with shelves and shelves of cowboy boots in every shade and style you can imagine, including some that defy imagination. Some are pre-scuffed, styled to mimic years of lasso-toting, tractor-riding wear. On the opposite side of the spectrum are shiny boots in every shade of pink, from blush to brazen.

Grandma hands me her urn and makes a beeline for a pair of white leather boots with swirling welts of tooled leather and turquoise studs rising from the vamp. She touches them the way you’d stroke a baby’s cheek.

“You should try them on,” I say, and she looks at me as if she’s forgotten I’m there. I hand them to her.

“Why not?” I say.

She’s still wearing her old housedress, but the boots fit like they were made for her.

“Woo-ow-wie,” comes a voice from behind me. “Pardon me, ma’am, but if you don’t walk out of here in those boots, you’re a damn fool and I’m even worse for allowin’ it.”

Big Dave himself has appeared from among the racks of boots. I’ve never seen a man who looks more like a cartoon in my life; what I thought was a caricature of him on the billboard out front may have actually been a photograph. Cowboy boots, denim on denim, a wide smile under the biggest Stetson I’ve ever seen.

Nevertheless, Grandma is visibly pleased.

“You know, we’ve got a hat that’d match those shoes right perfect. If you’ll just walk with me right this way?” He offers my grandmother a gallant arm and she accepts. She turns away quickly, but I’m pretty sure I see her blush. I hurry to follow them before they disappear into a sea of leather and fringe.

Within moments, he’s ushered her into a fitting room with three pairs of jeans and a rainbow of Western-style shirts. While she changes, he turns his attention to me.

“Let’s see what Big Dave can get you into, young lady.” He eyes me up and down.

I tell him that I’m not exactly a cowboy boots kind of girl and he laughs.

“Maybe you just haven’t met the right pair of boots yet.” He squints and turns his head to fix me in a sideways glance. Purses his lips. “Wait right here.”

When he returns, he carries a single pair of boots. They’re less ornate than the ones that caught my grandmother’s attention: black, polished to a high shine, low-heeled and capped with shiny gold tips.

Not bad, Big Dave, I think. I don’t have to say it. He knows.

“Try them on,” he says in a faux whisper and thrusts them at me.

Just then comes the sound of curtain rings gliding along the bar: Grandma emerges.

She’s let her hair down from her bun to fit the cowboy hat on her head, and it falls around her shoulder in wiry ringlets. She’s chosen a blue and white gingham shirt with faux mother-of-pearl buttons and bleached-almost-white jeans that fasten high around her waist. Her smile is almost as big as Big Dave’s. He whistles at her and it grows even wider.

“Spin!” he coaxes and waves his pointer finger in the air like a lasso.

Grandma complies, preening like a schoolgirl. I’ve never seen my grandmother like this: smiling, clothed in something with a waistline. Fringe sprays out around her shoulders.

“’At-ta GIRL,” Big Dave says, applauding. “Now, I know I’m biased ‘cause I own the place, but puh-lease tell me you’re walking out of here in that.”

At this, Grandma’s face falls. “I don’t have my pocketbook,” she says and begins to retreat into the changing room.

“Uh-uh. Surely your sister here can cover you, just this once,” Big Dave looks at me. He tips his Stetson up to give me a better look at his puppy dog eyes.

I look at Grandma. She does look young and fresh in her cowboy getup. Not to the point where we’d be mistaken as sisters, but she looks much younger than I’ve ever seen her look. Her face is enough to convince me.

“Of course I can,” I say.

“That’s the spirit!” He throws one arm around my shoulders and uses the other to gesture to the boots in my hands. “Your turn.”

By the time we’re ready to leave, we look like dueling cowboys: Grandma in white and blue, me in black boots and jeans, a red blouse. At checkout, I buy a “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” tote bag and tuck Grandma’s urn inside.

Grandma carries our old clothes in a plastic bag printed with Big Dave’s smiling face. She swings it as she walks to the car, humming one of the songs I recognize from yesterday. She knows she looks good in her new jeans.

It occurs to me to check my bank account, considering that Grandma’s probably eaten, shopped, and chain-smoked her way through most of my last paycheck, but when I look at my phone, I see my brother has texted me again. Hello? Are you alive? Dad wants to call the cops. I text him back. I’m okay. I’ll call soon. And then, I turn my phone off.      

 “What’s next, Grandma?” We’re back in the car, pulling out of the lot.

“Let’s go to Nashville,” she says.

We start with dinner: Nashville Hot Chicken. The restaurant doesn’t look like much, but there’s a line out the door. We take our checkered cardboard trays and eat at the picnic tables that ring the cracked parking lot. Grandma tucks into the meal like it’s her last, chewing every bite a hundred times, licking hot sauce from her fingers.

We stand out in our cowboy outfits. No one else is dressed like this. It’s hot and most people are wearing shorts and flip-flops, though there are a few cowboy hats dotting the crowd. Normally, I would feel self-conscious to be dressed so obviously like a tourist, but my grandmother looks natural, like she’s shed some sort of fifty-year chrysalis to reveal a fresh-faced country starlet.

It’s getting dark and the streetlights come on. For dessert, we share a family-sized banana pudding. Grandma eats most of it. She picks the wafer cookies out and licks the pudding off before popping them into her mouth.

Then, she tells me that she wants to hear some music and we’re off again.

It doesn’t take long to find a dark bar that’s just beginning to fill. Two guys sit on the stage: one on guitar, one on drums. At first, they play original stuff, but when they start playing covers, people launch themselves from their barstools to do the Boot Scootin’ Boogie.

My grandmother and I are at a booth, each on our second beer. She’s been watching the band, nodding along, but when they play “Walkin’ After Midnight,” she grabs my hand.

“Let’s dance!” she says. I follow her to the dance floor. She shouts over the music. “This was our song!”

“Grandpa?” I ask and she shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “My high school sweetheart.”

“Pete?” I ask. Grandma just winks and pulls me into the crowd.

My grandmother, I discover, is an excellent dancer. She shimmies, sways her hips. She matches the drummer beat for beat. I notice the bartender watching her as he polishes glasses.

When the song ends, the band takes a break. Grandma motions that she wants a cigarette. I follow her outside.

“Want one?” she says, offering me the pack for the first time. I reach for it and she snaps the top shut, like the jewelry case in Pretty Woman. She giggles, then lights one for me.

“Watch out, these things will kill you. I should know,” she says, then laughs again, and I remember that my grandmother, with her pink cheeks, enormous appetite, and effortless dance moves, is dead.

Inside, we hear the sound of the drummer counting off. The music starts.

“Come on,” she says. She puts her arm through mine and we duck back inside.

My grandmother disappears. When she returns, she presents me with a shot glass of golden-brown whiskey.

“How did you pay for these?” I ask.

“I didn’t. They did.” She nods toward a few guys at a pool table. She gives them, a little wave—just the fingertips. “To promises,” she says to me. We clink glasses and take the shots.

The lead singer of the band pauses between songs to announce that late-night karaoke will be starting after their set, in fifteen minutes.

“Karaoke!” my grandmother says. “Let’s sign up!”

I shake my head. “Grandma, I am too drunk for karaoke.”

She laughs. “That’s the point.”

“You go,” I say. “I’ll watch,” but she’s already on her way to pick a song.

I watch my grandmother on stage, singing one old country song after another. You’d think that folks around here would get tired of these songs, but no one’s complaining. Instead, the crowd’s going wild for my grandmother, this sprightly, 70-year-old dime store cowgirl from Newark. No one else has signed up to sing for almost an hour. It’s just her, belting the hits.

Even after listening to her in the car, I’m surprised by how good her voice is. She doesn’t look at the words once — she sings them like she wrote them herself — and as I listen to the lyrics, I begin to understand why. Underneath the twangy guitar and catchy lyrics, I hear my grandmother lay claim to things that had always evaded her: independence, freedom, fun. She sings her heartbreaks with a smile and I start to understand just how much I’ll never know about her. I listen to her sing and sing and she smiles down at me from behind the microphone.

Eventually, the bar closes and, with nowhere else open so late, we end up at a Waffle House as the first twinge of dawn is coloring the sky. This time, my grandmother doesn’t order much.

“Just a Coke,” she says to the waitress. I think back to our breakfast this morning in a Waffle House eight hours north of here. The booth is almost identical: the menus, the caddy of condiments and paper napkins. This table is sticky too, and the waitress is wearing the same black polo, the same hair net.

But my grandmother looks like a different person. Her white hair looks blonde, like it did before I was born, before her husband died. Before she dropped out of school. Before babies. Before her housedresses began to fade. Her blouse is open to her chest. Her wrinkles have melted away and her cheeks are rosy. She’s relaxed, leaning back into the plastic booth like it’s a sofa.

I watch her as she sips her soda. I realize now that I have so much I want to ask her, but even as I look at her she grows younger and younger every moment, her skin almost transparent in the pink morning light.

She holds up her pack of cigarettes. There’s only one left.

“I’m going to step outside,” she says and I watch her through the glass. I pay the bill at the counter, then realize that she’s left her urn on the table. I turn away from her for a second to pick it up and when I turn back around, she’s gone.

By the time the sun is up, I’m already heading north. I’ve found a country station and turned it up loud. Grandma’s urn is in the passenger seat next to me, the seat belt fastened around it. The car still smells like syrup and smoke, but it’s already fading.

I pass Big Dave’s. The lights are off, there are metal bars pulled over the door. Everything is different now.

I turn my phone back on. The screen lights up. I owe my family answers, but I’m still not sure how to explain the past two days. Do I say I panicked and took the ashes? Is there any version of the truth they’d believe?

Within minutes, my father calls.

I don’t want to answer, but I turn down the music and pick up. Before I can say anything, he’s yelling. His voice pours over me and I can’t get a word in edgewise. It’s what I expected, and it’s fine. Whatever he says, I’d do it all again.

On the radio, I hear the beginning of “Walkin’ After Midnight.” 

“Dad?” I say, and without waiting for him to stop talking, I say “I’m going to have to call you back.” I hang up and turn the radio back up.

Next to the road, a field full of goats spreads, wide and green. I pull over, get out of the car, and open the urn, filtering ash through my fingers into the field. Then, I drive back towards Nashville. I sprinkle some of my grandmother in front of Big Dave’s animatronic sign, the arm waving over us like a benediction, then I drive south.

A promise is a promise. When I’m inside the city limits, I open the urn and empty what’s left of my grandmother, plus the yellow ends of a few stubbed-out Marlboros, into the wind.