“Can I go to Mamaw Dubel’s house?” I ask. Having mustered the courage to inquire, I look expectantly at my mother while also trying to act like it isn’t a big deal. If she knows how desperate I am to escape her, she won’t let me go. Underneath my curated facade, my stomach clenches, and my body braces for the rebuke.

“Why?” My mother replies. The flinty tone of voice along with the narrowing of her eyes and the grim set of her mouth tell me that generosity is not in today’s forecast. I will have to spend begging currency.

“I don’t know. I just want to. Please let me go. Just for a little while.” One of these sentences is a lie. I do know why. The boredom and loneliness of being an only child kept under tight maternal control is stifling, especially in the summer when I don’t have the refuge of school.

With a huff of air out her nostrils, she says, “I guess. Call her and see if you can.”

I rush to the phone, no longer able to maintain the nonchalant air. I press the receiver to my left ear so my right hand is free. My finger hooks into the opening for the 3, and I crank the round dial to the right, then follow its mechanical whirring back to the left. I do the same with the 2, and then back to the 3. Some of my friends have a push-button phone that makes a cool beeping sound when you press each number. I imagine how wonderful it would be to own a cream-colored trimline phone rather than this mustard yellow rotary version that hangs on the den wall with its extralong spiral cord always tangled. In my hurry, I mess up and have to push down on the silver hook to get the dial tone again. I restart, this time scrunching up my eyes in concentration so I don’t make a mistake. It takes forced patience to dial 3-2-3-5-4-9-4. I expel a sigh of relief when the first ring sounds.

My grandmother lives in a quaint little house. Part of the respite I find there is that her black rotary telephone sits tucked away in a built-in wall cubby. It’s a unique set up that I have not seen in other homes. I wish I could ask my grandfather, who built the house, about that feature, but he passed away three years ago when I was eight, tragically dying of a heart attack on his final night at work before retirement. At home, my mother talks incessantly on the phone as if it’s her occupation, hobby, and religion all rolled into one. As soon as she hangs up one call, she starts breathlessly dialing the next person so she can pass on and embellish the titillating gossip she just learned. Any fisherman’s exaggerated fish tales have nothing on my mother who desires drama over the boringness of accuracy or discretion. As a result, I frequently retreat to my room and close the door for the silence I crave. My grandmother, however, is a quiet, reflective woman for whom using the phone is just a practical matter. She shares a party line with multiple houses and so finding the line clear isn’t always easy. It’s best to keep conversations brief so others aren’t prevented from making calls. It is also wise to be discreet because you never know who is listening along. This party line makes it a miracle that I get through to her on the first try.

“Hello,” Mamaw answers in her dignified high voice.

“Hi, Mamaw,” I say, smiling as though she can see me. My right hand plays with the cord, entwining in its elastic spirals.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she says.

“Can I come down?” I try to keep my voice light and not whiney. I again brace against the possibility of disappointment, shifting my weight from one leg to another as if I need to pee. She may be heading out to the library, the laundry mat, or a hair appointment.

“Sure, but Wimbledon is on today, so I’ll be watching tennis,” she replies.

“That’s great. I’ll watch with you. Be there in a few minutes.”

The tight grip I have maintained on the receiver relaxes, and I hang up the phone while the “OK” has barely escaped her lips. I catch my mother’s eye. She’s been watching and listening during the brief exchange. She resents the love I have for my father’s mother, our special kinship.

“Don’t stay all day,” she orders as I push open the storm door.

I bound off the porch steps and sprint through the yard. My grandmother lives on Highland Drive, which runs perpendicular to my dead-end street. One of the few great fortunes of my childhood is that via our neighbor’s backyard, I can slip through an opening in the fence row, either on foot or on my bike, and emerge into my grandmother’s garden. At certain times each year, April to August, the Japanese honeysuckle blooms in that fence row. I usually pause to smell and taste its sweetness. It feels like a divine sacrament to pick that delicate white flower and pull the stem’s bottom so the style dislodges its sweet deposit of nectar. When our preacher reads from Psalm 34, “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” this is what I think of.

When I reach the pavement, I glance back, knowing that my mother will be standing on the porch with her arms crossed. Her eyes will follow me the whole way because she fears that something could happen to me in the short three-minute journey through the yards of neighbors we know well. As I focus on the pleasure that awaits me, I try to shake off my mother’s resentment that I feel boring into my back. I hurry through the grass where the properties of three houses meet. The sun beats down on my head, and the humidity clings like a shroud. It’s July so the smell of honeysuckle greets me while I’m still 30 feet from the vines, but today I don’t linger. I dodge tree limbs and undergrowth to push through the opening, careful not to stumble over exposed roots.

To the left is my grandmother’s expansive garden where the corn and tomatoes I love grow. I round the detached garage that houses her car and step onto the narrow sidewalk. I’m assaulted by overgrown airplane plants that line the walkway. They attract bees so I veer into the grass to avoid a sting. I mount the small stoop and notice that the front door is already open. She’s expecting me. I give three quick knocks on the screen door and peer inside to watch her progress.

“Hi, sweetie. Come in. How are you?” She says in one breath.

“I’m ok. What have you been up to?” I deflect, which is one of the strategies I adopt at home so everything can be about my mother. I don’t need to use it here, but it is reflexive at this point.

She responds, “I worked in the garden a bit this morning before it got hot, then cut out a pattern for a dress I want to make.”

Our exchange takes place right inside her front door, which opens directly to the kitchen and is where I love to be. My grandmother is an early riser, which baffles me. She is up before 6 a.m. and sometimes has completed a long list of chores and baked two pies by 8 a.m. I conclude that it must be an “old people” thing. I do know that she doesn’t like the heat, and in the summer, she is even more intentional about her morning schedule because she knows if she gets overheated that it will be difficult to cool down. As I stand in her kitchen, I notice that the temperature inside is not much cooler than it is outside. Her house doesn’t have central heat and air. She can’t afford it. She finally acquiesced to my father’s purchase of a small box air conditioner for her living room window, but she refuses to run it unless the temperatures climb into the 90s. She hasn’t held a job outside the home in decades. In the 1930s, she trained as a nurse in Roanoke, Virginia, and then worked at hospitals in New Jersey and California. But she quit work to raise her children. My father, the oldest, was born in 1943, then nine years later, at age 44, she gave birth to twin girls. Surely their conception was unexpected, but she never said, and I never asked. So, as a widow on a fixed income, she does not spend money without careful consideration, and the air conditioner, which inflates her power bill, stays mostly off.

When I was younger, my grandmother and I occupied ourselves by reading from a shelf of picture books, creating masterpieces with crayons, and playing board games such as Yahtzee and Pollyanna. We still enjoy board games, and we’ve added solving the daily crossword. She humors me in this because she doesn’t need my help, confidently filling in letters with a pen. Often, I sit on the side of her bed and watch her sew. With the limits of a five-room house, her bedroom doubles as a sewing room with assorted cloth, patterns, and notions spilling from every surface. Her black Singer sewing machine operates by a lever at her knee; she is adamant that she doesn’t want the more standard foot pedal. The machine’s staccato patter soothes me, and I’m fascinated as her skillful hands guide the material through the rapidly pulsing needle.

But if there is a tennis match airing, all other activities are abandoned so we can watch it on her black and white television. She refuses to upgrade to a color set, claiming they hurt her eyes. I don’t think to ask her how she became interested in tennis. It seems unlikely given her non-posh background, but whatever the reason, she is passionate. I do my best to be a fan and a connoisseur, following with her the careers of players she loves— Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Björn Borg, Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, and Martina Navratilova. These names are part of a secret language that only she and I speak. I love the way the word “fault” is shouted and how the scoring system terms include “Love.” John McEnroe lends extra drama to the script with his epic temper tantrums. He likes to rail at the umpire then slam his racket to the ground. Except for these saucy interludes, most of a match is the mesmerizing lob of the ball back and forth across the net, like my piano teacher’s metronome. There is an intimacy in watching only two players battle for victory, to hear their effort-laden grunts and see their sweat-stained faces. It seems in harmony with the intimacy of my grandmother and me, only us in the house, side by side on her green, cracked vinyl couch.

Although I don’t have an interest in learning to sew, I do enjoy other needle crafts, especially cross stitch. The previous year I found a little kit at my favorite store, The Record Shop. As the name would suggest, the front of the store is indeed a wide assortment of albums, but the back half is devoted to crafts. It’s a strange partnership that suits me perfectly. I thought of my grandmother immediately when I saw the design— two tennis rackets crisscrossed, to be stitched in brown thread, with “Tennis Is My Racket” lettered above. It turned out to be trickier to complete than I thought, but I was proud of the finished project. I gave it to her for Christmas that year mounted in a small circular frame, which she hung in a prominent spot on her kitchen wall.

When my grandmother passed away almost two decades later, my cross-stitched emblem of our loving bond still hung in that same spot, the white cloth now yellowed. I haven’t remained a devoted tennis fan in my adulthood, too many other interests and responsibilities crowd my time. But more than that, it feels too closely connected to her loss and the grief I still carry. But whenever I inadvertently catch a televised match at home or in a sports bar, I experience a reflexive tug inside and the familiar sense of being transfixed by the ball. I’m momentarily awash in the safety and happiness I enjoyed when snuggled up with my grandmother on the couch. I long to hear her caustic commentary again, her frustration at a missed return or failed serve. I want to shout, “Look, Mamaw, she’s really good, but of course, nothing like Evert and Navratilova!”

In The Night Villa, Carol Goodman writes about the ghost root, an empty place we must carry around that retains the same shape as our lost loved one, a void that can never be filled. I believe this is true, and when I envision the ghost root in me, it looks like two crisscrossed tennis rackets.