She said the church didn’t take her back. She said the two women she’d known for thirty years crossed the road. She said the whole town has heard a recording of her voice saying the thing she said at that table, and that people don’t forget a voice.

“There is nowhere in this county where I have a face,” she said. “Except here. They know exactly what I did — it’s in my file, they had to be told — and they let me in three mornings a week anyway, and nobody says anything about it, and I mop the floor.”

I said, “Do you like the dogs?”

And she said, “No. I don’t, particularly. I never have.”

Which is, I think, the only completely honest thing my grandmother has ever said to me.

I asked her one more question, which was the one I’d got on two buses for.