The last time I was at a Waffle House I was crying. No one batted an eye at me sobbing into my chocolate chip waffle then. Now, I chat with the waitress Janet while she refills my coffee and I butter my pecan waffle. 

Being in the South always brings me a confusing sense of painful nostalgia and longing for a person I never was. The singing bugs, the humidity that causes my hair to grow ten times its normal size, all of it makes me think of my failures, like my second marriage, and my extreme success at getting the fuck out of dodge. I even feel an appropriate level of guilty when I pull out my heavy silver Amex that proves I’m not from around here to pay my breakfast tab, which reminds me of how little Janet gets paid. I wonder if she will feel insulted by my tip. I never know exactly whether to tip high because I won’t even notice the difference or to tip what’s normal for around here because anything more might remind them that I was wearing Italian leather and they had black keds. I go high, thank Janet and wish her a happy tourist season, and get into my rental car. 

The last time I was in the south I did not have a rental car. I had borrowed my uncle’s Tesla, which got me dirty looks from the paramedics who came to move my grandma from her recliner to a bed in the back room of the condemned house she was in so she could die with a little more dignity. “It isn’t mine!” I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell them about the decades old Honda CRV I still drove back in California, because no matter how much money I made I couldn’t seem to stomach spending tens of thousands on a new car. But the paramedics who lifted my grandma’s frail body didn’t care. I was just some rich white bitch, and to the neighbors I was just some woman they’d never seen visit before. So why now?

I had received an email in my blog’s inbox while I was at work. I typically scroll through my various chats and texts and emails while I walk to the restroom because I don’t have my phone or any way to contact me personally when I am within the workspace. The only times I get to reconnect with the outside is when I leave to use the restroom or, on blessed days, get lunch. As I walked down the hall I read, “I found your blog, if you are the granddaughter of Donna, please come. She’s dying.” 

It felt like a punch to the gut. I was on a plane to Atlanta within three hours. You know, because money can do that. 

While I flew I messaged my sister, my aunt, and my mom who all lived in Georgia still. Did they know how bad it was? Why was I the one who was contacted? Why didn’t Lulu reach out to them? Why didn’t Lulu reach out to ME? Why this stranger?

I didn’t fault my grandma or Lulu for not keeping in contact with me. I had tried call and text but grandma stopped being able to hear a decade ago and Lulu got a new cell phone and a new number multiple times a year. My number hasn’t changed since 2016.  Whenever I saw him I would remind him of my number and beg him to call if he needed anything. He never did. And by the time I would try to call him over the next two months his number would be disconnected. 

Lulu greeted me nervously at the door of the run down shack in the bad part of Atlanta. I wasn’t able to directly give him a heads up that I was on the way but I had emailed the neighbor and told him I was coming, and thank you for getting in touch. When I pulled up to the house in my uncle’s red Tesla, Lulu came to the door and gave me a huge hug. He tried to shove all of the garbage out of the way as I made my way into the house where my grandma lived…if the term “lived” could even be used. 

I had seen pictures of the house from my Google search months before when I called the cops to conduct a welfare check on my grandma. Lulu had driven to my aunt and uncle’s house back then, in one of the trucks he used to pick up items off of the street, and tried to drop my grandma off. Through multiple calls between my sister and my aunt I discovered that Lulu claimed he couldn’t do it anymore, he couldn’t take care of her anymore. No longer a young man himself, he was at his wit’s end of taking care of a ninety year old woman who couldn’t hear, or chew, or walk. 

My aunt and uncle didn’t take my grandmother, my aunt’s mom. So Lulu cursed them, sped off with my grandma still in the truck cab, and disappeared. 

The police seemed exasperated by my phone call to request a welfare check. That part of Atlanta doesn’t care about older people, why would they when drugs and murders don’t discriminate against age? The police said they would call me if anything bad happened, if they could even get a patrol car out there to check but otherwise they wouldn’t call me back. I wouldn’t know if someone even drove out there. On my third attempt of trying to get someone compassionate on the phone, I was able to get the dispatcher patch me through to a cop who had me on the phone while they explored the outside of the house. My heart pounded at what they might find. They couldn’t get in the house without a warrant and no one was answering. Without suspicious activity like a busted lock or a sprawled body spotted through a window, the cops could do no more. I didn’t want to get Lulu in trouble by telling them she was missing so I thanked the cops and just waited for any news, trying to dispel images of her starving to death locked in a house. 

She would eventually show back up a week later. Lulu had driven her to his family down south. And, of course, had changed his number. 

Months later, I would be standing inside that house I had looked up online, just as terrified at the possible state of my grandmother. 

“Come in, Vannie, come in, sorry about the mess, you know how it is.”

Unfortunately, I did. And the people sitting around me at Waffle House when I left almost twelve hours later didn’t bat an eye at my sobbing because they knew how it was too. Poverty, sickness, bills, living on the street, all of it ties the people of the South together in an unspeakable bond of knowing. Well, that is, some of the people of the South.