I have already mentioned (on more than one occasion) that my mother and her sisters went to high school with Flannery O’Connor. Mom graduated from Peabody High in 1943, O’Connor in ’42. Not that they were chums, exactly. In those days, Mary Flannery was the Catholic girl who lived in a white-columned house in town, right next door to the antebellum Governor’s Mansion. Her mother, Regina, kept a pretty tight rein on her daughter’s social life. My mother, who lived on her grandfather’s rented farm across from Hopewell Methodist Church, belonged to the socioeconomic class from which the future famous author drew many of her startling country characters. Back in the high school years, my mother was not one of the girls who might find themselves riding horseback with Mary Flannery at Andalusia Farm or enjoying Sunday luncheon at the house in town.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I wrote a whole novel set (mostly) in the middle of Georgia with the specific intention of wrangling an invitation to read at Flannery O’Connor’s house, but here we were, my mom and I — and her sister and several cousins — in the famous author’s dining room, where the big table had been pushed against the fireplace to make room for rows of chairs. I stood at a podium in the corner, flanked by faded floor-length drapes in a fern-and-leaf pattern that looks like peacock tails. The drapes are vintage — a creation of Flannery’s mother, I learned. Regina also made curtains for the living room across the hall, which is preserved as it was in Flannery’s day, when it served as her bedroom. My mother was saddened by the crutches leaning against the famous author’s bookcase. The typewriter is what got to me.

While the director of Andalusia Farm made his announcements to the audience, I looked across the dining room to my mother. She was sitting in the corner opposite the podium. One week shy of her eighty-fifth birthday, she was smaller than she used to be — when the wind was gusty, we were glad she carried a substantial purse — but she had a certain presence, my mother, the result, I think, of her steadfast refusal to be impressed. Once, at a fancy hotel in historic Savannah, she’d gone downstairs ahead of us to the restaurant and enjoyed what she believed to be the free hot breakfast; the waiter never even asked for her room number. Mom had behaved admirably on this trip — no driving from the back seat and no complaints about road food as long as we ate at a Waffle House. She returned my gaze from her folding chair in the corner of the famous author’s dining room, her substantial purse in her lap and a small, expectant smile on her face, looking as if it had never occurred to her to feel anything but welcome here.

In November 2010, six weeks after the book tour, my mother suffered a stroke. She died in August 2011. If even half of what my mother and Flannery O’Connor believed turns out to be true — they were both devout Catholics — then they’ve probably found each other by now, a couple of Peabody girls from the wartime classes of ’42 and ’43. They probably knew each other right away by the Milledgeville accent. Or so I reckon.