The title came out of a working call.

I was helping a client finish a book about building relationships that last — what you wish for in another person, and how to actually get there. The manuscript sat at ninety-five percent. The working title didn’t work, and his early readers had told him so.

I gave him my NGFS analogy. Naval Gunfire Support — a warship correcting its fire onto target, round by round. He’d commanded a guided-missile destroyer, and we’re both surface-warfare Navy, so he had it before I finished. “Titles work the same way. You fire long, you shoot short, you adjust — then you’re on target, and you fire for effect.” We’d get there by iterations.

Talking it through walked me back over the book’s central question, “What do you wish for?” And somewhere in there, a memory from long ago came back. I shared it with him.

* * *

When I was a boy, I’d spend the odd weekend with my great-grandmother. We were poor; she’d had it harder. She raised her kids and her grandkids through the Depression, and even by 1971, she had almost nothing you’d call a comfort now. No TV, just an old radio. Evenings, she’d sit and rock and chew tobacco with a Country-and-Western station turned low, and she’d read. Two things only: the Old Testament and the Montgomery Ward catalog.

The Bible was big, heavy; its black leather scuffed. It looked as old as she was — eighty-something then. I’d watch her from the couch that smelled of dog, though she’d never owned one, while I read my own book. After an hour or so, she’d cut a glance at the side table where the catalog sat. After the third glance, she’d close the Bible, set it aside — it went to bed with her, onto the small table by her head — and pick up the catalog.

My Big Granny (we called her that, though she stood barely five feet and might’ve gone a hundred pounds soaking wet) never smiled. She wasn’t mean. A hard life had just worn the gentle out of her. But when I stayed, she cooked my favorites: skillet-fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, apple cobbler. She cooked it all in a cast-iron pan bigger than a 1950s Cadillac hubcap; though it looked to weigh thirty pounds, she handled it like nothing. She’d produce a whole supper out of it alone. A good meal was how she said the things she didn’t say or show.

The first few times I watched her with the catalog, after a few slow pages, the set of her mouth eased into the barest curve. Sometimes she’d quit rocking and tip the pages under the lamp, that bone-thin finger tracing down a column. She’d squint… and the curve would grow.

Marginally.

Then a small shake of her head, and she’d settle back and turn the page.

I finally asked. “Big Granny, what’re you reading?”

“Not reading. Looking.” Her mouth went flat again. She wasn’t a talker; any conversation you wanted with her, you had to run down and catch.

“Looking at what?”

She stopped rocking. “Come here, boy.”

“Yes’m.” I was off the couch and beside her in three steps.

“This” — she laid her hand on the catalog in her lap — “is my wish book.”

I thought of Aladdin and the lamp, the genie I’d read about in One Thousand and One Nights earlier that summer. “What’s a wish book?”

She looked up, and for a second, I thought the smile might come. It didn’t take. “Everything I wish I had and never did…” A beat. “Never will.”

Her voice barely moved. It bent a little on never will.

That was a memory I’d lost, and the call had handed it back. As I trailed off, my client cut in.

“Back up. What’d you call it?”

“Her wish book.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That. That could be the title.”

* * *

After we hung up, I sat a while and thought, but not about the book. A wish of my own had surfaced. Big Granny’s decades gone, but I wished I’d put one thing from that catalog in her hands — whatever it was her finger kept finding, and her head kept shaking off. She lived alone for a long time. I never weighed that until I was a man with a four-decade marriage and four daughters of my own.

What I want for my girls isn’t in any catalog: it’s somebody to hold who holds you in return, somebody to grow old beside. All the things Big Granny wished for and never got.

I was just a boy then, with nothing in my pockets.

I’d give a lot to go back with something in them. Sit with her. Turn the pages of that wish book together.