She pulled up every day after school in her rusty, brown Maverick with a plastic figurine of St. Jude dangling from her rearview mirror. Always the first to arrive and a half-hour early, she was one of few babysitters in a long line of mothers picking up their kids from school. But Helen was the only seventy-two-year-old babysitter in the parking lot. We liked to think she was our grandmother, even though genealogy charts proved otherwise.

Her welcoming kisses punctuated the end of the school day and the beginning of the afternoons with our next-door neighbor. We’d dive into her pocketbook, usually a tote bag that smelled faintly of mothballs, to find a mound of M&M’s, devil dogs, and Twinkies, all of which she encouraged us to eat, even if we were en route to the dentist. Her purse changed daily to match her carefully chosen outfit of either a polyester pantsuit or a skirt and a patterned blouse with a corduroy blazer.

We’d ease out of the school’s gravel driveway and slowly putter home on country roads. Helen’s preferred speed was about 30 mph, and, always the lady, she often pulled over to let cars and trucks pass by if they were tailgating her. Her driver’s license first entered her wallet when she was in her late sixties, right after she lost her husband to a heart attack. Whenever we’d dare her to speed up, she’d respond, “Where you kids gotta’ go? You’re with me.” And there was nowhere else we’d rather be.

At five feet eight inches, she used to always say that she’d been shrinking for years. As she turned the steeling wheel, she’d tell us that our arm muscles would one day flap like hers, “like Popeye’s when he doesn’t eat his spinach.” Her thin, black hair with several wisps of gray was always coiffed into a sturdy do, a result of her weekly visit to the hairdresser. Her heavily wrinkled face sagged like a Sharpei’s but her warm, brown eyes lit up whenever she saw us.

Helen offered more than just the security of constant companionship to two kids whose parents worked. Her energy, love, and affection gave us a Technicolor childhood. We always dismissed the guilt our parents felt for not being there to greet us when we came home from school. Helen let us eat dinner while watching “Three’s Company”, helped us ace our math homework with her mind for numbers, and sometimes even let us beat her at Canasta.

Her soft, Mannerist hands were always there to guide us on long walks in the arboretum or errands around town. Her silver engagement ring hung loosely on her wedding ring finger, a reminder of the life she led before us. Reading glasses hung crookedly from her neck on a ribbon to help her decipher the backs of medicine bottles whenever we were in need of cough syrup or baby aspirin. The wadded tissue she always tucked underneath the sleeve of her left wrist served to blow our nose or dry our tears.

It is still her voice that I love most: a strong Brooklyn accent with a raucous laugh of someone who drinks vodka on the rocks on special occasions. In upstate New York where everyone spoke in dull monotones, the irreverent lady from Brooklyn stood out like a tenor in a choir of sopranos. “I like my cawfee strong and my men weak,” Helen used to quip whenever she took us to the village diner for a special after-school doughnut. There, we’d seek her approval in citing the grades we’d received on a spelling test to which she’d inevitably respond, “You’re so smaawrt.” And, more than once, she’d scream upstairs to see what we’d prefer for dinner, “Hamburgas or haawtdaawgs?”

One summer, Helen took us to the Catskill Game Farm in Upstate New York. Prize-winning pigs, home-raised chickens, and spitting lamas entertained us for hours. We gazed at the creature of choice behind chain-linked fences with Helen’s puffy hand nearby to grab whenever an unexpected snort or frightening squeal caught us off guard. A plump goldfish memorialized our day as a prize for one of the games we’d won. Several weeks later, suitcases lined the hallway for the year-long sabbatical in England we were about to embark on with our parents. Our portly goldfish had no passport, we were told, and Helen would take care of him while we were gone.

The following August we swung open the door to the familiar smells and creaks of the house we had missed in the year abroad. And, there he was, or so it seemed, our aquatic friend of a year past. But he looked different – slimmer. Helen must have put him on a diet, my brother and I thought. Years later, Helen, always the good Catholic, confessed to my mother that she’d never liked fish as pets. “I flushed him down the toilet right after you left for London and bought a new one before you came home,” Helen admitted. “I figured the kids would never know the difference.”

Growing up, I could never imagine that Helen had a life before she met us. As far as I was concerned, life began when I was two and Helen walked into it. I figured it must have been the same for her. Until one day, when I was seven and my brother was five, that Helen took us to visit her husband’s grave. I’d never been to a graveyard. I held her hand tightly as we walked through an unknown territory of foreign names, tall slabs of rock and wild flowers. I helped her pluck the dandelions that had invaded his tombstone and traced my fingers over the letters of his name. All I knew of him was a weathered black-and-white photograph that Helen kept framed on her dresser. As Helen prayed, my brother and I kneeled beside her and sat quietly. Her only child had married and, later, divorced, and had never given her the grandchildren she would have loved to have cared for with her husband. That was the day I realized Helen wanted to introduce us to her husband – not as the kids she babysat for but as her surrogate grandchildren.

That day, and in many more to follow, Helen showed us her relentless faith and determination to never give up, despite loneliness, old age and widowhood. It’s St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, she used to say, who helped her get through each day. Whenever we asked her how she was doing, she’d always wink and say, “With you kids, I couldn’t be better.

She’s ninety-six now, and lives in a house next door to her daughter. But every summer, she takes off for two weeks on her own to “camp,” a Winnebago campground where she lives in a trailer and visits her summer friends. “So I can finally have a little peace and quiet to myself,” she says.

Two years ago, she came to Manhattan for my wedding and it was the first time she’d stepped foot in the city in forty years. When she arrived at the church, my husband greeted her and escorted her inside where she sat with family. She was one of the last guests to go at the end of the evening, and the photograph of the two of us is one of my favorites in our wedding album. This summer, our first child will be born, and I can’t wait for him to meet his great-grandmother. I’m sure she’ll have a Twinkie for him.