Some initial hesitation was almost natural, but it gave way to affection without exception, as everyone who came into the adult movie store fell in love with the woman they called Grandma.

The title wasn’t exactly arbitrary. She was at least seventy years-old, had gray hair, and would make occasional references to grandchildren. It made sense that her nametag didn’t read “Agnes” or “Ida” or “Whatever Her Name Actually Was.” It just said “Grandma.” And no one questioned that.

Partially because she was so sweet. Grandma was exactly the kind of person you would never expect to find behind a counter crowded with marital aids. She was the most open-minded senior citizen a body could hope to find. If a customer expressed interest in something, she would enthusiastically encourage that feeling. No genres or types of visual or physical stimulation were taboo for her. Grandma would happily point you to the sections with leather gags, stirrupped hammocks, or exotically-flavored underwear.

Grandma could recommend any product in the store as if she had actually used it. And perhaps she had. Her knowledge base was so vast that other employees consulted her encyclopedic recall before the official records. Grandma knew not just which stars were in which scenes, but what their specialties were, and with what other stars they had appeared. Employees and customers would test her with a variation on Six Degrees of Separation, in which the last word was changed to something more befitting the atmosphere. If at any point Alzheimer’s had come to claim Grandma, she had beaten it back with one of her premium leather riding crops.

There was something soothing about talking to a grandmother about one’s sexual difficulties, it seemed, because she was never short on conversational partners. Grandma was as sympathetic to complaints of discomfort due to lack of lubrication as she might be to an irritating office situation. She would cluck and say, “Oh, dear,” and point the wronged party to an instructional volume on self-pleasuring.

Several hundred strangers joined the family for Grandma’s funeral, all of them wearing something to commemorate the impact she’d made on their lives, whether it was visible or not.