The Lawn Chair at the Bus Stop
I knew it was hard on her. I knew it was the kind of hard that a small town is good at. And I will tell you the truth: part of me, the part from that first Wednesday night, was not sorry.
But the bigger part of me lay awake thinking about the fact that my little sister had not called me one time. Not to explain, not to fight. Nothing.
Here is what I did not expect.
Lexi had been struggling with reading. I hadn’t wanted to admit how much. In kindergarten she had done fine with letters, but first grade had a list of sight words, and she would sit with that list at the kitchen table and get red in the face and quit.
Her teacher had sent home a note the second week of school. “Lexi is a bright girl. She needs extra practice with her reading at home.” I had read that note and felt sick, because by the time I got home at six and made supper and did baths, there was nothing left in either of us.
Mrs. Harlan saw the sight word list in Lexi’s backpack on the third day.
“Well,” she said. “We can’t have that.”
The next day, the library book in her lap was not for her. It was one of her old classroom readers, the thin kind with a cat on the front and big words and lots of white space. She had kept a whole box of them in her basement for forty years. “I knew they’d be good for something,” she said.
That afternoon I got home at ten to six and found them both still out at the bus stop, because it was warm and Lexi had refused to come inside until they finished the book.
Mrs. Harlan sat in the lawn chair with the book open on her knees. Lexi sat on the curb beside her with her chin almost on the page, following along, her finger under each word.
“Stretch it,” Mrs. Harlan was saying. “Stretch it like taffy. Ssss. Aaaa. Mmmm.”
“Sam,” Lexi said.
“That’s it. Now who is Sam?”
“Sam is the cat,” Lexi read, slow, one word at a time. “Sam sat.”
She looked up at me with her whole face lit like a porch light. “Mama. I read it. I read it by myself.”
I knelt down on that sidewalk in my scrubs and I held my child, and over her head I could see Mrs. Harlan taking her glasses off and wiping them on the hem of that light blue cardigan, the way you do when you don’t want anyone to see you need to.
That night, while I was doing dishes, Mrs. Harlan’s porch light was still on. I walked over with a slice of the pie I had picked up at the gas station, because it was all I had.
She was sitting out there with the box of readers beside her, going through them one at a time.
“I haven’t been anybody’s 3:25 in nineteen years,” she said, without looking up. “Not since Walt. You don’t know what you did for me, Courtney.”
I didn’t answer, because I couldn’t. I just sat down next to her and helped her put the readers in order, from easiest to hardest, until it was almost ten.
Jeff came by on his Saturday that week to pick Lexi up. I had told him all of it on the phone, the curb and the texts and the lawn chair.