The Pink Glasses Grandma Threw Away

Lark came in the back door from her grandma’s car on a Tuesday afternoon in late August with her backpack dragging and nothing at all on her face.

I was at the kitchen sink still in my scrubs, rinsing the lunch box I had forgotten to pack that morning. I looked at her twice before it landed on me what was missing.

“Where are your glasses, baby?” I asked her. I said it light, the way you ask a child where her other shoe went, because I figured they were in her backpack.

She climbed up on the kitchen stool and reached for the cookie jar like she did every afternoon. “Grandma put them in the trash can at the park,” she said.

She said it the way she would tell me it was hot outside. No tears. No fuss. Just a fact she had been handed and was handing on to me.

I turned the water off. I set the lunch box down on the dish towel very carefully, the way you set something down when you are afraid of what your hands might do next.

“Say that again for me, Lark,” I said. “Slow, so I hear all of it.”

She pushed a cookie in her mouth and talked around it. “We went to the park to swing. Grandma said I looked slow in them. She said they made me look like I was not smart. Then she put them in the trash can by the bathrooms.”

“Did you ask her not to?” I said.

She looked down at the counter. “I asked her one time. She said I would thank her someday.” She swung her feet against the stool rungs. “Mama, can I watch my show?”

I told her yes. I stood there at the sink for a long minute after she went, with the cartoon voices coming in from the front room and the window unit rattling, and I tried to breathe like a person.

Those glasses were one day old.

You have to understand how long it took us to get those glasses, or none of the rest of this makes sense.

Lark squinted through all of first grade. I can say that now. At the time I did not see it, and I was looking right at her every single day.

She held picture books close to her nose. She sat about three feet from the television. When I pointed at a hawk on a fence post on the drive home, she said “where” and then “oh, I see it,” and I believed her.

Her first grade teacher told me at the spring conference that Lark daydreamed. She said Lark was a sweet girl who seemed to drift off during board work, and she would grow out of it.

I thought she was shy. I was shy at her age. I figured she had my mother’s quiet way and that she would find her feet when she was ready.

Nobody caught it until the school nurse did the eye screening at back-to-school registration, the Thursday before second grade started. She sent home a pink half sheet of paper that said Lark should see an eye doctor for a full exam.

I read that paper standing at the mailbox and felt sick. A whole year. A whole year of my girl looking at a blur on the board and thinking that was just how the world looked.

I work as a nursing aide at a care home in Ponca City. My shifts run seven to three most days. The insurance through work comes with a vision plan that covers one exam and one pair of glasses a year for each of us.