The Pink Glasses Grandma Threw Away

So I traded another shift with my friend at work, and on a bright cool Thursday in October, the three of us drove the forty miles south in my car. Lark sat in the back and read every sign on the highway out loud, and Dorinda sat in the front and held her purse in her lap with both hands.

Dr. Bratton remembered us. He did not say anything about the trash can. He did not say one word about it then or ever. He shook Dorinda’s hand and said, “So you’re the grandma,” and she said, “I’m the grandma,” and that was that.

He put her in the big chair. He clicked the lenses. “Better one, or better two?” Lark stood by the wall and whispered “two, Grandma, say two” until Dr. Bratton laughed and asked her to let her grandma do her own test.

Dorinda was more nearsighted than Lark. A good deal more. Dr. Bratton said she must have been driving on memory for years. Dorinda said she had been.

Then we went out to the frames. The grown-up frames are on a high shelf. Dorinda stood in front of them a long time with her purse on her arm and did not touch a single pair.

“I don’t know how to pick,” she said quietly. “I never picked. The county picked last time.”

Lark took her by the hand. “I’ll help,” she said.

She walked her grandma along the whole shelf. She had her try on brown ones. Gold ones. A black pair that made her look like a librarian. Lark looked at each one with her head tipped to the side, very serious, like Dr. Bratton.

Then she stopped and pointed up at the top shelf. “Those,” she said.

They were pink. Not loud pink. A soft pink, like the inside of a shell, with the corners a little rounded. Almost exactly like Lark’s, only bigger.

Dorinda laughed. “Baby, I’m sixty three years old.”

“So?” Lark said.

Dorinda held them a long time. Then she put them on and looked in the mirror. She looked at herself in that mirror for so long that Dr. Bratton quietly went in the back to give her a minute.

“Well,” she said finally. “Well, I’ll be.”

The glasses came in two weeks later, on a Friday. Dorinda drove herself down to Stillwater to get them. She said she wanted to do it by herself this time, and she did.

That afternoon she pulled up to the curb at three like always. I was off that day, so I was at the school too, in my own car, a few spots back in the pickup line, because Lark had made me promise to come see.

Lark came out the doors with her backpack and her crooked ponytail. She walked up to her grandma’s car and stopped.

Dorinda was sitting behind the wheel with her window down and her elbow out, the way she always does.

And on her face was a pair of pink glasses, exactly matching the ones on her granddaughter.

Lark did not say anything at first. She just stood there on the sidewalk and looked up at her grandma. Then she put her hand flat on the car door.

“Grandma,” she said. “Read me the sign.”

Dorinda looked across the street at the school sign, the big one with the letters you can move, and she read it to her, every word, out loud and clear, without one squint, sitting there in the bright afternoon in her matching pink frames.