The Pink Glasses Grandma Threw Away

I called every eye doctor in town on my lunch break. The ones on my plan were booked to the middle of October. October. I could not stand the idea of her squinting at a classroom board for another two months.

The office I found with an opening was in Stillwater. Dr. Hollis Bratton. Forty miles south of our house, a straight shot down the highway, past the wheat stubble and the pump jacks.

The girl on the phone said they had a cancellation Saturday morning. I said we would take it before she finished the sentence.

Dr. Bratton was a tall, gray headed man of about fifty five with a soft voice and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead that he kept forgetting were there.

He sat Lark in the big chair, and she looked so small in it her feet stuck straight out. He let her push the button that made the chair go up before he did anything else.

He had her read the letters on the wall. She got the big E. After that she guessed. She guessed with so much confidence that I almost laughed, except it was not funny at all.

He clicked the lenses in front of her eyes one at a time. “Better one, or better two?” he asked her over and over, and she took the question very seriously, like it was a test she could fail.

“She’s nearsighted,” he told me after. “Both eyes, about the same. Not terrible, but enough that the board at school has been a smear for a good while. Things close up are fine. Things across the room are not.”

“A year,” I said. “She went a whole year.”

He shook his head kindly. “Kids don’t know what they’re missing. She thought everybody saw it that way. You caught it now. That’s what counts.”

Then we went out front to the frames. There was a whole low shelf of children’s frames, set down at a child’s height, which I thought was the nicest thing I had seen in a long time.

Lark tried on every single pair. Blue ones. Purple ones. Tortoiseshell like a grown lady’s. She looked at herself in the little round mirror and made faces at each one.

Then she found the pink ones. Plain pink, not glittery, a little rounded at the corners. She put them on and looked in the mirror and did not make a face at all.

“These,” she said. That was all. Just “these.”

The glasses came in on Monday. I left work at three, picked her up early from her grandma’s, and drove the forty miles back down to Stillwater with her chattering the whole way.

When Dr. Bratton slid them onto her face and bent the ear pieces to fit, she did not say anything for a second. She turned her head slowly around the room like someone had switched on a light.

On the way home she read me every mailbox number, every speed limit sign, every billboard. She read the word on a grain elevator two miles off. She read the license plate on the truck in front of us out loud, all six characters, three times.

“Mama,” she said, somewhere around the turnoff, “the trees have leaves on them. Like, separate. Every leaf is by itself.”

I had to pull over on the shoulder. I told her I had something in my eye. I did, I suppose.