The Pink Glasses Grandma Threw Away

That was Monday. On Tuesday afternoon, her grandmother put them in the trash.

Dorinda Varga is my ex-mother-in-law. She is sixty three years old. Her son and I were married five years and have been divorced two, and we get along fine, which is more than a lot of people can say.

Dorinda has watched Lark after school since kindergarten. She lives four blocks from the elementary school in a little white house with a carport and a glider on the porch. She picks Lark up at the curb at three and keeps her until I get off.

She will not take money for it. I have tried. She says a grandmother does not get paid to be a grandmother. She makes Lark grilled cheese cut in triangles and lets her water the tomatoes.

I want to say all of that plainly, because what she did was wrong, but she is not a monster. She has loved my daughter every day of her life.

I called her from the kitchen while Lark watched her show. I kept my voice low and even. I have been a nursing aide for nine years, and I know how to talk to someone when I am angry and cannot let it show.

“Dorinda, Lark says you put her glasses in the trash at the park.”

There was a pause on the line. I could hear her television too. Then she said, “I did.”

“Can you tell me why?”

“Those things made her look slow, Kenna.” Her voice was flat and sure. “Big pink things on that little face. She looked like a child who could not keep up. People see that and they decide what she is.”

“She couldn’t see the board,” I said. “That’s why she looked like she wasn’t keeping up. Because she couldn’t see.”

“I’m not having her sit in the dumb row like I did,” Dorinda said. And then she hung up on me.

I stood there with the phone in my hand. In nine years we had never once hung up on each other.

I want to answer something now, because I know some people will be thinking it. Why didn’t I get in the car, drive the four blocks, and have it out with her on her porch?

I thought about it. I had my keys in my hand.

But I knew how that would go. I would say what I thought. She would say what she thought. One of us would say a thing that could not be taken back, and by Wednesday I would have no one to pick Lark up at three.

There is no after-school program at Lark’s school. The one at the church across town fills up in July. I work until three, and some days the care home keeps me until four if a resident is having a hard day. I cannot leave a woman on the toilet because the school bell rang.

And more than the ride, a fight would have cost Lark her grandma. Her daddy works away, and Dorinda is the only family on his side she sees from one month to the next. I was not going to take that from her over one afternoon, not if there was another way.

So I did not fight. I did something else.

First I called Lark’s daddy. He works on a pipeline crew in West Texas, three weeks on and one off, and gets home to see her when he can.

He picked up on the second ring with machinery loud behind him. I told him the whole thing, start to finish, and for a while he did not say anything at all.