The Pink Glasses Grandma Threw Away

We pulled out of the pickup line and onto the main road through town. And Lark, in the back seat, started reading.

She read the name of the bank off the brick front on the corner, every letter. Then the sign that blinks the time and the temperature. “Three oh eight. One hundred and two. Grandma, it’s a hundred and two degrees!”

“It feels like it,” Dorinda said.

At the light she read the church sign out front of the little brick church across from the post office. “All are welcome. Sunday ten thirty.” She sounded it out slow. “Grandma, that’s your church, right? That’s where we go.”

“That’s where we go,” Dorinda said.

She read the stop sign. She read the sign at the feed store. She read the word on the side of a delivery truck. She read every single thing on that road like somebody had given her the whole town for her birthday.

And then we came up on the gas station by the highway with the big price sign out front, and Lark leaned forward against her seatbelt and read it loud.

“Two. Seven. Nine. Two seventy nine. Grandma, gas is two seventy nine.”

Dorinda put her blinker on and pulled into the gas station. She did not need gas. She parked off to the side by the air pump, in the shade of the canopy, and turned the car off.

Then she put both hands over her face.

I did not say anything. Lark said, “Grandma?” in a small voice, and I reached back and put my hand on her knee and shook my head a little, and she hushed.

Dorinda sat like that a long minute. Then she took her hands down and looked straight ahead at the ice machine.

“I was seven too,” she said. “Second grade, 1970, in a little town south of here that isn’t even there anymore. A lady from the county came through and checked our eyes, and I got glasses that summer.”

She smoothed her blouse with both hands.

“Thick ones, thick as the bottom of a pop bottle. Brown frames. They made my eyes look huge. The first day I wore them, the teacher took one look at me and moved me to the back row with the kids who couldn’t read. The slow row.”

Her voice got quieter.

“I stayed there two years. The kids called me Owl. Dumb Owl, the bigger ones said. So the glasses and the slow went together in everybody’s head, mine too. Two years of sitting in the back thinking I was stupid.”

She stared at the ice machine.

“I quit wearing them in high school. Put them in a drawer. I’ve been squinting fifty years. I still hear them, Kenna. Dumb Owl. Some mornings I still hear it.”

She turned around in her seat and looked at Lark, really looked at her, in those pink frames with the freckles across her nose.

“I thought,” Dorinda said, and her voice cracked right down the middle, “I thought if I took them off you, nobody would ever call you that. I thought I was protecting you. And I took the one thing that would have kept you out of the back row.”

Lark looked at her grandma for a long time. Then she said, “My teacher moved me to the front row yesterday.”

Dorinda blinked. “She did?”

“Right under the board,” Lark said. “I can see everything. I read the whole board today. I read it before anybody.” She thought about it. “Grandma, nobody called me Owl. Somebody said my glasses were pretty.”