The Pink Glasses Grandma Threw Away

Dorinda made a sound I had never heard her make. She reached back between the seats and took Lark’s hand in both of hers and held it.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “Grandma’s so sorry. I was wrong. I was wrong and I knew it by suppertime and I was too proud to say so.”

“It’s okay,” Lark said. “Kind of okay.” Then, very seriously: “Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t,” Dorinda said. “I promise you. I swear on my mother.”

Then she turned to me. Her face was wet, and she did not wipe it.

“Kenna. What did they cost? The second pair.”

“Eighty eight dollars,” I said. “Your son sent forty.”

She dug in her purse right there by the air pump. She counted out forty eight dollars in fives and ones, slow, and pressed them into my hand.

“I’ll pay for any pair she ever needs,” she said. “From now till she’s grown.”

I did not argue. I folded the money and put it in the pocket of my jeans. I said thank you. That was all. I did not need to say anything else, and I did not want to.

We sat there another minute in the shade. Then Dorinda started the car and pulled back toward the road, and at the edge of the lot she stopped to look for traffic.

She squinted up the highway. Hard. The way she always does. I had seen her do it ten thousand times and never once thought about it.

Lark saw it too. Lark, who now saw everything.

“Grandma,” she said from the back seat. “You’re squinting. Like I used to.”

Dorinda laughed, wet. “I’m old, baby. Old ladies squint.”

“No,” Lark said. “You need a checkup. Dr. Bratton is really nice. He let me make the chair go up.”

Dorinda did not answer. She pulled out onto the road. But at the next light I saw her looking at Lark in the rearview mirror, and she did not look away.

Things settled after that. Dorinda picked Lark up at the curb every day at three. Lark wore the glasses every day, from the time she woke up to the time she went to bed.

Every afternoon on the drive home, Lark read Dorinda the signs. The bank. The temperature. The church. The price of gas. Dorinda started calling it the report. “What’s the report today?” she would say, and Lark would read off every sign from the school to the white house with the carport.

Her reading came up so fast that her teacher sent home a note in the second week of September. Lark had moved up two reading groups. There was a smiley face drawn at the bottom, and a little pair of glasses on it.

Her daddy came home on his week off in mid September. He took her to the drive-in for a dip cone and she read him the whole menu board, top to bottom, including the prices. He told me later he had to go sit in his truck for a minute after.

In October, Dorinda called me on a Saturday morning.

“I made an appointment,” she said. No hello. “With your Dr. Bratton. In Stillwater. Next Thursday at ten. I want Lark to come.”

“She’ll be in school,” I said.

“I asked her teacher,” Dorinda said. “She said Lark can miss the morning. She said it was educational.” There was a pause. “I can’t do it by myself, Kenna. Fifty years. I can’t walk in there by myself.”