Chapter 13
Nicola shook her head, like she always did when she was mad. Addie did too, but from her, the gesture seemed more like admiration.
“I think that you look adorable in glasses!” she told me, smiling.
I definitely looked different, which I noticed every time I saw myself in the mirror.
My face was so much clearer and I had realized that it had always been clear to everyone else, too.
They could all see the little freckle just underneath the lower lashes of my right eye, which I’d thought was invisible unless you were close enough to kiss me.
Everything was different, much sharper and easier to understand.
For the first time, I got why other cars started to break so early when they were coming to a traffic light: it was because the drivers saw that it was red, even from far away!
They knew that they would have to stop soon and they didn’t have to do it with an abrupt stomp on the pedal, the kind that made passengers mad.
Words were also easier. The way I heard them hadn’t changed, but the way I read them on a page definitely had.
There was an obvious difference between a lowercase T and an F, for example, and you didn’t actually have to guess if you were looking at an A or an O.
The little tail of the former was as plain as day, now that I had these frames on my face.
“Bifocals,” Nicola intoned glumly, and Theo nodded.
“I had wondered about Grace’s visual acuity, but she had developed coping mechanisms to deal with the issue and masked it pretty well.”
“I probably won’t lose as much stuff now because I can see it, and I can also judge distances better so I may not get stuck as much.
Like when I was trapped in the crotch of the tree at your wedding,” I suggested to my oldest sister.
I would have thought it would make her happy to hear that I would no longer disrupt family events like that, but Nicola only frowned.
Maybe she needed proof. “Watch,” I told her, and I read the sign on the wall of Sophie’s kitchen that warned all visitors not to speak her husband’s name if he wasn’t home, because the kids went crazy when they heard it.
In that way, they reminded me a lot of the shelter dogs at feeding time, but I kept it to myself because I had the feeling that Soph wouldn’t have cared much for the comparison.
Nicola didn’t look at me. She didn’t seem impressed but things were also much safer now, which I thought she would have liked. I could read hazard signs on the road, for example, and spot the edges of frozen lakes much more easily.
“We always thought you were just clumsy,” Addie said. “I guess it was your vision all along.”
“No, I’m also clumsy. Since I got these glasses, I’ve already fallen into a gutter.
” That had been a shame due to all the recent snowmelt.
“But I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’m not trying to get attention.
I’m myopic, presbyopic, uncoordinated, and often thoughtless, but it’s not faked.
It’s a real problem that I’m working on. ”
“I had to get my eyes tested at the Secretary of State to get my driver’s license, and I also remember that we got tested at school,” Brenna said. “How did you avoid that?”
I had friends who’d helped me with my license, and as for school?
“Sometimes I wasn’t there,” I answered vaguely, because I definitely remembered removing myself from the examination situations.
Now that I looked back, I realized that it had been a very poor idea but at the time, it had been more fun to make a break outside by myself.
There was a park I’d gone to with a hidden brook that came up from between some big rocks, and I’d hung out there for hours.
Addie was also remembering those screenings. “They didn’t do a good job at our elementary school with catching kids’ issues,” she said.
“With vision?” Theo asked her.
She took a sip of coffee. “Like with Grace’s eyes, but I was also remembering her speech problem. I’m going to listen to my kids very carefully so I can catch any impairments and they won’t have to deal with all that. Poor Gracie.”
“I talked funny for a while,” I started to explain to Theo, but then Nicola piped up.
“Can we discuss the problem of Mom now?” she requested loudly. “Sophie, this coffee is cold and it’s too strong.”
I looked at her because I understood what she was doing, and it was kind of funny.
We had met at my second-oldest sister’s house to discuss the problem of our mother, but we usually all chatted a lot about anything, no matter what the actual topic was, and Nicola rarely objected to that.
Right now, she was trying to avoid something with diversion.
I saw that because I often did the same thing, if I didn’t just remove myself from the situation entirely.
“I’ll make more coffee,” Granger suggested, and took her mug.
He had specific ideas about how to prepare food and his ways seemed to be better.
I’d been going over to his restaurant to observe the cooking there and that was how I’d ended up working for him—not at the restaurant, but at the garage he also owned.
He had said that when I didn’t show up with a sick bird, I made for a reasonable hire and I liked the job. I hadn’t broken anything, not yet.
That was one of the answers that my siblings had shared when I had asked what was wrong with me: I never held a job for more than five or ten minutes.
I had known that, of course, because I was the one who kept updating my résumé on Addie’s laptop.
It had never bothered me much until fairly recently, and now I was fixing it.
There were a lot of things to fix.
But my mother’s problems were the ones we were dealing with today, and we had all crammed into Sophie’s house because she said it was the most centrally located.
That wasn’t correct, according to Beckett who was precise with things like words, distance, time, et cetera, but Soph didn’t respond to his message in the group chat in which all of us were allowed, including spouses, girlfriends, and Theo.
“Dion, give us the report,” Nicola ordered.
He cleared his throat. “Mom is dismantling the yoga studio and making it into an office,” he said.
“What? She loves yoga!” Brenna protested.
She still had a minor hint of tan from her vacation in Anguilla and she looked so relaxed.
I wished that Theo and I had gone to Florida instead of how I’d…
I took out my phone under the table and added “don’t run away from trouble” to the list, the written one.
My mental list was reserved for things that I didn’t want anyone to see, not even in the code I used.
“She removed the mats, took the mirrors off the wall, and uninstalled what Nicola calls the ‘stripper pole,’” Dion continued. “She’s saying that she needs to be a career woman now.”
“The path to a career begins with having a home office?” Sophie asked skeptically.
“She does need to find a job,” her husband Danny pointed out. He was holding two Curran kids, one that I identified as belonging to him and one that was Addie’s. I was pretty sure.
“But yoga keeps her steady,” Jude reminded us. He was also holding a few kids and they couldn’t have all been his and Nicola’s.
“Ahem.” Dion loudly cleared his throat and then looked around the room to make sure he had our attention. “Jude is right, because the lack of yoga is affecting her emotionally. She’s crying a lot.”
“I think it’s because she’s finally realizing that Dad is gone,” Patrick stated. “She thought that she’d get him back, but now that other woman is wearing grandma’s ring. She posted pictures of it.”
“What?” Juliet asked. “Dad gave that woman our grandmother’s ring? That’s outrageous.”
“It’s also his mother’s ring,” her husband pointed out.
I had looked Beckett over carefully when they had come in, something made much easier now that I could see him so clearly.
He seemed great, totally healthy, and Juliet glowed.
She was mildly upset about this latest problem with our mom, but I could see (also clearly) that she was doing a lot better.
She was also doing a lot bigger, in that she was huge with their baby and according to Nicola, he was coming soon.
Dion wanted us to hammer out a solution, immediately, but there was really none to be found. “Mom is just going to have to deal,” Sophie said brusquely, but Addie put it in a nicer way.
“We’ll all stay in better contact to try to give her extra support,” she told him, “but she’ll have to come to terms with the fact that their marriage is over. She’s been putting that off but now, she really can’t. It’s as plain as Grandma’s ring on another woman’s finger.”
It had been fun to see everyone and to drink Granger’s good coffee, but the meeting did break up without a perfect answer about what to do.
I hadn’t voiced anything myself, since I’d already known that there weren’t any solutions and also because I was still upset about the last time my mother and I had seen each other.
“He’s the reason that your life is in shambles, Grace.
” That was what she had told me about my father, and she wasn’t correct about the reason but she had been right about my life and the shambles.
“That’s why you’ll never have a good relationship and find happiness like your sisters.
” She might have been right about that, too—again, not the reason, but the result.
“That was a fun meeting,” Theo commented as we left.
Thanks to the people at my new job, my green car was now running great and they’d taught me a lot about how to repair it.
But today, I was driving his truck to get some practice on it.
We got in and I started it, and the engine roared.
The extra height and weight of the vehicle made me nervous—as did the fact that it didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t want to hurt it.