The Reading Lessons (45 page)

“We’ll know it’s there.”

Meg dipped her brush in the magenta paint. “I don’t mean to get all corny with this, but Old Hadley has taught me something that I hope I never forget. Maybe we could paint that on the wall, just to be on the safe side?”

“What is it?” Grandma said. “Never sit in poop-colored paint?” 

“No, Grandma. He’s taught me that you don’t have to just lay down and die just because you’re going to die. I’ve played a lot of pinochle with you both, yet I never understood until now that there is more than one way to win. I propose we paint one word each. Grandma, you get MAKE. I’ll go in the middle with IT. Old Hadley can do WALK.

“That is corny,” Grandma said, but she went up to the wall and painted her word in curly, pink letters. Meg made her letters big and wide. Old Hadley finished like a pro, his lettering beautiful and strong. They all stood back to admire their work.

MAKE IT WALK

“Needs an exclamation point,” Meg said.

Somehow, all signs of illness seemed to evaporate as they slapped on coat after coat of bright paint. They opened the windows, and the sun came in, and when magenta splattered on Grandma’s shoes, she didn’t even stop to wipe them off. 

Old Hadley knew grandma when she was a child, and Meg asked him what she was like back then. “Was she as sassy as she is now?”

There was a time when Meg would have never voiced such a thing out loud for fear of the repercussions, but the strokes of noisy pink paint made her feel bold. 

“She was terrifying,” Old Hadley said as he meticulously cut in around the door. “Some things never change.”

“He always thought he was so special. I had to knock him down a peg or two,” Grandma said.

“Her hair wasn’t that phony color of yellow that it is now,” Old Hadley continued.

Grandma looked like she might kick over the paint bucket.

“It was the color of butter,” he said.

Grandma shook her paintbrush at Hadley. “He pretended he couldn’t read so I would have to give him lessons.”

“She liked giving lessons.”

Meg wished now that she had never brought up their childhood. She hadn’t meant to ruin the moment. It was always ticklish with Grandma.

“We read some wonderful books,” Old Hadley said.

Grandma nodded. “We had a book club, believe it or not.”

“We made up our own holiday.”

Grandma looked down at the trail of little pink footprints she’d made across the drop cloth. “He was my closest friend.” She slapped a few sloppy strokes over their message. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

The room was hot now, thanks to the sun. It smelled of paint and flowers, and everyone’s skin was the color of a rose. The paint pinked everything. “It’s like a sunset in here,” Meg said. 

“Or a sunrise,” Old Hadley said.

Because he was beginning to look tired and there wasn’t a good place to move the vases, they decided to paint around the flowers. White shadows in the shape of Ballerina roses remained on the magenta walls. “We can go back and get those later,” Meg said. “Let’s put you on the couch tonight.”

A bed was made up in the other room, and Old Hadley looked sleepy but happy when she tucked him in. “Thank you,” he said, and he squeezed her paint-stained fingers.

Meg cleaned the brushes under the hose outside and the grass and mud turned the color of Old Hadley’s bedroom. She hammered the lid down on the paint can and left it by the front door so they could finish up another time. She hung the carpenter’s pants next to Old Hadley’s coveralls and took her grandmother back to her house. “We can move Old Hadley into his magenta bedroom tomorrow,” Meg said.

###

Meg stopped at the market for some milk and doughnuts the next morning, and when she paid Mr. Bing, she noticed there were dark crescents of magenta still clinging under her fingernails. The color made her smile.

When she opened Old Hadley’s door, it was clear he’d already moved back into his bedroom. The house smelled of the work they’d done, and Meg pondered his other white walls, wondering what wild color they might make them. She put the doughnuts on a white china plate she found in the kitchen, poured three glasses of milk, and carried them on a tray into the magenta bedroom.

Grandma was back and sitting in a chair beside his bed with a book in her lap and a drop cloth bunched around her paint-dribbled shoes. She was fast asleep, and something about her looked different to Meg. She suspected it was all that lovely pink light. It softened her. Old Hadley was in bed, just as she’d guessed, and she tipptoed in, quiet as a mouse. 

A jar on the nightstand caught her eye when she made room for the tray. Every vase, cup, bottle, and jar to be found had been confiscated for the indoor garden except for three glasses they’d saved for drinking. The jar stood out like a sore thumb. The word WHOOPS had been handpainted on one side, and there was nothing in it.
Now why did they empty this one?
Meg thought.

She glanced around at the mess they’d left behind, dropcloths splattered with multicolored drips from other walls and other secret messages, magenta-tipped paintsticks, the occasional loose nail scattered here and there on the floor, and the snow-white silouette of ballerina roses growing up one wall.
Perhaps we should leave that wall alone
, she thought? The white of the roses somehow made the magenta all the more special and beautiful. 

With a little searching , she was able to spot the brushmarks that hid the message they made. As she patted the spot, it occurred to her that she’d not heard any coughing since she came into the room. Maybe Old Hadley really was going to make another amazing recovery?

He looked awfully still. She rested her magenta stained fingers on his chest and softly chanted, “Please oh please oh please.” 

Nothing.

She kept her hand on his quiet heart and whispered her prayer for a long time. Long enough for tears to fall on the tops of her fingers and slide away between them. “Grandma,” she said. “He’s gone.”

At that same moment, she realized what was different about Grandma. She was wearing glasses! Grandma didn’t own glasses. Grandma was like Mrs. Leaf across the street who could only hear half the words anyone ever spoke to her yet refused to be fitted for a hearing aid. She placed her hand on Grandma’s chest, but this time she knew there was no point. 

Just like that, on the same sunny morning, both of them were gone.

For the longest time, she stared at the glass full of purple-pink orhids that Grandma had arranged two days before. The flowers they’d shoved into the corner were crowded and mashing into each other, and Meg set about returning them to their appointed locations around the room, taking care to remember where Grandma had originally placed them, positioning flowers for optimum viewing. “There,” she whispered.

Curious to know what the last book was that Lucinda Worth-Homes and Hadley Crump read together, Meg slid the worn volumn from her grandmother’s grasp. It was a shabby, well-read thing and tucked between two pages near the very end was a yellowed recipe card printed in childish handwriting.

From the kitchen of . . . 

Great Expectations

By Charles Dickens.

But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day
. . . 

Rating System 

Juicy Swears !

Lots of Kissing x 

Pain and Suffering + 

Could Make You Go Blind * 

Books

Anna Karenina x+ 

Age of Innocence x+ 

Tom Jones x+* 

Romeo and Juliet x+ 

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man +x

Great Expectations +x 

Hunchback by Victor Hugo + 

Adventures of Tom Sawyer ! 

Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen 

Poe *

The Postman Always Rings Twice +x! 

Dracula by Bram Stoker +x 

Ulysses x* 

Venus Wears Furs x*+ 

Of Mice and Men +! 

Lady Chatterley’s Lover X* 

Absinth: Torment of Love

Amaranth: Fidelity

Apple Blossoms: Good Fortune

Asparagus Fern: Fascination

Aster: Daintiness

Azalea: Ephemeral Passion

Begonia: Beware! I am fanciful

Bindweed: Busybody

Blue Bell: Delicacy

Buttercup: Childishness

Camellia – Red: 

You’re a flame in my heart

Chrysanthemum, white: Truth

Clover: Fertility

Cockscomb: Silliness or foppery

Daffodil: Unrequited love

Dahlia: Good taste

Forsythia: Anticipation

Gardenia: I love you in secret

Heather: Protection from danger

Hollyhock: Fecundity

Hydrangea: 

Thank you for understanding

Lavender: Constancy

Lily, day: Coquetry

Lily of the Valley: 

Monkey flowers: 

One who performs 

behind a mask

Phlox; Sweet dreams

Pecan: Hard to crack

Peony: Healing

Rose, dark pink: Thank you

Spider Flower: Elope with me

Tuberose: Dangerous pleasures

Wisteria: I cling to thee

Witch Hazel: A spell

Zinnia, pink: Lasting affection

Secret names for flowers arose long ago from a need to conceal the identity of certain herbs.

Lupine: Blood from a head

Tuberose: Mistress of the Night

Clover: Semen of Ares

Burdock: Love Leaves

Great Mullein: Peter’s Staff

Vervain Sage: Christ’s Eye

Wild Geranium: Shameface

Southernwood: Maiden’s Ruin

Yarrow: Devil’s Plaything

Goosegrass: Sweethearts

Meadowsweet: Queen of the Meadow

Blackberry: Scaldhead