Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry Read Online Free PDF Page A

golden dress.
    I tried to read a few pages, but I couldn’t concentrate. I put back the book and paced up and down across the open part of my room, in front of the windows, going from my closet door past my rocking chairs to my long dresser, the one with my socks in it. Maybe Grandma wrote me a story, and that’s what I’d find in one of her bags, hidden deep in her closet. I’d probably regret it if I read it now.
    Closet door. Rocking chairs. Sock drawer.
    What if it was a finished manuscript we could sell for extra money to help with her care? Mom wouldn’t have to work two jobs then, and we could hire more help, and Dad could relax, and his blood pressure would probably get better. Grandma might have thought ahead that way, and trusted me to dig through her purses at just the right moment.
    Sock drawer. Rocking chairs. Closet door. My socks scooted on the hardwood as I walked.
    By the time Grandma moved in with us, she was already getting a little paranoid. I didn’t understand that when I was younger, but I had learned that her suspicion was part of her Alzheimer’s disease. When she lost things and couldn’t remember where she put them, she thought people were hiding her stuff. When she forgot to pay her electric bill and her power got shut off, she thought the utility company wasout to get her. She talked about persecution and plots a lot, and stuff she thought she did—so maybe she just thought she hid something in her purses for me to find, or wrote about plots and conspiracy theories or other nonsense.
    Nonsense I wasn’t supposed to touch until she was gone, which sort of seemed like a promise even though I never made it. That word again— gone . Was she gone enough for me to see what she left me?
    Closet door. Rocking chairs. Sock drawer. Rocking chairs. Closet doors.
    I could hear my parents speaking softly to each other as they left Grandma’s room. Last year, I would have heard Grandma too. I would have come home and told her all about Mac, and cried, and she would have wrapped her arms around me and held me tight, and she never would have said I was being dramatic, or getting upset over something that wasn’t a real problem.
    I stopped at my rocking chairs and sat down, heavy with remembering what life was like before my grandmother’s mind hopped a bus for parts unknown. Or maybe I was just waiting until my parents’ voices got quiet and I knew they had gone to bed for the night. Because once they had, it took only a second for me to sneak into Grandma’s room.
    Wait, wait. Not sneaking. Sneaking meant doing something wrong, and I wasn’t exactly— Oh, never mind. I was sneaking. On tiptoes and everything.
    Grandma lay in her bed, breathing quietly. She didn’t eventwitch as I beelined for her closet and creaked open that door as quietly as I could. The inside light flicked on, pitching everything behind me into soft blue shadows just as the smell of her clothes hit me full in the face—light, almost sweet, like flowers, but sharper. It was her perfume, something old she had worn my whole life, called Oh! De London . It made me think of Grandma in pantsuits and lipstick, her hair perfectly in place, fixed up to go write at her favorite desk in her favorite carrel at Ole Miss’s library.
    Tears popped into my eyes. I wiped them with the bottom of my shirt, then my face, and did my own quiet breathing. It took me a few seconds to blink away the idea of crying and fix my attention on the section of the closet where her purses hung.
    Feeling halfway out of my own body, I opened one bag after the other, glancing inside and feeling around in the pockets. If I didn’t find anything envelope-like, I moved on. The sixth purse, the seventh—maybe this was just stupid, and I’d be standing here smelling perfume flowers when Mom or Dad came in to check, and they’d give me the look, and I’d feel awful, and—
    And