Made to Bend

The next morning, I drove to Shopko because it had both a pharmacy and optical center. One arm of my glasses had been ripped off, and I couldn’t find the missing part—under the couch or on the snowy porch or in the driveway—and I never found it. I expected I’d need to order a new pair. The sun was barely up, and I hadn’t yet showered off the fight, but I couldn’t sleep or be alone, and in a minute I’d whisper to somebody behind the other counter could I please buy the morning after pill. I told the optician sorry, and she took the incomplete glasses out of my hand and showed me where to sit. She went into a back room for only a few minutes. When she returned, she held the mended glasses out to me. She’d given them a new arm, one that didn’t match even a little: leopard print, some stray part attached to the original blue frame. “It’s not an arm,” she said. “It’s called the temple.” I didn’t believe her, some lady in a white coat under fluorescent lights working in a stupid store in the winter in the morning in the place I would normally buy shampoo or a lawn chair, but she settled the hot glasses secure on my face with both hands, her palms really, like the glasses were precious, or on fire, or maybe evidence in somebody else’s very important case, and told me to put my wallet away and sit for as long as I needed, until they felt right.

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