Sea Glass

Daddy promised to come home for my 7^th birthday, and me and Lucy spent the whole day with our noses pressed to the front window, waiting. He never came. I wanted to wish for him to come home on my candles but I didn’t. I didn’t wish anything.  Maybe that was why I didn’t get the wedding Barbie I wanted.  That was the worst birthday. I didn’t get Barbie, and I didn’t get Daddy neither.

Mom was mad at him for a while, but then the man with the suit came and she wasn’t mad anymore. It wasn’t Daddy’s fault he couldn’t come, she told me. He wasn’t going to be able to come home again. He had gotten killed where he was fighting.  So it was just her and me and Lucy now, she told me, and she was going to have to go back to work.

The older girl from across the street, Melody, would come to stay with me after school, and she would sit in the kitchen and do big math problems and let me eat popcorn. She was the prettiest girl I’d seen, even in movies, and she would braid my hair and even helped me paint Lucy’s nails once.  Her parents were splitted up, and she lived with her mom, too. Once, when Mom had to go away overnight, I got to stay at her house and she gave me her old Barbie and showed me her collection of sea glass. She had half a jar full, red and blue and green, and one big purple piece.

“My dad showed me how to find it when we went to the beach when I was your age,” she told me. Then, a week later, she told me she was going to go live with her dad, which was a long ways away. I went to bed one night and she was there, and then the next morning she was gone and I never got to see her no more. But she left the jar of sea glass on my doorstep.

I went to the beach that summer, and brought Barbie and the sea glass. I took Barbie swimming and the ocean stole her, and I cried and cried until I found a piece of pink glass. Mom told me that was the ocean’s apology for taking my doll, so I added it to the jar and spent the rest of the trip looking for more.

Sometimes, if I’d have a bad day at school, late in the evening when the sun shone right through my window, I would dump the jar out onto my yellow bedspread, yellow with pink flowers, and sort them by color and size and texture and they would make different colors on the walls. I broke one or two, but mostly I was very careful, and they were ordinary colors, anyways. They made me think of my babysitter, and of Daddy, and then when Lucy died I put a few pieces in her shoebox and I thought of her, too.

I stopped collecting when the jar got full, because I didn't want to throw any away but more than one jar wouldn't have been the same anymore. It moved from my shelf to my desk, then to m closet, but whenever I had a bad day I would find it and dump it onto my bed and everything was okay again. It's funny, how to this day sea glass makes everything okay.