This Secret Thing, стр. 27
When Violet turned away from the car, Polly got the first glimpse of her granddaughter’s face in fourteen years. The last time Polly had seen her, she’d been a chubby toddler with grubby hands. Now she was a slender wisp of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Though they shared some features, she did not look like Norah. When Violet was a baby she had looked exactly like Norah’s baby pictures. Polly would’ve bet she’d grow to be the spitting image of her mother.
But instead Violet looked like someone else, someone also familiar to Polly, someone she barely remembered: herself at fifteen years old. She recognized the burgeoning beauty that was not quite there yet and the uncertainty in her eyes that Polly recalled in an instant: the fear that she was never going to get there. That she would always be skinny and gawky, unsure of the right things to say or do around a boy, and overwhelmed by a world that seemed to come at her instead of waiting until she was ready to come to it.
As Violet drew closer, Polly had to resist the urge to rush forward and take the girl into her arms, to tell her all the things she needed to know, to warn her and to encourage her, to promise that though she’d been absent from her life for far too long, now she was here. That she would never leave her again. This was her granddaughter. Her flesh and blood. But she didn’t want to overwhelm the girl. So she kept her arms crossed in front of her. It looked like she was hugging herself, when really she was imagining the day when it would be comfortable, natural, to hug this child she did not know, but knew very well just the same.
Violet
She stepped out of her stepmother’s car to see the older woman—her grandmother, she supposed—standing on the porch beside that pumpkin, watching her. She blinked at the woman a few times, then turned away. She craned her head back inside the car to look over the headrest at her two half siblings strapped into their car seats in the back. “Bye, you guys,” she said, feeling a sadness as she said it, a finality that didn’t make sense. It wasn’t the last time she was ever going to see them.
The baby waved her chubby fist in the air in a gesture that was half wave, half fist bump. Violet took it as a sign of solidarity, a baby way of saying, “You got this, girl.” She thanked her stepmother’s profile for the ride, then grabbed her bag and walked away. Behind her she heard the car shift into reverse and speed away. With her stepmother gone, there was no escaping. She wanted to turn around, chase the car down the street hollering, “Wait! Don’t go.”
She kept walking toward the stranger waiting for her on the porch. The woman crossed her arms and squinted into the sunlight as Violet slowly closed the distance between them with faltering steps. She couldn’t believe this was her life now, that this was reality. She glanced over her right shoulder at Micah’s house, wondering if by some miracle he was watching this scene unfold, wishing she’d spot him in his driveway. She wanted a witness to this moment, and he was her best bet due to proximity. Not out of real interest. She knew better than that.
She climbed the few steps to where her grandmother stood and dropped her bag at her grandmother’s feet, right in front of the pumpkin. The two of them silently blinked at each other a few times. Finally, Violet extended her hand. “I’m Violet,” she said.
Her grandmother gripped her hand and, when the smile bloomed on the older woman’s face, Violet saw it was her mother’s smile, as plain as day, like a magic trick. If it was possible to reach out and grab hold of a smile, Violet would have, just to take hold of something that was familiar. Instead she only smiled back.
The woman let go of her hand and said, “You have her smile.”
“Whose?” Violet asked.
“Norah’s,” she said. She corrected herself. “Your mother’s.”
Violet rolled her eyes. “Hardly,” she said.
She’d grown accustomed to deflecting any comparison to her mother. Her mother was beautiful. Violet was not. She had accepted this long ago. Any comparisons between them were just something people made out of obligation. But Violet did not have whatever beauty her mother, and apparently her grandmother as well, possessed. She was different from her mother and from her grandmother. She hoped Polly would not be too disappointed that her granddaughter hadn’t inherited the family beauty gene.
“I’m Polly,” her grandmother said. Violet had wondered what to call this woman. One of her friends called her grandmother Nana, and one called hers Mimi, and one called hers Honey. But none of those names would fit the still young, still quite beautiful, not at all grandmotherly-looking woman who stood in front of her. Violet supposed that Polly would do just fine.
“Nice to meet you,” Violet said, and wondered if she should hug her grandmother. Didn’t grandmothers like hugging? But Polly didn’t look like the hugging type. So she gestured to the front door, which stood slightly ajar. Her mother would not like that. She always yelled “Close the door! Flies are going to get in!” whenever Violet left it open. “Do you want to go inside?” she asked, inviting Polly in, taking ownership of her house even if Polly had apparently already been