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He nodded and finally, his eyes opened to meet mine. “It’s why I never came back to school. After my surgery to relieve the swelling in my brain, I lost my ability to speak, read, or write. Eventually, the speech came back, but the reading and writing are gone forever. The condition I was left with is called alexia.”
“I don’t understand how you can’t read at all, though. They can’t reteach you the skill?”
“No,” he said on a sad head shake. “The part of my brain responsible for recognizing letters was damaged and there’s no way to recover it once it’s gone. It’s like if someone has a stroke and has alexia. Some people with it can’t read, but can write. They just can’t read what they wrote. The damage to my brain was too great and I can’t do either.”
“Our brains work in weird ways, don’t they?” I asked, squeezing his hand again. “This is why you don’t drive, right?”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Along with the alexia, I lost my field of vision on the right side, so I don’t see anything peripherally on the right. I also can’t read signs or any of the gauges on a car. Even if I had adaptive devices for the vehicle, I could never pass a vision test.”
“How do you make it work at the diner?”
He tapped his ear. “Ever notice that I always have one earbud in?”
“Yeah, but you’re always bopping around back there, so I just assumed you were listening to music.”
“Sometimes I am, but when I get a new order, I take a picture of it with my phone and my phone reads it to me. I also have a special pen that I use for ordering supplies. I run it across the words on the page and it reads it to me via my earbud. It doesn’t work on handwriting, though.”
“That’s great technology. I had no idea it existed.”
“You wouldn’t need to since you can read. There are other devices out there that use artificial intelligence to do all kinds of tasks for people with visual disabilities, but mine is less about not being able to see and more about not being able to understand what I see.”
“Wait, is that why all the dishes on the menu had the codes next to them that we had to write when we took orders?”
“Yeah,” he said on another long sigh. “I can’t recognize letters or numbers, but shapes aren’t a problem. Lines, as long as they aren’t crossed like an X or a T aren’t a problem either. Ivy and I developed a system so when I saw it on the paper, I knew what the person was ordering. Thankfully, now that she has the computer system that prints the ticket for me, I can run the pen across it quickly and know what the order is. It makes it easier for substitutions and large orders.”
“Shapes and lines,” I said, pausing for a moment. “That note I found on the top of your mom’s Christmas decorating book had shapes and lines. That wasn’t a diagram of where she wanted the decorations, was it?”
“Nope,” he said, popping the P. “She was telling me to look at the book. Phone technology wasn’t what it is today when I was a kid, so she had to figure out a way to leave me notes. We used shapes for her to leave me simple messages. If I saw note from her with that line of shapes in a row, I knew to listen to the recording she’d made on a handheld tape recorder. We never really stopped doing it, even once phones became more widely used. I’m not sure why.”
“Maybe because she liked communicating with you in that way. She knew her handwritten notes, even if they only told you to get the recorder, made you feel like your uniqueness was celebrated instead of something to hide?”
“Knowing my mom, that was probably part of it. That’s why when you handed me the cookie recipe, I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t use the system on anything not meant for me. She obviously planned to make the cookies herself, or she would have recorded the recipe for me.”
I brushed a piece of hair off his forehead. “You must know how much you meant to her that she took the time to record everything even after she didn’t have to do it, right?”
“She never wanted to make my life harder than it already was, so I’m sure that’s why she kept doing it. Sure, she could have sent me a text, and my phone would read it to me, but as you said, she wanted me to feel like someone cared enough to communicate at my level.”
“No. She cared enough to communicate with you. That’s it. Nothing else. There aren’t levels of anything when you love someone, Lance.”
He shrugged and stared over my shoulder into the darkness. “It’s never felt that way, if I’m honest. My mom was a nurse educator. She could have been a professor with all her degrees, but she worked at the hospital as a nurse manager because she loved taking care of people, not standing in a classroom. I could never meet her at that level intellectually, not after the accident. Sure, I read books, or rather listened using audiobooks, but day-to-day life would always be a struggle for me, Gumdrop. I needed her for the most basic things like putting phone numbers into my phone with the right contact information. The will and the bills for the house were another whole situation that I struggled to complete. I’m being honest when I tell you these things because you deserve to know what life with me will be like. You have a college degree. I barely have a high school diploma.”
I was silent while I considered what he said but more than that, how he said it. He felt inferior to everyone, most especially his mother and me. “I respect how you feel, Lance. This must be an extremely frustrating way to live.”
“It is,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “I can see, but it’s like I’m blind to things too, if that makes sense.”
“It does, and for all intents and purposes, you are blind to language. I can’t even begin to imagine how angry and frustrated you get when the world around you doesn’t understand.”
“Especially when I have to keep it a secret,” he whispered.
“I don’t understand why you have to keep it a secret, Lance. Everyone in the town knows about your accident. You wear the proof of it every day,” I reminded him, my finger tracing the puckered skin along his temple. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of something outside of your control. Why do you keep it a secret and how? It must be time consuming.”
His laughter wasn’t amused when it filled the gazebo. “It’s extremely time consuming, but I guess I’m just used to it now. My mom always kept it a secret, so I grew up thinking I should too. I had to tell Ivy, of course. I never told The Hideaway and that’s why I stopped working there. Once they transferred me to a shift where I had to work with people instead of alone at night, I couldn’t keep using my pen to read for me. People would find out.”
I wrapped my arm around his shoulder. He stiffened, but I refused to drop my arm. “I’m sorry your mom made you feel that way. I can’t say what her reasons were or if she was even doing it on purpose.”
“I think she was ashamed of me in that regard. She knew I would never amount to much or do anything outstanding career wise. I was always going to be a low wage earner because of it.”
“No,” I said immediately. “I don’t believe that and neither should you. You can cook circles around Mason, so don’t play that card with me. Whatever Michelle’s motivations were, we’ll never know, but you can change things now. You already have. You’ve told me the truth and by doing that, you’ve made your life a little bit easier.”
