Lift by Kelly Corrigan Read Free Book Online

already, prepared to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her child.
    The choices we have are staggering. You girls will have even more.
    In time, Meg tried again.
    “It worked,” she said when I picked up the phone.
    Every hair on my arms lifted. “Really?”
    “Really.”
    I screamed and you both came running into my office and we turned to October 2 in my calendar. I colored in the entire day, line by line, with my orange highlighter. When you saw the tears coming down my cheeks, you said, “What’s so wrong about October second?” and I said, “Not wrong. October second is the day Meg becomes a mom.”
    I studied you girls that afternoon, like art. Your collarbones, your coloring, your shoulder blades—fine and slender as a bird’s. Claire, you were sitting by the French doors to the deck that needs replacing, wearing only your underwear and the ruby red slippers Meg gave you that were years away from fitting. As you leaned forward to run your finger over the sequins, the light hit the trail of hair that swirls down from your hairline in the back and it lit up like phosphorescence. Georgia, you were up in the bath with your eyes closed and your ears justunder the water, your hair spread out around your face, humming that song from Les Miserables that you saw Susan Boyle sing on YouTube.
    Who will look at you like I do?
    I think about your futures a lot. I often want to whisper to you, when we’re tangled up together or I’m pinning your poetry to the bulletin board or repositioning the pillow under your head so you don’t get a crick, Remember this. This is what love feels like . Don’t take less . But what I end up saying is, “This was my dream. You were my dream.” I’ve said it too many times though; now when I look at you all soft and gushy and say, “Guess what?” you say, “This was your dream. I was your dream.”
     
    A month later, Meg was still pregnant.
    “I’m going to go see my grandmother. She’s notgonna live for nine more months. I gotta tell her,” Meg said.
    We practiced over the phone as she drove down to the airport. I thought the key was to lead her grandmother there so that she’d know what Meg was going to say before she said it.
    “So I’ll start by talking about how I always wanted to be a mom.”
    “Right, perfect.”
    “Okay.” She sounded resolute but then she came back with, “She got married when she was nineteen.”
    “And?”
    “She’s one of the most conservative people I know, Kelly. She goes to church every day. The church that won’t give condoms to Africans with AIDS. What do you think they think about babies out of wedlock? From online sperm banks?”
     
    In St. Louis, Meg sat in the living room with her grandmother and told her.
    “Oh thank God ,” said the woman born in 1912.
    Meg looked up.
    “I always worried that your brains and beauty were gonna go to waste. Go in my bedroom. There’s some knitting by the window. Yellow.”
    On the radiator, Meg found a tiny sweater, almost complete. The buttons were pinned on and the second sleeve still needed to be attached.
    “I wasn’t sure who I was knitting that for,” her grandmother called out from the other room. “Isn’t that something? I just was knitting a baby sweater for no one in particular. And now I know. Isn’t that something?”
    So girls, will you please believe me when I tellyou that I love you enough to take in the full reality of your lives? That I can understand the things you think I can’t and I can see and know and embrace every bit of you, full frame, no cropping?
     
    This morning, Georgia, you slipped into bed with me before six. After some adjusting and resettling, you said, “You know what I’ve noticed?”
    “What?” I asked.
    “A lot of times, elbows are bent.”
    “It’s true.”
    “That’s why the skin is so wrinkly on the tips,” you said, finding my elbow under the sheets as Claire appeared in the doorway looking like a cross between Sandy