ro·man·tic

adjective

1. 1.conducive to or characterized by the expression of love.

When Someday Angeline was started, but not finished fast enough, my mom decided it was time for me to learn to read.

“Why would I,” I remember saying, “you could just read to me.”

My mom, a single mom with a job, raised her eyebrows. Her whole face moved with them, stretched into the same incredulity I sometimes find my own face stretched into these days with my own kid. “You want four chapters per night? You can read them yourself. I’ll read you one. If you want more, you have to learn.”

So she searched my bookshelves and eventually pulled out an old favorite, “Blueberries for Sal.”

“I can read that already,” I said.

“No,” she snapped when I opened the first page and started reciting, my eyes on her the whole time, “backwards.”

So we started reading it backwards, sounding out each word as we went. I was behind in school with reading—I had yet to get my ADHD diagnosis, would not get it until I was in my early 20s, so the consensus of all besides her was that I might simply be stupid. But not her.

It took about a week for me to master the words in that book. We moved on to Harry Potter. That was more difficult—to this day I resent dialect in books.

Finally, she handed me Someday Angeline. We’d already gotten through it at this point, one agonizing chapter per night, and I’d been trying to get her to read it to me again. “You read it,” she said.

I started to read aloud, and she stopped me, “Inside your head,” she said, “try it.” Then she left my room with a sigh, moving on to my little sister.

I read it. It was like a secret world that understood me. A Wrinkle in Time was next—she’d told me it was too grown up for her to read to me, that I had to learn to read to read it. That, truly, solidified it all. This was the best thing I’d ever done. I would never stop doing it. She would never turn out my light, either. I was allowed to stay up as long as I wanted, so long as I was reading.

When she was dying, I read Little Women aloud to her, softly, just a few pages. It was hard to focus, but I think she got it when I said, “thank you. Thank you so much for everything.”

Without books, she still would’ve given me everything. With them, it was too much to thank her for. I did my best, though. I’m doing my best, now.