Free If You Could See What I See by Cathy Lamb

sat on her porch swing on Thursday evening. I’d had dinner with her and her husband, Matt, my niece, Cassidy, who is seventeen, and my nephews Hayden, who is sixteen, and Regan, who is fifteen. They hugged me hard when I came in.
    I brought Cassidy a coffee table book on knitting, which she squealed about in delight and hugged close to her. She brought it to dinner and barely looked up.
    I brought Hayden a book on the history and clothes of Coco Chanel. He loved it.
    And I brought Regan a sob story book about the animals in Africa and their endangered habitats. He cried, but he loved it, too.
    Matt and the kids were cleaning up inside. I could hear them laughing and fighting with one another. Lacey’s house was blue on the outside and sky blue, light green, and lemon yellow on the inside. She loved color. She had lots of durable, soft furniture; framed art that her kids had done; a huge kitchen with a table in the middle of it; and a bunch of pets wandering all over. It was a happy home.
    “How are you doing, Meggie?”
    “Fine.”
    “No, be honest. How are you doing?”
    “I’m fine, Lacey. I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “Okay. I’m here.”
    “How are you feeling, pregnant momma?”
    “Exhausted. All the time. And mad. I caught Cassidy naked with her boyfriend, Cody, in the back of our camper trailer. I found them because the whole thing was rocking in the driveway, like a ship on a stormy sea. Damn that wild thing.”
    Cassidy Brianna is, in Lacey’s words, “the daughter from Hades. Her father is Lucifer. Her mother is Cruella De Ville. She landed on my doorstep. I couldn’t have given birth to her.”
    Cassidy is my middle name. Brianna is my mother’s name.
    Cassidy has a boyfriend named Cody, who is also seventeen. She is having sex with that boyfriend. When Lacey found out, she yelled, she raged, then she grounded her “for forever, you reckless, nonthinking hormonal gnat!”
    Matt about passed out when he found out, and wasn’t much help. Lacey said he literally clutched his chest when she told him. Cassidy’s still a tiny, helpless baby girl with ribbons in her hair in his mind, and he hardly knew what to do when he found out his baby was cavorting around naked with a male.
    The grounding and yelling didn’t help. Cassidy snuck out in the middle of the night. They put a lock on her door so she couldn’t get out. She climbed out her window and scrambled down the oak tree. She and Cody had a naked tumble in Cody’s car in the parking lot at school. Lacey found out because a friend of hers told her. The police picked up Cassidy and Cody and gave them a ticket for indecent exposure/curfew violations when they were naked in a park at three in the morning playing Adam and Eve.
    Cassidy occasionally smokes pot and drinks screwdrivers. My sister found this out when she took a sip out of Cassidy’s water bottle by accident. She thought the kid was drinking orange juice.
    Cassidy’s tall with long red hair, a crooked but huge smile and dark brown, happy eyes. She is Lacey’s mini-me. She is kind and funny and loves her family. She brings my sister breakfast in bed on Saturday mornings, complete with a flower. She loves to cook elaborate dinners, and sew, quilt, and knit, which she had to learn from my mother, as my sister and I know nothing about that stuff.
    She recently made me an embroidered pillow with flowers that said, “I love you, Aunt Meggie.”
    Cassidy’s on birth control. As Lacey said, “She’s going to do it. I don’t want to be a grandma. I am facing the doom of my reality.”
    Cassidy is exactly like the other women in our family: hell on high heels.
    Only I don’t wear high heels anymore.
    I wear tennis shoes.
    Not the fashionable sort, either.
    “These teen years are killing me.” Lacey grabbed my hand as we swung. “Sometimes I feel like problems are simply not solvable. You have to wait them out. Or maybe accept that things aren’t going to change. Or that it’s