The Name Tattooed On Her Arm
They set the reunion in Branson because it was halfway and because it gave her the cover of the girls’ trip, so she could go and come back and figure out how to tell me from the safety of having already done it. She got his name on her arm the last night because Patty said she had earned the right to wear it out loud, after thirty-five years of not being allowed to whisper it. And then she panicked the whole drive home, and put on the long sleeves, and started planning the flowers.
“I was going to cover him up,” she said, staring at the tattoo, at her own son’s name. “Do you understand what I almost did? I was so scared of you I was going to hide him again. I already gave him away once because I was scared of what a man would do. I wasn’t going to do that to myself twice, and I almost did.”
I put my hand over the name on her arm. “You’re not covering anything up,” I said. “You’re not hiding him for one more day.”
The drive to Fort Wayne
We drove up to Fort Wayne the following Saturday. Marlene changed clothes four times and finally wore a short-sleeve blouse, the tattoo out in the open in the daylight for the first time, and she held her own wrist the whole drive like she was holding his hand.
I want to tell you I was calm. I was not. I am a hardware man from a town of eleven hundred people and I did not know the first thing about how you are supposed to act when you meet your wife’s grown son for the first time at the age of fifty-eight. I practiced things to say in my head and threw all of them out.
He was standing in the driveway when we pulled up. And Deb was right. He had her eyes exactly. He had her eyes and he had a nervous way of pushing his hair back that I had watched Marlene do ten thousand times, and when he saw the car he came off that porch fast and then stopped himself, unsure, the way you do when you want something so bad you are afraid to reach for it.
Marlene was out of the car before I had it in park. I watched my wife cross a stranger’s driveway and become, in about four steps, the mother of a man she had not been allowed to raise. I hung back by the car and let them have it. And then Cody looked over her shoulder at me, this big shy man with my wife’s eyes, and he stuck out his hand exactly like Sharon said he had the first time, like a job interview, and he said, “You must be Gary. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for, I don’t know. For being okay.”
I did not shake his hand. I am not a hand-shaker at a moment like that. I put my arms around the boy because he was hers, and that made him mine to look after now too, as far as I was concerned.
His two kids came out onto the porch, a girl about seven and a boy about four, hanging back shy behind their mother in the doorway. Marlene saw them and put her hand over her mouth. Grandchildren she had not known existed a month before. The little girl gave a small wave, and Marlene waved back with the arm that had his name on it, and that was the first time I saw her wear the tattoo like it was the proudest thing she owned instead of the most dangerous.