The Photo That Explained My Son

“He’s not just a Pruitt,” I said. “He’s half mine.”

Wade didn’t answer. And in that silence I heard everything Glenda had planted, taking root in my own husband, right there on the pillow next to me.

I need to tell you about my people, because they matter to the end of this.

My mother is Lorene Haines. She raised me and my two brothers mostly alone after my father passed when I was eleven, working the register at the Marathon station out on Route 30 and cleaning the Methodist church on Saturdays for extra. We did not have much. We had a lot of photographs, though, because my daddy had been a man who loved a camera, and after he died my mother kept every picture he ever took in a green Stride Rite shoebox on the top shelf of her closet, and that box was the most valuable thing we owned. More valuable than the truck. We all knew it.

My daddy’s people were the dark ones. His own father, my grandfather Harlan Haines, was what the old folks around here called black Irish, dark hair and dark eyes and skin that went brown the first warm week of May. There is one picture of Harlan as a young man leaning on a tractor that could pass for a stranger, he is so dark against all the pale Pruitts I married into. But Harlan died before I was born, and my daddy died when I was a girl, and the dark in our family had gone thin and quiet by my generation. My brothers and I all came out fair like our mother. The dark had skipped us.

I did not think about any of that in those first weeks. I was too tired to think about anything. I was nursing every two hours and crying in the shower where Wade couldn’t hear me and holding my own baby with a question in my chest that I hated myself for holding.

The whispers got out of the house. Of course they did.

This is a small place. Glenda sings in the choir at Harmon First Baptist, and she has a telephone, and she has a sister named Carol who is worse than she is. By the time Eli was six weeks old I could feel it when I walked into the IGA. Betty at the register, who has known me since I was in pigtails, got a careful look on her face and asked how the baby was doing in a voice like she was asking after someone in the hospital. The women from the prayer chain brought meals and looked past me into the bassinet with their eyebrows going up a quarter inch. At the Sunrise Diner, where I have eaten a patty melt every Friday of my life, the talk dropped off a notch when I came in with the car seat, and picked back up quieter when I sat down.