The Photo That Explained My Son

I called Glenda myself and asked her to Sunday dinner at our place on Township Road 9, the first time I had ever hosted it, and I could hear her surprise and her suspicion down the line, and I kept my voice sweet as pie. I called Tammy. I called Carol, which about knocked her over. And I called my mother, and I asked her to bring the box.

And then, because I had decided my son would be defended by more than one photograph, I called my great-aunt Verna, my grandfather Harlan’s last living sister, who is ninety-one and sharp as a tack and lives at the Cedarbrook home over in the county seat, and I asked her two questions, and I asked her to come.

They all came. Glenda came in her good coat with a pecan pie and that flat look, already composing herself for whatever she thought this was. The house was full. I had made the pot roast in my own kitchen on my own good plates, the wedding plates her family had sniffed at, and Eli sat in his bouncer in the middle of it all, three and a half months old, dark and bright-eyed, the whole reason for the gathering and too little to know it.

I waited until everyone had a plate. I waited until Wade had sat down, because I wanted him there for this, I wanted him to have to watch. And then I stood up at the head of my own table, and I said that before we ate I wanted to show everybody something, because there had been a lot of talk about my son’s face and I thought it was time the talking stopped.

I nodded to my mother, and she took the lid off the green shoebox, and she took out the photograph of me at three months old, and she passed it down the table hand to hand.

I watched it travel. I watched Tammy look at it and her mouth fall open. I watched her husband look from the picture to the baby in the bouncer and back. I watched Carol take it and go very still.

And I watched it come to Glenda.

She held it in both hands. She looked at that dark, furious, black-haired baby on the porch quilt, and then she looked at Eli, and then she turned the picture over to read the back, where my daddy had written in pencil the way he wrote on all of them: Nora June, three months, July. She read it twice. I watched her read it twice.

“That is me,” I said, into the quiet. “Three months old. I was born dark as my son is dark, black hair all over my head, and it fell out and came back light before I was two. My grandfather Harlan Haines was dark his whole life. It runs in my family and it skipped me and it landed on Eli, and that is the beginning and the end of the story.”