The Salon I Sold For My Son
“Past fifty, at his age, it keeps going,” the surgeon said. “Even after he stops growing. It can press on his lungs later in life. I would not wait on this one.”
The in-network surgeon our plan allowed was in Rochester, and the first opening there was the following September.
The children’s hospital in St. Neil could do it the first week of January, during winter break.
Insurance came through Rod’s job at the feed mill, a good plan for a town our size. But the St. Neil hospital was out of network for it, and out of network meant a higher deductible and forty percent until we hit the cap.
I sat with the woman in the billing office for an hour with a calculator.
When she finished, our share came to eleven thousand dollars, give or take. The surgeon’s office wanted it settled before they would hold the January date.
“We have payment plans for the hospital portion,” she told me kindly. “But the surgical group bills separately, and they ask out-of-network families to arrange it ahead. I am sorry. I know it is a lot.”
I owned a two-chair salon on Main Street. I made a decent living.
Decent in our town means you pay your bills and you go out for the fish fry on Fridays during Lent. It does not mean eleven thousand dollars by Thanksgiving.
Rod’s aunt Marlene had died that August in Albert Lea. She had never married, and she had kept the same little house and the same Buick for thirty years. Nobody knew she had money until the lawyer called.
Ninety thousand dollars, left to Rod alone, because he was the one who had driven down every month to mow her grass and fix her storm windows.
Nobody begrudged him that. He had earned her love the slow way.
The day the check came, Rod sat in his truck in the driveway for twenty minutes before he came inside.
When he did, he told me he was putting it in a savings certificate at the credit union and he did not want to touch it.
“It’s the first money I ever had that’s just there,” he said that night. “For if something happens. For if the mill closes. You don’t know what it’s like to have nothing under you.”
I thought I knew. I had been a single mother at twenty-nine with a four-year-old and a two-chair shop.
But I let it go, because it was his, and because I did not need it then.
In Minnesota, money one spouse inherits stays that spouse’s money as long as he keeps it separate. I knew that.
Every woman who has ever done hair in a small town knows things like that, because her clients tell her everything.
So when Rod said what he said at the kitchen table, I did not call anybody. I did not look up what a lawyer would charge.
The money was his alone by law, and I was not going to beg a man to love my son.
That is the plain truth of it. I could have pushed. I could have cried and pleaded and brought it up every night until he gave in.