The Salon I Sold For My Son
Highway 169 was down to one lane past Belle Plaine, and I followed a plow truck for forty miles with both hands on the wheel.
Tanner did not talk much. He played music in his earbuds and looked out at the snow coming sideways across the fields.
Once he took one earbud out and asked if Rod knew the surgery was tomorrow.
“I told his mother,” I said. That was true. I had called Rod’s mother, Arlene, because I did not trust myself to call Rod.
She said she would tell him. She did not say anything else.
The surgery started at seven-thirty the next morning. The nurse said five or six hours.
They gave me a pager like the ones at a supper club and told me it would buzz when there was news.
I sat in that waiting room with a cup of coffee I never drank. A family from Duluth sat across from me.
Their daughter was having the same surgery. The mother and I held hands for a while without ever saying our names.
At noon the pager buzzed. A nurse took me to a little room with a box of tissues on the table.
The surgeon came in still in his cap and said it went well, the curve was corrected to about twelve degrees.
“Two titanium rods and a row of screws,” he said. “He’ll be sore. He’ll be taller, too. Kids his age usually gain an inch or two from the correction alone.”
Two rods. I did not laugh about that until April. Even then it was the kind of laugh that is mostly something else.
That afternoon my phone buzzed with a text from Arlene. It said only: He drove up this morning.
He has been sitting in the parking ramp since eight. He will not come in.
I walked to the window at the end of the hall and looked down at the ramp across the street.
I could not see his truck from there. I stood a long time anyway, with my forehead on the cold glass.
I did not go down. I did not text him. I went back to Tanner’s room, where he was asleep with tubes in both arms, and I held his hand and watched the numbers on the monitor until the nurse brought me a blanket.
Tanner was in the hospital five days. On the second day the physical therapist had him stand up and walk to the door and back.
He was white as a sheet and sweating, and he did it.
“Mom,” he said when he got back to the bed. “My eyes are higher. Everything looks different from up here.”
The therapist laughed and told him that was the best review she had all week.
We came home on a Wednesday. He spent six weeks recovering at home, mostly on the couch in the front room with pillows stacked behind him.
The school sent his work home in a folder every Monday.
His friends came by after school in a pack of four or five, smelling like cold air and Doritos.
They played video games and argued about the Vikings and acted like nothing had happened, which was exactly what he needed.
Morgan came over on a Sunday and gave him a haircut in the kitchen with a towel around his shoulders.