The Salon I Sold For My Son
She would not let me pay her. She said it was the first cut in the new year and it was on the house.
I kept working at Prairie View. My mother drove over from Fairmont and sat with Tanner on the days I worked.
She brought hotdish in foil pans and read the Free Press out loud to him whether he wanted it or not.
Rod did not come by. But twice I found the driveway shoveled before I got up, the edges cut square the way only Rod ever cut them.
Once there was a bag of rock salt on the back step. Neither of us mentioned it.
Tanner went back to school in the middle of February. He was not allowed to carry his backpack, so a girl named Kayla carried it for him to every class. He pretended to be embarrassed about that.
In March, on a Thursday night, Tanner called me into the kitchen.
I was folding towels on the bed upstairs, and I came down thinking something was wrong, because his voice had that sharp sound in it.
He was standing against the doorframe between the kitchen and the back hall, very straight, with a pencil in his hand.
On the white paint above his head were the old lines from when he was little.
Every line had a date beside it in small print. The first one, from when he was eight, was in Rod’s handwriting.
Rod had started those lines the summer we got married, and he had marked every birthday since.
“Mom,” Tanner said. “Look.” He stepped away from the frame. There was a new pencil line an inch and a half above the last one.
Next to it, in his own careful print, he had written the date.
I put my hand flat on the doorframe under the new line. It was such a small thing.
A gray pencil mark on white paint. I stood there and could not say one word, and he put his arm around my shoulders.
“Five foot nine,” he said. “I’m taller than you now. I’m taller than Grandma. I’m almost as tall as Rod.”
Then he got quiet. He looked at the old lines in Rod’s handwriting for a long time.
“Do you think he’d want to see it?” he asked me. “Is that weird? That I want him to see it?”
“It’s not weird,” I said. “It’s not weird at all.” I went upstairs and finished the towels, and I folded the same washcloth four times because I could not see it right.
Arlene came to see me at Prairie View the next week. She did not have an appointment.
She sat down in my one chair and asked for a trim she did not need, and while I cut she told me about Rod’s father.
“He left when Rod was nine,” she said. “Took the truck and the savings and the television. We lost the house that winter. Rod slept on a cot in my sister’s porch till he was twelve.”
I knew some of that. Rod did not talk about it much.
I did not know about the porch, or that Rod had bagged groceries at fourteen and given his mother every check so they could rent a place of their own.