The Salon I Sold For My Son
“That money of Marlene’s is the first thing he ever had that nobody could take,” Arlene said. “When you asked him for it, he got scared. And when Rod gets scared, he says the meanest thing in the room.”
“He said my son wasn’t his blood,” I said. I kept cutting. My hands were steady. “I can understand him being scared, Arlene. I can’t understand him saying that to me about a boy he raised.”
“I know,” she said. “Neither can he. He hasn’t slept right since October. He sits in my front room and looks out the window at nothing.”
She paused. “I’m not asking you for anything. I just wanted you to know.”
She paid for the trim she did not need, and she tipped me ten dollars, and she hugged me at the door of the dining hall with her purse still on her arm.
Eighth-grade promotion was the last Thursday in May. Elm Lake is small enough that the whole thing happens in the old gym, with folding chairs on the floor and families standing three deep along the walls.
The student council had hung blue and gold crepe paper from the ceiling beams.
Daylight came through the high windows and lay across the floor in long bright stripes.
I wore a coral blouse I had bought in Mankato for the occasion.
My mother said it made me look ten years younger, which is what mothers say. I had cut my own bob the night before in the bathroom mirror.
I could not sit. I stood at the end of the third row of folding chairs with my hands clasped at my chest, the way my grandmother used to stand in church during the long hymns.
The eighth graders lined up along the side of the gym in alphabetical order. Forty-two of them.
The boys had their hair combed wet and their shirts tucked in. The girls had done their own makeup and mostly overdone it.
Tanner was near the end of the line, Larson coming late in our class.
He wore a white button-down shirt and a blue tie my father used to own. He was the tallest boy in the row by half a head.
I watched people notice. A lot of the women in that gym had sat in my chair at one time or another.
I saw them look at Tanner, and look at me, and lean over to whisper to the person beside them.
Half the gym knew why he was standing that straight. Nobody said it out loud. Small towns are like that.
They know everything and say very little, and they sit there in their folding chairs and they keep score.
The principal read the names one at a time. Each kid crossed the low stage, shook hands with the principal and the school board chairman, and took a rolled-up certificate tied with a blue ribbon.
Then she said, “Tanner James Larson,” and my son walked up the three little steps onto the stage and crossed it with his head up and his shoulders level, like someone had hung him from a string.
He did not hurry. He shook the principal’s hand. He shook the board chairman’s hand.