The Salon I Sold For My Son
Rod did not look up from his coffee when I slid the paper across the kitchen table.
It was the estimate from the hospital in St. Neil, with the number circled twice in my blue pen.
“Eleven thousand,” I said. “That is our part, Rod. The deductible and the out-of-network share. They have a surgery date in January if we can pay it by Thanksgiving.”
He set the mug down. The furnace kicked on in the basement, and I remember the vent under the table blowing warm air across my ankles while I waited for him to say something.
“You know what that inheritance is,” he said finally. “You know what it is to me. I told you the day the check came. That money is not for spending.”
“It is not spending,” I said. “It is his spine. It is a fourteen-year-old boy who cannot stand up straight. You have ninety thousand dollars sitting in the credit union.”
Rod rubbed his jaw the way he did when the mill had a bad week.
Then he said it, quiet and flat, the way a man reads off a number he has already decided on.
“He’s not my blood, Jess. His dad can pay for it.”
I have tried many times to tell this part better than it happened. There is no better way.
He said it, and the kitchen stayed exactly the same, and I sat there holding the estimate.
Tanner’s father had been gone since Tanner was four years old. In ten years he had sent about three hundred dollars, two birthday cards and one phone call from a number in North Dakota that did not work the next week.
Rod knew that. Rod had been the one in the bleachers for six years.
Rod had taught Tanner to back a trailer down the boat ramp at Lake Tetonka. That was why the words did not make sense to me.
“Okay,” I said. I folded the estimate in half and put it in my purse. I did not cry at the table.
I did not raise my voice. I went upstairs and sat on the edge of the tub for a long time.
The curve had been found the spring before, at a sports physical in Mankato.
The doctor had Tanner bend forward and touch his toes, and she ran her hand down his back and went quiet.
“Has anyone ever mentioned his shoulders?” she asked me. I said no.
She said one sat higher than the other, and that she wanted an x-ray before we left the building that afternoon.
It was thirty-eight degrees that first time. They put him in a hard plastic brace he was supposed to wear twenty hours a day.
He wore it maybe ten, and I did not fight him as hard as I should have.
He was thirteen. He hated how it showed under his shirts. He quit going to the pool in Blue Earth with his friends, and he started wearing a gray hoodie every day, even in July.
By October the curve was fifty-two degrees. The specialist in St. Neil showed us the x-ray on a big screen, his spine bending like a letter S, and said the word fusion while I held my son’s hand.