Part 3 — Roots at the Lake
Sharon set her wine glass down so carefully that it made no sound at all. Every face at the long table was turned toward her, and for a moment she looked like what she was, a woman of seventy-one sitting very straight in a very good blouse, with something old and heavy rising behind her teeth.
“Say it, Sharon,” said my father-in-law. His voice was not angry. It was tired in a way that had waited fifty years. “She is waiting.” Sharon looked at the photograph of the boy on the tractor, at the cowlick, the freckles, the crooked grin. Then she looked at her own hands, and she began to talk.
“I was born with red hair,” she said. The table did not understand, and she said it again. “Red. Bright red. My mother had it, and my uncle, and I had it until I was eighteen.” She touched her brown curls. “My stepfather used to say the milkman must have visited my mother. Every Sunday for ten years, in front of everyone. That I was the child of somebody else. That I did not belong at his table.”
She had left home at seventeen. At eighteen she dyed her hair brown with a box from the drugstore, and she had never stopped, not once, in fifty-three years. She had told no one. Not her husband, not her children, not the wives of her sons. “When the baby of my daughter was born with red hair,” she said, and then she had to start again.
“I walked into that hospital room and I saw my own head on a pillow,” she said. “And I told my daughter what my stepfather told my mother. That the baby could not belong to her husband. I said it was a joke, and she cried, and I said she was too sensitive.” She turned to her daughter, tears running through the powder on her face. “I was frightened of the color. I was frightened of everyone seeing where I came from. And I hurt you the way I was hurt, because it was the only language I knew.”
My father-in-law reached over and laid his hand on hers. “I have known since 1971,” he said gently. “I saw the roots at the lake. I did not mind. I never told you because I thought you would say it when you were ready. I did not know it would take this long, or cost this much.” Sharon turned to him as if a door she had pushed on for fifty years had opened by itself.
I had not planned to speak, but Caleb was still in the doorway in his snow boots, and I walked across the room and stood beside him. “Sharon,” I said. “I am sorry for what happened to you. It was not right, and it was not your fault. But what you said to my son was not a joke, and he heard every word. You owe him something, and it is not me who can collect it.”
Sharon got up slowly, holding the edge of the table. She crossed the room and knelt on the old carpet in front of the boy, which cost her something, I could see, because of her knees. “Caleb,” she said. “I was wrong. Your hair is the best in the family. It is the color I was born with, and I was afraid of it. I am not afraid anymore.” Caleb studied her face. “Can I touch your hair?” he asked.
Ryan came last. He took the hand of Caleb and then looked at me, and his face was a mess of shame. “I laughed,” he said. “I should have stood up at Thanksgiving. I let my own son hear that, and I told you that you were too sensitive.” I told him an apology is a start and a habit is the rest, and that I would be watching which one he chose.
His sister crossed to her mother and held her without a word. Her husband, who had gone so still at the first mention of the hospital, let out a long breath and put his arm around them both. Someone, I think an aunt, quietly poured Sharon a glass of water.
The hair of a child is only a color, but the love that comes with it decides what a family remembers.
Ryan and I made a rule that night, and we have kept it. No joke at our table is allowed to land on a child. Sharon came to our house the following week without calling. She took a box out of her purse, the kind from the drugstore, and dropped it in the trash can by the garage, right in front of me, with a small, brave laugh.
At the lake the next summer, Sharon sat on the dock in a sun hat with the brim pushed back. Her roots were silver, with a strip of faded copper at the front, and the grandson beside her declared it the best hair he had ever seen. She smiled at him as if she had waited fifty-three years to be told so.
