My Son Asked Me To Skip Grandparents’ Day Because My Burn Scars “Scare The Kids.” I Went Anyway. The Principal Saw Me In The Hallway, Stopped Mid-Sentence, And Rolled Up His Sleeve

My son calls every Sunday at four, after the Browns or before them, depending on the time of year. On the last Sunday of August he called at four and talked for a while about the gutters on my house. Then he talked about my car. Then he got quiet, and I knew there was something on the end of the line besides the gutters.

“Mom, you got the flyer for Grandparents’ Day? At Josie’s new school?”

“It’s on my refrigerator. Josie drew a turkey on it, I don’t know why. It’s in September.”

“Yeah. So, I was thinking. Beth’s mom can come in from Columbus for this one. She’s been wanting to. So you wouldn’t have to make the drive.”

“I don’t mind the drive, Mark.”

He breathed for a second. I could hear the television going in the other room, and I could picture him rubbing the back of his neck, like his father used to.

“It’s a lot of little kids,” he said. “Kindergarteners, first graders. They’ll be taking pictures for the newsletter. It’s her first year there, Mom, she’s trying to make friends, and I just think— you know how kids are. Your scars scare the kids. Last year at the Halloween thing that little boy cried. I’m not saying it to hurt you.”

“I know you’re not.”

“So maybe just this one year.”

“Let me look at my calendar,” I said. I don’t know why I said that. I’m a seventy-year-old widow. There’s nothing on my calendar but the dentist.

I hung up and sat with my hands in my lap. I looked at them for a while, and then I got up and watered the African violets.

What I Look Like

I’d better tell you what he meant.

I’m Dee Hollis. The left side of my face, from the jaw to about the temple, is smoother and shinier than the right side, and it doesn’t move as much when I smile. So I smile a little crooked. My left ear is smaller than it ought to be. The skin on my neck goes down into my collar in a pattern something like the bark of a birch tree. Both my hands and my right forearm look like somebody ironed them and left a diamond print behind. That’s the way skin grafts healed in those days.

None of it hurts anymore, except sometimes in the cold. It’s been forty-five years. To me it’s just my face, the way yours is yours.

But I’ve been looked at for forty-five years, too, and I can tell you all the kinds. There’s the look and the quick look away. There’s the young mother steering her cart around me at Giant Eagle. There’s the too-bright voice at the bank. Children are the most honest. They stare with their mouths open, and I’d take that over the bank any day of the week.

I wear high collars. I wear a scarf from October to May. For a long time I wore thin white cotton gloves, and then one night my husband took them off me at the kitchen table, one finger at a time.

“Delores,” Ray said. “Who are those for?”

I met Ray Hollis in 1983, when I was doing the books for a marine supply on Bridge Street, in the harbor, in the back where nobody had to see me. He ran a tug on the Ashtabula River. He came in for a shackle and asked me to the fish fry at St. Joseph’s before he’d even looked at his receipt. I said, “Have you noticed my face?” and he said, “I noticed it’s Friday.”

We had thirty-six years. He died in 2019. I stopped wearing the gloves because he’d asked.

The Pinewood Derby

Mark came along in 1985, a late, surprising, wonderful baby, and for his first few years I was simply the whole world to him. He used to pat my cheek on the shiny side when I rocked him. He liked how it felt.

Then he went to school.

I never knew just what happened. I know that in second grade he asked me to drop him at the corner instead of the door. I know that in third grade there was a boy named Kyle Decker, and that one day Mark came home with a split lip and wouldn’t say why, and that Ray took him out to the boat for the afternoon and came back looking old.

In fourth grade he was in Cub Scouts. Ray had the night tow, so I helped him sand his Pinewood Derby car at the kitchen table for a week. It was painted like a tugboat. When I drove him to the church basement that Saturday, he stopped with his hand on the car door.

“Parents aren’t allowed, Mom. It’s just for the kids this year. You can wait here.”

I looked through the windshield. There were mothers and fathers going in by the dozen, carrying folding chairs.

“All right, honey,” I said. “You go win.”

I sat in that Oldsmobile for three hours with the radio on. He came back out with a second-place ribbon, and he was so happy, and he told me all about it on the drive home, and I said my, my, my.

He’s forty-one now. He sells commercial heating and cooling, he coaches soccer, and he has never once missed a Sunday call. I never held the Pinewood Derby against him, and he’s never known that I knew.

January

He doesn’t know about the fire, either. Not really. He knows there was a fire in an apartment before you were born, because that’s all I ever gave him. Ray used to tell me I ought to say more. I never could see how to do it without standing on a box.

In the winter of 1981 I was twenty-four. My name was Delores Harken, and I was waiting tables at a diner on State Street in Erie, Pennsylvania, and renting one room on the third floor of an old brick building on East Sixth. I had a green wool coat I’d paid too much for. I had nice skin, I’ll say that. I’d been told so.

Across the hall lived a woman named Carol, who worked third shift at the GE plant and was raising a five-year-old by herself. Danny was a round-headed little boy who wore his rain boots in all weather. Most evenings he’d knock on my door before his mother left, and I’d give him a saltine and ask him what the news was.

“What do you hear, Mister Man?”

“Nothing, Miss Dee.”

“Well, keep your ears open.”

That was the whole friendship.

On the night of January 16th it was four degrees out. A little after two in the morning somebody on the second floor was running a space heater, and I woke up with my room smelling wrong, and people yelling. I got my coat and went down the back stairs in my nightgown and bare feet, and I got out on the sidewalk in the snow with everybody else.

The sitter was out there, a sixteen-year-old girl from the first floor. She was turning in circles with her hands over her mouth.

“He was behind me,” she kept saying. “He was right behind me.”

I looked at all those people on the sidewalk. I looked for the rain boots.

I’m not going to tell you I was brave. I’ve thought about it for forty-five years and I don’t believe I thought at all. I went back in the way you’d go back for your purse. I remember the stairs were very hot through the soles of my feet. I found him under his mother’s kitchen table with his boots on. I ran the tap and soaked my coat in the sink and got it around him, and I said “Keep your ears open, Mister Man,” because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

He was a heavy child. One of his arms kept working its way out of the coat, and I kept shoving it back.

I don’t remember the stairs going down. That’s a mercy. They tell me a fireman named Kowalczyk took him out of my arms at the door.

I woke up in March, at the burn unit in Pittsburgh.

Miss Dee Moves Away

I was there for five months. A nurse told me the boy had come through fine, with only a bad arm, and I lay there and looked at the ceiling and was glad. It was the only thing I was glad of that winter.

The building was gone by then, torn down. Everyone on East Sixth had scattered. A card came to the hospital in Carol’s handwriting, with no return address, and it said God bless you. I found out she’d taken him away to family somewhere in Ohio. That’s all I ever heard.

My Aunt Vi came and got me in June, and took me to her house in Ashtabula. The first week I was there she laid a newspaper clipping on my bed, a little square from the Erie paper with a photograph of the building taken the next morning. There was just the brick shell in the snow, with the windows black, and no one in it at all. It said a neighbor, Deanna Harkins, 24, had carried a child out of the blaze. They had my name wrong.

“You could write in and fix that,” Aunt Vi said. “You could find that boy’s mother. She’d want to know you.”

I remember I was sitting on the bed in front of her vanity, and I remember what I saw in the glass.

“No, Vi,” I said.

Because I’d thought it through. He was five years old. He was going to grow up and have a whole life, and he’d never remember me if I let him alone. What would he want with this, turning up at his door? What’s a little boy supposed to do with a face like mine, knowing it’s on account of him?

So I put the clipping in my Bible. I let the name stay wrong. And Miss Dee moved away.

The Turkey

The Wednesday after Mark’s call, a big envelope came in the mail. It was addressed in pencil, and every letter was a different size.

Josie is eight. She has two brown braids and a space where a tooth should be, and she has been asking me questions since she could talk. When she was four, she climbed up on a chair across the table from me, put her chin on her fists and studied my face for a good long time.

“Does it go all the way around?”

“No, just this side.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe you were two people.” And she went back to her applesauce.

Inside the envelope was a sheet of orange construction paper folded in half. She’d drawn a table with cookies on it and two stick people, one with crooked lines down the side of her face, done very carefully in brown crayon. On the inside she’d written:

Grandma you are in charge of the snickerdoodles. I told Mrs. Albright. She wrote it on the list. Dont forget.

I read it standing at the mailbox. Then I went in the house and got down the cream of tartar.

I called Mark on the Thursday night before, so he wouldn’t be taken by surprise.

“Mom,” he said. “I asked you.”

“I know you did, honey.”

“Are you doing this to make a point?”

“I’m doing it because I’m on the list,” I said. “Mrs. Albright wrote it down.”

Garfield Elementary

It was Friday, the eleventh of September. I’d baked six dozen. I put on my good gray dress with the high neck, and I stood at the hall mirror for a long time with the blue scarf in my hand, and then I put it on.

The front hall of Garfield Elementary was full of old people in their good sweaters, wandering around with name tags. Everything smelled like floor wax and coffee.

Mark was in the lobby. He’d taken the morning off. He had on a shirt and tie, and he came over quickly and took the cookie tins from me, and he kissed me on the good side.

“Thanks for coming, Mom,” he said, in a low voice, looking over my shoulder. “Listen, they’ve got the tables in the cafeteria. I talked to them. I got you a spot down at the far end, by the kitchen, nice and quiet. Beth’s mom’s doing the photo thing with Josie. You can just sit.”

I could feel the eyes already. I felt them the way you can feel a stove. A big grandfather in a Cleveland cap looked at me and then got very interested in a bulletin board. A woman with a nice perm gave me the bank voice.

“Good morning! Aren’t you sweet to come!”

Halfway down the first-grade hall, a little boy was standing by himself next to the row of coat hooks. He was maybe six years old, and he’d lost his class and was working up to something big. His chin was going. Mark had gotten ahead of me with the tins. The child looked up and saw my face, and his eyes got huge, and I saw that this was just about all he could take.

I know how to do this part. I’ve had practice. I stopped a good ways off, the length of a coat rack, and I bent down a little with my hands on my knees and turned my good side to him.

“Well, that’s an awful big cry for such a small hallway,” I said. “What do you hear, Mister Man?”

It just came out. I hadn’t said it in forty-five years. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe it was the coats.

The boy hiccupped. “Nothing,” he said.

“Well,” I said. “Keep your ears open.”

Mid-Sentence

There were three people coming up the hall behind him. The one in front was a tall man with gray at his temples and a blue tie, walking backward like a tour guide, with a lanyard around his neck. He was talking to a man in a suit and a young woman with a camera.

“And what we’ve done with the reading lab, thanks to the PTA, is we’ve really been able to—”

He stopped.

He didn’t trail off. He stopped dead with his mouth open and his hand in the air, like someone had pulled his plug. The man in the suit took two more steps and bumped into him.

He turned around slowly. He looked at the little boy, and then he looked at me.

I’ve told you I know all the kinds of looks. I did not know this one. He looked at the shiny side of my face and he didn’t look away. He looked at my neck, where the scarf had slipped when I bent down. He looked at my hands on my knees.

I straightened up. I thought, Well, here it is. Here comes the principal, and he’s going to ask me very nicely to move along. Way up the hall, I saw Mark turn around with the tins. I saw his face start to fall.

The tall man walked toward me. He didn’t hurry. His lips had gone white. He stopped about four feet away, and he didn’t say a thing. He took hold of his left cuff and undid the button, and his fingers weren’t working very well. And then, right there in the first-grade hall, with the superintendent of schools standing behind him, he began to roll up his sleeve.

He rolled it once and twice, up past the elbow, and he turned his arm over in the light.

It was the same as mine. From the wrist to above the elbow, it had that pale, ironed look and the same small diamonds. It’s a pattern they quit using years ago. In all my life, I’d never seen it on anyone but me.

He held his arm out next to my arm. He didn’t touch me. And I thought about one arm that kept working its way out of a wet green coat, and how I kept shoving it back.

“Nothing, Miss Dee,” he said. His voice had gone up high and strange, a little boy’s voice in a big man’s chest. “I don’t hear anything.”

I couldn’t get my breath. The whole hall had gone far away, and the floor wax and the coffee, and I said the only thing I had.

“Danny? You wore your boots.”

Then Daniel Reese, principal of Garfield Elementary, fifty-one years old, sat down on a bench made for six-year-olds, put his face in his hands, and cried so hard that the lady with the camera lowered it without being asked.

Forty-Five Years of Harkins

He’d looked for me. That’s what I couldn’t take in, sitting in his office with a paper cup of water and the door shut, and my son standing against the file cabinet with six dozen snickerdoodles still in his arms.

“My mother told me the story every January,” Danny said. *“Every January 17th, she’d sit me down and we’d have a saltine. I didn’t know why saltines, until I got older. All she ever had was Miss Dee, and that clipping with the name. She went to the hospital in Pittsburgh twice and they couldn’t tell her anything. She couldn’t get you on the phone. So we looked.”

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk. It was a thick, soft file folder. He’d started it in 1994, when he was in college. There were letters to the Erie paper and the fire department, and years of searching phone books at the library and then the internet. He had letters to every Deanna Harkins in Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio. There were eleven of them, and he’d gone to see three.

“One of them, in Buffalo,” he said, laughing a little, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “I sat at her kitchen table with my sleeve rolled up. She’d never been to Erie in her life. She cried and made me a sandwich.”

“My name was Harken,” I said. “Delores. They spelled it wrong.”

“I know that now.”

“I saw it was wrong. I never fixed it.”

He looked at me for a while with those round, brown eyes. It was the same round head, I could see it now, with fifty years of gray on it.

“Why not?”

So I told him. I told him about the vanity at Aunt Vi’s, and how I thought a little boy shouldn’t have to look at this. I’d never said it out loud to anyone but Ray. I looked at the carpet while I said it.

He got up and came around the desk and sat down in the chair next to me.

“Miss Dee,” he said. “Why do you think I went into elementary schools?”

I shook my head.

“Twenty-six years, I’ve been standing in hallways with kids who are scared of something,”he said. “I tell every one of them the same thing. I say, somebody came back for me. That’s all I’ve got, it’s my whole philosophy of education. I’ve been looking at your face my entire life. I just never got to see it.”

It was very quiet in the office. Behind me, I heard the tins start to rattle, just a little, and then I heard them stop as my son set them down on top of the file cabinet.

I turned around. Mark was standing with his tie crooked, looking at my hands. He’d looked at my hands every day of his childhood.

“You went back in,” he said. *“Mom. You went back in?”

Second Place

Twenty minutes later I slipped out the side door of the gym for some air, and he came out after me. We stood by the bike rack in the sun. He didn’t look at me. He looked at the flagpole.

“In fourth grade,” he said, “Kyle Decker and those guys called you Melted Mom. They’d do this thing with their faces. I told everybody you were my grandmother. I told them my real mom lived in Cleveland.”

“I know you did, honey.”

“The derby. Parents were allowed.”

“I know. I saw the chairs.”

That undid him. I hadn’t meant it to. He bent over with his hands on his knees, a forty-one-year-old man in a tie, and his shoulders shook.

“You sat out there three hours,” he said. “I’ve been sick about it for thirty-two years, I swear to God. And then Josie gets a new school, and I hear about these kids, and all I could think of was Kyle Decker. I thought, not her. I’m not going to let them do it to her. I’m so stupid, Mom. I thought I was protecting my kid.”

“I know what you thought,” I said.

“You should have told me. You should have told me what you did. I could’ve told Kyle Decker.”

“You were nine. I didn’t want you to have to carry it around.”

“Well, that’s what we do, isn’t it,” he said, and he laughed, a wet, awful laugh. “You and me. We wait in the car.”

I got a Kleenex out of my sleeve. I reached up with my ironed-looking hand and wiped his face with it. I hadn’t done that since about 1994, and he let me, right out there by the bike rack, in front of God and the second-grade recess.

The Snickerdoodle Table

I didn’t let Danny make a speech. He wanted to, and I told him if he got up on that stage and said my name, I’d go home. So he said something else. He stood up in front of two hundred grandparents and all those children on the gym floor and said there was a table in the cafeteria that needed some help, and that the lady running it was a friend of his from when he was five.

That was all. But the young woman with the camera had a mouth on her, and so did the man in the suit, and you know how a school is. By the time I got back to the cafeteria, the far table by the kitchen had been picked up and moved to the middle of the room. Mark had done that. He’d carried it himself. He stood behind it with his sleeves rolled up and a pair of tongs, and when the grandfather in the Cleveland cap came by, Mark looked him in the eye and said, “This is my mother. She made these.”

They came in a line. The grandfather took my hand in both of his and couldn’t talk. The woman with the perm dropped the bank voice and told me about her brother in Vietnam. The kids came at the same time, a whole class at a time. They stood across the table from me with their mouths open, the way children do.

“Did it hurt?” asked a little girl with glasses.

“It did, a long time ago. It doesn’t now.”

“Are you the lady from Mr. Reese’s story? The somebody?”

I looked across the room. Danny was standing by the milk cooler with his sleeve still rolled up. He had forgotten about it.

“I suppose I am,” I said. “You want one or two?”

Josie stood at the end of the table the whole time with her braids and her name tag, keeping count on a napkin, with her chin up. She didn’t come near me. She had a job to do. Every so often, she told someone, “That’s my grandma. She’s in charge.”

Somewhere in all that, the blue scarf came off. I never did find out where I left it.

The Green Coat

Danny drove out to Ashtabula the second Sunday in October, with his wife. Mark and Beth and Josie came too, and I made a pot roast. Mark calls at odd hours now. He has no reason, he says. He wants to know what I hear.

After dinner, Danny went out to his car and came back with a flat cardboard box from a dry cleaner in Akron. He put it on the kitchen table and stood back from it with his hands in his pockets.

“My mom died in 2017,” he said. “The fireman gave this to her at the hospital that night, because it was wrapped around me. She had it cleaned every January. She mended it herself.”

I knew what it was before I lifted the tissue paper.

It was smaller than I remembered, the way things are. It was still that dark bottle green, but the wool had gone thin. The left sleeve and all along the hem were dark and rough. They’d been patched and darned in tiny, even stitches, in thread that almost matched, by somebody who worked third shift and had all the patience in the world. There was a paper tag pinned to the collar with a rusty safety pin. It was in Carol’s handwriting, the same as the card.

This belongs to Miss Dee. Danny, you find her.

Nobody said anything. Ray’s clock ticked over the stove. Mark put his hand over his mouth.

“Well,” Danny said after a while. “It took me a minute.”

They left around dark. Danny stood on the back step in the cold, turned up his collar, and looked back in at me. Then he asked me, very seriously, what I heard.

I said, “Nothing, Mister Man. Drive careful.”

I have a row of pegs by my back door. Ray put them up in 1986, for the boat coats. After everyone had gone, I took the tissue paper out and shook the green coat once and hung it up on the middle peg, and I stood there and looked at it for a good while without my scarf on.

Josie had left her yellow raincoat, on the peg next to it. She’d hung it herself, too low, one sleeve still inside out. I reached out to fix it.

Then I didn’t. The green sleeve hung down just far enough to touch the yellow one, and I turned off the kitchen light and left them like that.

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