Patty DayJANUARY 2, 1985
9:42 A.M.
The sink was stained a sludgy purple from where Ben had dyed his hair. Sometime in the night, then, he’d locked himself in the bathroom, sat down on the closed toilet seat, and read through the instructions on the carton of hair color she’d found in the trash. The carton had a photograph of a woman with light pink lips and jet-black hair, worn in a pageboy. She wondered if he’d stolen it. She couldn’t imagine Ben, chin-to-chest Ben, setting a dye kit on the checkout counter. So he’d shoplifted it. Then in the middle of the night, her son, all by himself, had measured and combined and lathered. He’d sat with that mudpile of chemicals on his red hair and waited.
The whole idea made her incredibly sad. That in this house of women, her boy had colored his
