The girl at the front desk of the beauty shop on the square would not look at me.
She kept her eyes on the appointment book, running one finger down the page as if the answer might change if she read it a third time.
“Your mother-in-law called on Thursday,” she finally said. “Mrs. Lindgren. She said Maren changed her mind, so we gave the nine o’clock to a walk-in. I’m so sorry. I thought she was you.”
I turned and looked at my daughter. Maren was standing just inside the door with her braid hanging all the way down her back to the waist of her jeans, the way it had hung every single day for two years.
She did not say a word. She just looked at the empty chair by the big front window, and then at the woman already sitting in the other chair with foils in her hair, and then down at her own shoes.
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“Maren didn’t change her mind,” I said, as evenly as I could. “Nobody in our house changed their mind. Is Vonda here?”
The girl, whose name tag said Annika, nodded toward the back room.
She was maybe nineteen and working Saturdays for gas money, and I could tell she felt terrible, so I told her it wasn’t her fault and I meant it.
Vonda Kessler came out wiping her hands on a towel. She has owned that shop on the square in Litchfield for thirty years, and she has cut half the hair in Meeker County, including mine on my wedding day and my husband’s every six weeks since.
“Rhea,” she said, and her face fell when she saw Maren. “Oh, honey. I didn’t take that call. I’d have called you back myself. Annika didn’t know any better, and I didn’t look at the book until this morning.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It isn’t on you. Can you fit her in today?”
She looked at the book, and then at the two women waiting on the bench, and then at the clock. She shook her head slowly.
“I’ve got a perm in the back and I’m booked solid until four. I’m so sorry. Next week I can do anything you want.”
I told her I would call her that afternoon. Then I put my arm around my girl and walked her out onto the sidewalk, into a bright October morning that suddenly felt like the wrong weather for the day we were having.
Maren held it together until we got to the car. Then she put her forehead against the window on her side and cried without making a sound, the way she has cried since she was little, as if crying out loud would be a bother to somebody.
I did not start the engine right away. I sat there with my hands on the wheel and looked across the street at the brick courthouse and the leaves coming down in the park, and I waited until my own voice was steady enough to use.
“We’re going to get it done,” I told her. “I promise you that. This was not your fault and it was not Vonda’s fault, and Josie is still getting her braid.”
“Grandma lied,” Maren said into the glass. “She told them I didn’t want to. I’ve wanted to since I was ten.”
That was the truth, and it was the part that sat hardest on me all the way home down Highway 12, past the cornfields half harvested and the combines working the far rows in the sunshine.