The Braid in the Beauty Shop Window

It had bangs. The wig maker had read Maren’s note. Josie’s mother said that when Josie put it on in front of the bathroom mirror, she stood there for a long time, and then she said, “I look like me again.”

Josie came back to school the third week of January. Her doctors said she was well enough for half days during this part of her treatment, as long as she was careful and washed her hands and stayed home if anybody in class was sick.

She rode my bus home that first afternoon. I saw her in the big mirror at the front when she climbed the steps at the middle school, small in her puffy purple coat, with that blond wig and those bangs under her stocking cap.

She stopped at the top of the steps and looked down the aisle, past all the kids who were looking at her and trying to pretend they weren’t.

Then she walked straight back to the fourth seat on the left, where Maren sits every day.

Maren slid over to the window without a word. Josie sat down next to her.

And then, very carefully, Maren reached over and touched the ends of Josie’s hair, the way her grandmother had touched hers at our kitchen table.

I could not see the road for a second. I had to wait at the stop sign by the school longer than I needed to, with forty kids behind me and the afternoon sun coming low through the windshield, until I could see well enough to drive.

They sat together on that bus every afternoon for the rest of the year. I never heard what they talked about.

Mostly they giggled, and once in a while one of them would fix the other one’s hair, and that was all I needed to know.

At the end of January I went in to Vonda’s on a Saturday morning for my own trim.

It was a bright, cold day, and the sun was pouring through the big front window again. The picture of Maren was still taped up by the register.

I was in the back chair with a cape on when the bell over the door rang.

I looked in the mirror and saw my mother-in-law standing just inside the door in her good wool coat, the way Maren had stood there in October.

She didn’t see me at first. She walked over to the front window chair and stood beside it, looking down at it.

Then she sat down in it. Vonda looked at me in the mirror, and I shook my head a little, and Vonda went over to her.

Arlette reached up with both hands and began taking the pins out of her hair, one by one, and laying them in her lap.

It took a long time. Then her gray braid came down over her shoulder, longer than I had ever imagined it, past her waist.

It was the first time in fourteen years I had seen her hair down. I don’t think Vonda had ever seen it either.

The whole shop went quiet again, just as it had in October, except for the clock above the register.

Arlette held the end of her braid in her lap with both hands, the same way her granddaughter had held hers.

She looked at it a long time. Then she looked up at Vonda, and she asked her, quietly, how many inches it takes.