The Braid in the Beauty Shop Window

Her new hair barely came to her chin, blunt and uneven until Vonda shaped it, and she kept shaking her head from side to side to feel how light it was.

“It’s so light,” she said. “Mom, my head feels like a balloon. I didn’t know it was that heavy. I’ve been carrying around fourteen inches of hair for two years and I didn’t even know it.”

Vonda laughed out loud and started shaping the bob with her comb and her thinning shears.

Maren held the braid the whole time, both hands, like something that might get away from her if she set it down.

“Do you think it’s enough for bangs?” she asked Vonda. “For the wig, I mean. Josie always wanted bangs. Her mom never let her have them. She said they’d grow out funny. But she always wanted them.”

Vonda stopped with the comb in the air. Her eyes had gone wet, and she cleared her throat twice.

“I think,” she said, “if you tell that wig lady in your letter, she’ll make sure that girl gets bangs.”

Then Vonda laughed again, and wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist, and then she stopped laughing.

She was looking past us, out the big front window, across the street toward the courthouse and the cafe on the corner.

“Rhea,” she said quietly. “Isn’t that Arlette?”

I turned around. My mother-in-law was standing on the sidewalk across the street, in front of the cafe, with a paper cup of coffee in her hand.

She had come in for her Saturday coffee, the way she has done every Saturday since she was widowed.

She had not come for us. I am sure of that now.

She had parked on the square the way she always did and gone to get her coffee, and then she had come out the door and turned and seen her granddaughter in the window chair.

She stood there a long time. Then she crossed the street. She did it slowly, looking both ways twice, and then she came up onto the curb and stood directly in front of the big window, not three feet from the glass.

Maren saw her. For one second I felt my daughter’s shoulder go stiff under my hand.

Then she lifted the braid up higher, both hands, and she held it up to the window so her grandmother could see the whole length of it.

She didn’t do it to be spiteful. She is not a spiteful child.

She did it the way she used to hold up her drawings for Arlette when she was four, to show her. Her face was not angry. It was hopeful.

Arlette looked at the braid. Then she looked at Maren’s short blond hair, and Maren’s face.

Then, very slowly, she lifted her free hand and touched the back of her own head, where her own gray braid was pinned up.

Nobody in the shop said a word. One of the women waiting on the bench had stopped turning the pages of her magazine.

Vonda stood still with her comb in her hand. The only sound was the clock above the register.

Arlette stood there for what felt like a full minute. Then she lowered her hand, turned around, walked back across the street to her car, got in, and drove away around the square. She did not come in. She did not wave.

Maren lowered the braid. “Is she mad?” she asked me. Her voice wobbled. “Mom, is Grandma mad at me?”