The Braid in the Beauty Shop Window

“No,” I said, and I knelt down beside the chair so I was eye level with her.

“I don’t think she’s mad at you. I think she’s sad about something that happened a long time ago, before she was anybody’s grandma. That’s all. It isn’t yours to fix.”

Vonda finished the bob in silence and then swung the chair around so Maren could see herself in the mirror.

Maren touched the ends with her fingertips and smiled, a little sideways, and said she looked like a girl in an old movie.

When I opened my purse at the register, Vonda put her hand flat over it. “Put that away,” she said.

“Not a chance. Not for this haircut, not today, not from you. You keep your thirty-five dollars and buy that girl a milkshake.”

I argued with her a little, because I was raised to pay for things. She would not hear it.

Instead, she asked if she could take Maren’s picture holding the braid in the chair, and Maren said yes before I could open my mouth.

Vonda took it with her own camera, Maren in the window chair with the braid held up high, and me standing beside her with my hand on her shoulder, and Vonda leaning in at the edge of the frame with her scissors.

Two weeks later that picture was taped up beside her register, where it still is.

Every woman who pays for a perm in that shop sees it. More than one of them has asked Vonda what it’s about, and Vonda tells them.

We drove to the post office straight from the shop. It was a little after ten, and they close at noon on Saturdays.

I had brought a gallon plastic bag and a padded envelope from home, and the wig maker’s address written on an index card.

Maren laid the braid in the bag herself and pressed the air out of it.

She tucked her letter to Josie in the envelope beside it, the one folded into a square, and she wrote “Please give Josie bangs” on the outside of it in pencil.

The man at the counter weighed it and asked if there was anything fragile, liquid or perishable inside.

Maren said, “Just hair,” very seriously, and he smiled and said he’d see that it got there.

When we came back out into the parking lot, there was a woman standing beside my car with her coat buttoned wrong.

It was Josie’s mother. I had called her from the shop, and she had driven in from their place without even stopping to fix herself up.

She didn’t say anything at first. She just put her arms around Maren in the middle of the post office parking lot, in the sunshine, and held her, and Maren held her back, and I stood there and let them have it.

“Thank you,” Josie’s mother finally said into Maren’s new short hair. “Thank you, thank you. You don’t know. You don’t know what you just did for her. She hasn’t wanted to look in a mirror since July.”

“Is it enough for bangs?” Maren asked her, which made Josie’s mother laugh and cry at the same time.

She said it was enough for anything Josie wanted, and that she would tell Josie that very afternoon.

Then she drove home to tell her daughter, and Maren and I drove to the ice cream stand out on the highway, because I figured her father would forgive me for going without him just this once. She got the biggest one they had.