The Braid in the Beauty Shop Window

Arlette did not call that Saturday. She did not come to church on Sunday either.

On Monday morning, when I came back to the bus garage after my morning route, I found a loaf of bread in a bag hanging on the door of my car.

There was no note. It was her bread, the oatmeal kind with honey she has made every week for as long as I have known her.

I sat in the bus garage parking lot holding it and did not know whether to laugh or cry, so I did a little of both.

My husband finished the corn on the last day of October. That Sunday afternoon he drove out to his mother’s farm by himself and was gone three hours.

When he came home he sat at the kitchen table for a while before he said anything.

“She told me the whole thing,” he said. “About her mother and the shears. More than she ever told me when I was a boy. Then she asked me if Maren hated her now. I told her no. I told her Maren doesn’t hate anybody.”

“She was wrong,” I said. “She was wrong to do it, and wrong to lie about it. I won’t pretend she wasn’t.”

He nodded and said he knew that, and that she knew it too. Then he said she wanted to come by, if I would have her.

She came the next Saturday afternoon, in the middle of a clear cold day with the sun low in the south windows.

She knocked on the front door, which nobody in our family ever does, and stood on the step until I opened it.

Maren was at the kitchen table doing math. Arlette came in and sat down across from her, still in her coat, and folded her hands.

She looked at Maren’s short hair for a long time, and Maren let her look.

“I shouldn’t have called that shop,” Arlette finally said. “That was wrong of me, and I’m sorry for it. I want you to know that. I lied about you, and you didn’t deserve it. You did a good thing, and I tried to stop you.”

Maren looked at me, and I nodded at her, and she looked back at her grandmother. “It’s okay, Grandma,” she said.

“Dad said something happened to you when you were twelve. He didn’t say what. You don’t have to tell me.”

Arlette’s mouth worked for a moment. Then she said, “Someday I will,” and she reached across the table and touched the ends of Maren’s bob, just barely, with two fingers. “It suits you,” she said. “It suits you very well.”

That was all. She stayed for coffee and she did not mention it again.

When she left, she hugged Maren at the door, longer than she usually does, and on her way out she squeezed my arm without looking at me.

I don’t think we ever talked about it again, Arlette and I, not directly.

But she started coming back to church, and back to the alto section, and on Wednesdays the bread started coming again, and I let it be enough.

The wig came after Christmas. Josie’s mother called me the second week of January to say it had arrived in a box with tissue paper, and that it was blond and soft and just long enough to reach Josie’s shoulders.