She held up the bundle of hair, the rubber band holding it neatly the way she had probably watched a video tell her to do.
“I looked it up. Real hair can be donated for wigs. Mine isn’t enough by itself, but maybe it can help start one.”
“Baby.”
“I know it looks awful.”
Jonathan had lost his hair in clumps on his pillowcase in the third month of treatment. Letty had been nine years old and she had never said one word about it to him, but she had come to me after he was asleep and cried with her entire body. We had both sat on the bathroom floor for a long time. Neither of us had forgotten it.
I crossed the room, took the scissors out of her hand, and pulled her into my arms.
“No,” I said against her hair. “No, sweetheart. Your dad would be so proud of you right now. I know I am.”
She cried against my shoulder for a while. Then she leaned back and looked at herself in the mirror.
“Can we fix it? I look like a founding father.”
I laughed — actually laughed — for the first time in three months.
Teresa’s Salon and the Man Who Used to Work Eight Years With My Husband
An hour later, we were at Teresa’s salon on Elm, where Letty sat in a cape while Teresa studied the situation, sighed once with professional restraint, and got to work.
Luis, Teresa’s husband, came in partway through. He stopped in the doorway when he saw the rubber-banded bundle on the counter.
“What’s all this?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Letty said, from inside the cape: “A girl in my class needs a wig.”
Luis looked at her properly for the first time. Then he smiled at me in the mirror — not the polite social smile but the real kind, the one that contains something.
“Hi, Piper. That’s Jonathan’s girl, right there.”
Letty sat a fraction straighter under the cape. “You knew my dad?”
“Eight years,” Luis said. “We worked together every day.”
She touched the blunt ends of what was left of her hair. “Would he have liked this haircut?”
Teresa snorted from behind the scissors. “No decent human being supports a bathroom haircut performed without mirrors or training.”
“Teresa,” Letty said.
“But,” Teresa added, her voice softening, “he would have loved every reason behind it.”
Luis leaned against the station and looked at my daughter the way people look at children who remind them of someone they miss.
“Your dad couldn’t stand watching people suffer alone,” he said. “It made him restless. Like he’d physically rather do something, anything, than just watch someone hurt.”
Letty looked at her hands in her lap. “Millie tried to act like she didn’t care. But she did.”
“Of course she did,” I said.
Teresa stayed late. She worked on Letty’s hair and separately, using hair she had set aside from other donations, completed a wig before the next morning. She didn’t charge us for either.
