She shrugs. “So what?”
“So,” I hedge, “maybe you could be friends.”
Darla busies herself trimming off nonexistent split ends in her well-maintained blond strands. “Why would I want to be friends with him? I have enough friends.”
Billy snorts, and I briefly share an incredulous glance with him before he goes back to his screen and I respond, “I’m your only friend.”
“Exactly.” Darla shrugs. “I’ve hit my quota.”
“You have a friend quota? And it’sone?”
“Yep.” The scissors snick again. “That way, if a dead body shows up in my vicinity and people are like, ‘What about that Darla girl? She’s a creepy loner.’ Someone else can be like, ‘No wait, she has a friend, so she can’t be a completely terrible person. Let’s look into some other leads.’ ”
My brows, my nose, hell, my entire face scrunches as I try to mentally work through the scene Darla just painted with her snarky words.
“So,” my question starts off slow as I attempt to figure out what even to ask, “in this scenario, we are friends solely so you have a character witness when you murder someone?”
“I never said I’m going to murder someone.” She flicks the longer hairs on the left side of my head again. “And a friend wouldn’t accuse me of such a heinous thing.”
Darla has a logic all her own, and it’s like signing up for a marathon trying to argue with her.
“Fine, I promise not to accuse you of murder as long as you fix my hair.”
With a triumphant smirk, Darla gets back to work until my crimson strands are even.
Billy takes my seat—which is truly a brave move on his part—and I head into the living room and a world of happy chatter. The moms drink boxed wine, except for mine, who sips on a margarita mocktail. Marge sits with a pink goo on her head, dying her hair the way she always does as the end of the school year approaches. Sam is in the chair in the middle of the room as Sally deep conditions her hair in preparation for Billy to re-twist her locs later. Sally used to do every step of her wife’s hair, but joint pain started making it hard for her last year. That’s when Billy learned, and now his mom’s styling is his responsibility.
Just like mine.
“Look at you.” Mom grins at me from her spot on the couch. “Ready for me?”
“Yep.” I grab the case with our electric razor. The one we got for cheap at an estate sale a few years back. There’s a neighborhood of McMansions between our small town and DC, and when an estate sale pops up, we always make sure to swing by.
Mom hops up from her seat to settle in the other chair in the middle of the room near the freestanding mirror I carried downstairs for salon night. An old sheet lays spread beneath the seat for easier cleanup.
“Know what design you want?”
When I go through photo albums from my childhood, it’s shocking to see the difference between how my mother looked then and how she looks now. I’m sure it’s common for most people to beinterested in the differences in their parents as they age. But my mother didn’t just gain years on her life. She transformed into a new version of herself.
Charlotte Lundberg from twenty-five years ago was a slim woman with waist-length blond hair and a haunted look in her eyes. There is love in her expression when there are pictures of her and me. But in the occasional snapshots that Marge shows me of my mom on her own, I can see the anger that lived in my mother back then. An anger that still rises to the surface sometimes, just not as often.
I like to think that’s because she has found new joy and purpose in life.
She deserves it. Things have never really been easy for her.
“Now, I know you’re going to say that curved lines are a bitch. But I would love it if you could try even a basic daisy.”
I pretend to sigh and groan, but if my mother asked me to attempt to sketch a rendering of theMona Lisainto her hair, I would do my best.
“I’ll try. But if it looks wonky, that’s something you’re gonna have to live with for the next few weeks.”
My mother grins and settles in her chair, facing the room instead of one of the mirrors that we set up. She doesn’t feel the need to watch me as I work, preferring to chat with her friends as the trimmer buzzes.
The long hair may have been the first thing about the young Charlotte Lundberg to go. That thick, beautiful mass often had people treating her like a delicate flower, unaware that beneath her angelic locks were twisted vines of hurt and thorns of anger.
Maybe there was a time in her life when she was as sweet and innocent as she appeared. But the brief affair she had with Karl Newton changed all of that.
The way my father treated my mother when he found out she was pregnant was worse than unkind.
