They’re sitting on the floor around the coffee table, makeup palettes scattered about. On a plate are a few cookies and some crumbs, and Emma is sitting with her hands splayed out on the table, chatting with Hallie. Or, more likely, chattingatHallie, who is adding a coat of clear polish to her own nails as Emma rattles on, telling her the gossip from her school, with a few names I recognize as friends or middle school-level enemies popping up. Her hair is down and in loose curls, not like the ones she naturally has, but more refined, the kind that I’ve seen Wren do a dozen times with a curling iron, and it throws me back as I realize Emma is also wearing makeup.
“How’s it going, girls?” I say, and Hallie jumps, clearly caught off guard, turning to me with wide eyes. Emma turns as well, smiling wide at me.
“Good! We’re painting our nails,” my daughter says, wiggling her pinkies, her nails pink with little white polka dots.
Emma had been begging for makeup and girly stuff, since apparently the girls in her class are already wearing those kinds of things, and I’ve been at a loss for what to do. I hadn’t gotten around to asking Wren about her thoughts on it, but I have to say, I was both grateful and panicked when Emma opened the giant gift Hallie got her on Christmas morning at my parents, revealing makeup and hair stuff of all kinds. She looked at me immediately, and her face went soft as if feeling my panic across the room.
Don’t worry, Jess. It’s all very age-appropriate. No full faces or lash extensions, I promise,my sister had told me.Iwasn’t sure what either of those things was, but the knot in my stomach did release just a bit.
“Hallie’s been teaching me to make up.” There’s an excited tone in her words, and when I step closer, I see what she means. There’s a thin glide of blush over her cheeks, her lashes are a darker brown color, and there’s something shimmery swiped over her eyelids. Her lips are glossy and pink, and even though it cuts deep to see it on my daughter, who just last week couldn’t have been older than five, I’m grateful to see that Wren was right: it’s nothing crazy, but something that, based on the grin on her face, makes Emma feel good. I know her friends wear makeup, and I’ve seen some of their work and worried that Emma would try to use a heavy hand, but this feels like the perfect compromise.
“Looks good,” I say, pushing past the sudden annoying lump in my throat.
“Doesn’t she look gorgeous?” Hallie asks.
“And Hallie! I did Hallie’s makeup.”
“You both look beautiful, but you both always look beautiful.”
Emma rolls her eyes, but I don’t miss the blush that pinkens Hallie’s cheeks and down her neck. For the first time in a long time, I find myself wondering just how far it goes, her fair skin always showing her emotions so quickly. She looks away, fingers gently tapping on the tips of my daughter’s before nodding.
“You’re all dry. You want to wear that for dinner at your grandparents?”
“I’m gonna change. This face deserves a good outfit.”
Hallie looks at my daughter, something soft and easy, before nodding. “So true. I’ll neaten this up, and you go change, okay? I’ll set it aside, and you can clean it up after dinner, if that’s cool with your dad. But when you get back, it’s your responsibility to put it all away. If I find out you didn’t, then we’re not doing another makeup lesson tomorrow.”
With Hallie’s words and firm look, I brace for Emma’s attitude. Her nose scrunches just a hair in irritation, but then, to my astonishment, my daughter, who hates cleaning up almost as much as she hates ultimatums, nods, then grabs a few of the things out on the table, stacking them in her arms and walking toward her room without even being asked. I watch in awe as Emma stands and moves toward her room without a single argument.
“How do you do that?” I ask in awe once she’s out of earshot and eyesight.
“Do what?” Hallie asks, looking at me quickly before wiping a makeup brush on a paper towel, leaving a trail of faint pink in its wake. I watch the way her hands move back and forth, deepening the color until the brush is cleaned.
“Get her to talk to you? Get her to drop her attitude? Agree to clean up? Not freak out about going to my parents’ for dinner?”
She looks at me, confused. “We’ve been talking about going to dinner all day, so it wasn’t a surprise. I asked her to clean up and made a deal that seemed fair to her. Easy as that.”
“When I ask her to do anything, I get the attitude. When I ask her to clean up, I get a fit. Same for Mom and Dad, even Madden and Wren. But she just…did it.”
Hallie’s face clears when she looks at mine, then nods as if she understands and gives me a knowing look. She neatly arranges the remaining items into a pile as she explains.
“Well, unlike all of you, I treat her like she’s a person instead of a little kid,” she says bluntly.
“She is a little kid,” I counter.
She lets out a small, reluctant sigh meshed with a laugh. “Not for long. Soon, she’s going to be a woman, and right now, she’s in a very awkward stage. She wants you to treat her like someone whose opinions matter, not like someone who needs to be told what to do.”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell her that Emma does, in fact, need to be told what to do. If I don’t, she might not bathe regularly or clean her room, or, actually, remember to do her homework, but then I look at Hallie’s face.
And then I remember who Hallie is.
A woman who was once a girl being raised by a clueless single dad. She’s a woman whose mom up and left her when she was barely ten, a woman who clung to my family in an effort to find a place to belong.
A woman whose childhood probably looked a whole lot like Emma’s. When I don’t speak, lost in my thoughts, Hallie stands, pushing her hair behind her shoulders and giving me the same stern look she gave my daughter.
“Go. Take a shower, get dressed—do whatever you’ve gotta do. I’ve got things handled with Emma, and then we can head over to your parents.”
I look down at my outfit, a thick flannel and a pair of jeans, with a couple of smears of dirt along the knees, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some pine needles stuck to my shirt.
