For a moment, she simply stared.
Then her face twisted, disbelief, anger, embarrassment all tangling together until she looked like she might combust.
“Eleanor.” My name came out like a warning. Like a curse.
“What,” she hissed, “have YOU done to your hair?”
Ava’s hand trembled in mine. I squeezed it gently.
“We did it together,” I said, louder now, steady. “She wanted to match me.”
“Match—?” My mother sputtered, color rising in her cheeks. “Have you lost your mind? She looks—she looks?—”
“Powerful,” Ava whispered behind me.
I could’ve kissed her.
My mother snapped, “She looks ridiculous! And you—Eleanor, you’re a mother. You’re thirty-seven years old. You cannot walk around looking like?—”
“A person?” I offered. “Who makes choices? Has autonomy? Enjoys color?”
“Like a delinquent!” she spat.
I swallowed the immediate sting, kept my voice level. “It’s just hair, Mom.”
“It is NOT ‘just hair’! It is appearance, Eleanor. It is reputation. It is what people see when they look at you.”
“Maybe I’m okay with that,” I said softly. “Maybe Ava is too.”
She opened her mouth again, outraged, but I stepped back between them, forming a literal wall of blue streaks.
“Pancakes,” I said to Ava, tilting my head toward the stove as if we weren’t standing in the middle of a battlefield. “Chocolate chips or blueberries?”
Ava blinked up at me, cautious, then quietly said, “Chocolate chips, please.”
My mother sputtered something else. I didn’t catch it. I didn’t need to. Because Ava’s shoulders had dropped, her breathing had steadied, and she was watching me with something like awe.
And maybe for the first time in years, I felt like I had actually done something right.
About an hour after dinner, Ava was in her room as I came down the stairs to my sister and my mother sitting on the couch looking perfectly Stepford. I kept on my way to the kitchen.
“Eleanor, will you join us for a minute?” I heard my sister call.
Tentatively, I turned and looked at them. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. I just have a present for my sister.”
I walked closer, picking up the pamphlet on the table. “It’s a retreat for women at my church. It’s in a month. I think you would really benefit from meeting the women there. They might be able to help get you back on the right path.”
I shook my head. “I’m not interested.”
“I’m afraid I must insist,” my mother said, perfectly pleasant.
“You can’t just insist I go to a Christian retreat for a church I don’t even attend.”
“Eleanor, it’s nondenominational. You don’t have to be a member of my church to attend. It would be good sister bonding,” Stacey said.
“I can’t just leave Ava.”
