—
IT HAD BEENPASTORMIKE’Swife, Earlene, who first mentioned the problem to George: Lil’s hair. It was unmanageable.
He, too, had noticed that her baby-fine curls had somehow become matted in places. He had tried to brush it, but the bristles caught on the snarls and Lil would start to cry. Then Earlene stopped him when he was cleaning out the gutters of the church on a summer day that was easily a hundred degrees. She stood below the ladder with a glass of lemonade for him. He thanked her, and as he drank, she looked off in the distance to where Lil and some of the other kids from the church were playing on a swing set. “You know, one of mine had hair like that. Just as uncontrollable as she was.” Earlene laughed. “I used to wash her hair in the tub at night with shampoo and conditioner and braid it wet, so it couldn’t get tangled while she slept.” She took the empty glass from him and smiled. “Don’t you go getting sunstroke on me, hear?”
Earlene had the sweetest way about her, finding ways to make suggestions without being critical. George had never met a woman like that. Certainly his mama wasn’t that way, and if his wife had been more like Earlene, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten so angry all the time.
That night when he gave Lil her bath, he told her she was going to Daddy’s Hair Salon. He tugged a comb through her damp hair, working conditioner into the places where the tangles were tough, and razoring away one spot that had turned into the beginning of a dreadlock. Then he divided her hair into three sections, clumsily crossing his fists over each other to make a lopsided braid. He secured it with a rubber band, and tucked her in.
The next morning when he unwound the braid, Lil’s hair spilled over her shoulders like a shining waterfall.
“Daddy,” she said that night, “braid it again.”
George bought hair ribbons at the drugstore, and elastics that didn’t catch on Lil’s fine hair. It became a twice-daily ritual: he would sit her on a kitchen stool and stand behind her, brushing her hair rhythmically, and braiding it for bed. In the morning, he’d comb through the waves. As he got braver, he made a part, and fashioned pigtails. He learned how to pull her hair back into a barrette. He went to the library and watched videos on the free Internet about how to do a French braid, a bun, a fishtail.
There was no question that he took pride on Sundays, when at church, mothers came up to him and complimented him on Lil. Or when people were surprised to find out that she was being raised by a single father. He was a man who’d been told he’d done wrong all his life, and this was balm on a wound. But what George loved the most was the magic that happened between him and Lil when it was just the two of them, running the brush through her curls. George knew he was a quiet man, not given to, well, chitchat. But when he was standing behind his daughter, with his hands in her hair, she talked to him. And he started to talk back.
They talked about silly things: whether they’d rather have a fire pole in the house to get from upstairs to downstairs, or a swimming pool full of Jell-O; what they’d buy if they won the Powerball, if Batman would kick Wonder Woman’s butt, or vice versa. There was something about standing behind Lil and not making eye contact that made talking easier for them both, even when the conversation turned tougher—standing up to the girls at church who bullied her for wearing the same dress every Sunday; understanding that a boy who stuffed a frog down her shirt might have actually been trying to get her to notice him; talk of her mama.
George lived for those moments, twice a day, when he did his daughter’s hair.
Then one night, when Lil was fourteen, she didn’t come into the kitchen after her shower. George found her in her room, her elbows twisted behind her head, weaving her hair into a braid. “It seems silly for you to do it,” she said, “when I can do it myself.”
George didn’t know how to say it wasn’t about that, but about the moments he spent with her. He didn’t know how to explain that each sweep of a brush could jog something in a teenager that she didn’t even know she was holding inside. He didn’t know how to say that seeing her fix her own hair filled him with a terrible heaviness, as if this was the beginning of the end.
So he said nothing at all.
If Lil had still let him braid her hair, would he be here, now? Or would she have realized that there was nothing she could do or say that would make her seem less perfect to him? Would she have known that whatever knot she had gotten into, they would untangle together?
He had put down the telephone receiver because it hurt his ear. It was on speakerphone now, and he was pacing in front of the desk where you signed in. But Hugh McElroy had stopped talking, and so had George, both lost in their thoughts.
“You still there?” George asked.
“Of course,” Hugh replied.
And then, from somewhere behind the desk, he heard a sneeze.
—
IMMEDIATELY,IZZY SNEEZED, TOO.SHEfaked a series of sneezes, an allergic jag that should have won her an Oscar. If she could convince him that it had been her, instead of the two people hiding in the supply closet behind the desk, then maybe they would stay safe.
If the shooter found them, he’d also realize that Izzy had lied to his face when she told him it was empty.
He spun around, stalked to the closet, and yanked open the door.
—
“GEORGE?” HUGH SAID.HE COULDhear commotion and shouting and something clattering. “George, talk to me.” His heart began to pound.What the fuck is going on?
Hugh heard a grunt. A scuffle. “Get up. Getup!” George yelled.
“George, what’s going on?” Hugh tried again. He swallowed his worst suspicions. “Are you all right? Did something happen?”
There was a crash and a cry and then Wren’s voice:No, no, no…don’t!
All of the air left Hugh’s lungs. He was paralyzed, terrified for her. His only hope lay in calming George down before he did the unthinkable.
“George,” he urged, “I can help. I can—”
