Chapter 1: Baby’s First Haircut
The first thing I saw was the hair on the kitchen floor.
Long, light-brown spirals of it, scattered around the legs of the high stool like someone had shaken out a doll. Then I saw my daughter.
Lily was sitting at Linda’s kitchen table in her pink star sweatshirt, eating a cookie, kicking her sneakers against the rungs. She grinned at me with chocolate on her chin.
Her curls were gone.
Not trimmed. Gone. Somebody had taken the ringlets that used to bounce halfway down her back and hacked them off above her ears. The left side was shorter than the right. In the back there was a bald-looking patch where the scissors had gone in too close.
“Mama!” Lily said. “I got a haircut like Grandma!”
I don’t remember putting my purse down. I remember my hand finding the back of a chair and holding on.
“Isn’t she adorable?” my mother-in-law said.
Linda stood at the counter in her lilac twinset and pearls, beaming at me like she’d just pulled a perfect pie out of the oven. Her frosted bob didn’t move when she tilted her head. It never did.
“Linda,” I said. “What did you do?”
“Oh, don’t start. I gave her a little tidy-up. She couldn’t see past all that mess.” She waved her hand at the floor. “I’ll sweep. Don’t worry about the floor.”
The floor.
I’d been gone two hours. One hour and fifty-one minutes, actually, because the radiologist ran early. It was a follow-up mammogram, the kind they call you back for and say it’s probably nothing, and it was probably nothing. I’d spent the whole drive home crying with relief in the car.
Then I walked in here.
“I asked you,” I said. My voice was very quiet. “I asked everyone. Her birthday pictures are in two weeks. Nobody touches her hair.”
“And I didn’t touch it, I cut it, which is what grandmothers have done since the beginning of time.” Linda laughed. “Kate, honey, it’s hair. It grows. Oh! Wait. You have to see this.”
She went to the dining room hutch and came back with a thick scrapbook bound in pink linen. I’d seen it before. Linda kept a book for every grandchild, full of hospital bracelets and birthday cards and photos she’d printed at the drugstore.
She laid it open on the table in front of me like she was presenting a cake.
There was a fresh page. The glue was still shiny. At the top, in her loopy gold gel pen, she’d written:
Lily’s First Haircut, by Grandma!
Below it, under a strip of clear tape, was one perfect curl. The first one. The longest one, from the front, the one that always fell over Lily’s eyebrow when she ran.
Next to it was a Polaroid of Lily on the stool with a towel around her neck, and Linda behind her with a pair of silver sewing scissors, smiling into the camera.
“I got the whole thing,” Linda said proudly. “Before and after. She was such a good girl. She didn’t even cry.”
I looked at the curl under the tape.
My own mother had curls like that. She died when I was pregnant. The first time Lily’s hair started to spiral, I sat on the bathroom floor with her in the tub and cried, because there she was. My mom, coming back in a two-year-old’s hair.
I’d told Linda that story. At Thanksgiving. She’d patted my hand.
“That was supposed to be mine,” I said.
Linda’s smile flickered. “What was?”
“Her first haircut. Her first curl. That was supposed to be mine.”
“Well, you weren’t here.” She closed the scrapbook halfway, gently, the way you’d tuck in a child. “And honestly, Kate, if I’d waited for you, she’d have gone to kindergarten looking like a bird’s nest. Somebody had to do it.”
Lily held her cookie up to me. “Mama, you want a bite?”
I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t.
I reached across the table and opened the scrapbook again. Flat. I put my palm on the page, right next to the strip of tape.
Linda’s hand shot out and landed on the other side of the book.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, still smiling. “That’s my book.”
We stood there with the scrapbook between us, both of us holding on, and my daughter laughing at the crumbs in her lap.
