“How come you’re tired?”
“It may have something to do with running laps and doing push-ups.”
“You have to do push-ups? Really?” Jenny asked dubiously. “How many?”
“Too many,” Joanna answered. “And I have a mountain of homework to do as well, but Jenny you didn’t answer my question. Is something wrong?”
“No,” Jenny said finally, but the slight pause before she answered was enough to shift Joanna’s maternal warning light to a low orange glow.
“Jennifer Ann . . .” Joanna began.
“It was supposed to be a surprise.” Jenny’s blurted answer sounded on the verge of tear. “Grandma said you’d like it. I thought you would too.”
“Like what?”
“My hair,” Jenny wailed.
“What about your hair?” Joanna demanded.
“I got it cut,” Jenny sobbed. “Grandma Lathrop took me to see Helen Barco last night, and she cut it all off.”
A wave of resentment boiled up inside Joanna. How like her mother to pull a stunt like that! She had to go and drag Jenny off to Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty the moment Joanna’s back was turned. Just because Eleanor Lathrop lived for weekly visits to the beauty shop Vincent Barco had built for his wife in their former two-car garage didn’t mean everybody else did. In Eleanor Lathrop’s skewed view of the world, there was no crisis so terrible that a quick trip to a beautician wouldn’t fix.
Joanna, on the other hand, held beauty shops and beauticians at a wary arm’s length. Her distrust had its origins in the first time her mother had taken Joanna into a beauty shop for her own first haircut. Eleanor had been going to old Mrs. Boxer back then, in a now long-closed shop that had been next door to the post office. Joanna had walked into the place wearing beautiful, foot-long braids. She had emerged carrying her chopped-off braids in a little metal box and wearing her hair in what Mrs. Boxer had called an “adorable pixie.” Joanna had hated her pixie with an abiding passion. All these years later, she still couldn’t understand how a place that had nerve enough to call itself a beauty shop could produce something that ugly.
“It’ll grow out, you know,” Joanna said, hoping offer to Jenny some consolation. “It’ll take six months or so, but it will grow out.”
“But it’s so frizzy,” Jenny was saying. “The kids t school all made fun of me, especially the boys.”
“Frizzy?” Joanna asked. “Don’t tell me. You mean Grandma Lathrop had Helen Barco give you a permanent?”
“It was just supposed to be wavy,” Jenny wailed. She really was crying now, as though her heart was broken. “But it’s awful. You should see it!”
Joanna had always loved the straight, smooth texture of her daughter’s hair, which was so like Andy’s. Had Eleanor been available right then, Joanna would have ripped into her mother and told her to mind her own damn business. As it was though, there was only a heartbroken Jenny sobbing on the phone.
“That’ll grow out, too,” Joanna said patiently. “Ask Grandma Brady to try putting some of her creme rinse on it. That should help. And remember, Helen Barco and Grandma Lathrop may call it
permanent, but it’s not. It’s only temporary.”
