size of a Kennedy fifty-cent piece. She easily covered it with al the shiny hair she had left, but her fingers worried the spot, making her seem nervous and old.
“The neighborhood is going down,” she said. “Seventeen years ago, these were nice apartments. I was never worried about checking my mailbox. I used to walk around at two, three o’clock in the morning.”
“I know, Mother.”
“I hope you meet a good man when you go to Mount Holyoke. I am not saying that you need to find a Rockefel er or a footbal star. Just someone who wil understand that you have obligations, who won’t mind helping out a bit. I can’t live here by myself.”
When my mother’s hair was stolen, I had been watching
“Can’t James help us find another place?” I asked her.
“Your father has promised to sponsor your education,” she said. “That’s the best he can do. Bigamy is expensive.”
I expected her to reward her own joke with a dry, angry laugh, but she just held her hand over my own, pressing my fingertips onto the nubby patch.
“Don’t forget me,” she said as I rocked her on my lap, awash in a briny mix of guilt and gratitude.
BUT IN THE weeks fol owing, I grew tired of her unhappiness, the impossible weight of it.
“It wil grow back,” I said. I grabbed a handful of my own hair, so much like hers, and said, “I would give you some of mine if I could.”
“Don’t try and act like you don’t understand what’s going on here,” she said.
I spent as much time as I could away from the apartment. I was sick of my mother’s compulsive tidiness, as though we were always expecting guests. I wanted to live in a house with wal s painted in various shades of blue and green, instead of the eggshel hue that screamed renter. I used some of my summer stipend to buy a MARTA pass, so I could have unlimited access to the 66 Lynhurst. Marcus was home, but packing as he prepared to move to Chapel Hil . Ruth Nicole Elizabeth was stil his girlfriend, but he and I spent time together in the mornings; by lunch we were done and I walked across the street to Ronalda’s.
When I needed her to, she smoothed hickeys from my neck and chest. Cal ing Marcus “Count Chockula,” she careful y pressed the blemish with the teeth of her comb, dispersing the blood gathered under my skin. When she’d done al she could, I covered the marks with foundation and said,
“Want to play on the phone?”
I kept Laverne’s business card in my purse, even though Ronalda and I had both memorized the number; the shiny finish had broken down with the oil of my dirty hands. The card was from the stack my mother hid in the kitchen, behind the flour canister. I liked the logo — a languid fox lazing across the letters. MRS. LAVERNE WITHERSPOON, PROPRIETRESS. “Playing on the phone” meant that we would cal the Pink Fox pretending to be potential customers. Ronalda asked how much for a press-and-curl. Chaurisse, at least we thought it was her, said twenty-eight dol ars with a cut.
Ronalda said thank you and hung up. “Too rich for my blood,” she said. I cal ed once from school. “I want to know how much it is to get a Jheri curl?”
This time, I was pretty sure I was talking to Laverne. “That depends. Would you like to come in for a consultation?”
Ronalda unplugged the telephone from her parents’ room, took it down to the basement, and plugged it into the empty jack in her stepmother’s study. We got in the habit of cal ing several times a week, disguising our voices and asking about elaborate services. “How much is it to just get a press without a curl?” “What is the cost of relaxer on virgin hair?” “What about finger waves?” “Do you take walk-ins?”
“That’s what we should do,” Ronalda said. “We should just walk in one day.”
“No,” I told her. “No way. If I were to get caught over there, that would be the end of my family.”
Halfway through that miserable summer, Raleigh won a local contest for photography that earned him a four- hundred-dol ar prize; the winning photo, taken in the days after Miss Bunny’s death, was displayed in Greenbriar Mal for sixty days. The photo focused on Laverne as she was preparing herself to give Miss Bunny her very last hairdo. In the image, Laverne is slackfaced with sorrow while the straightening comb steams on the undertaker’s hot plate. In the background is Chaurisse, wearing a plastic apron and looking over her shoulder to where Miss Bunny lies, out of the frame, lifeless and not yet adorned. My mother visited the prizewinning photo, standing close enough that her breath mottled the glass.
“There is something beautiful about that,” she said. “Laverne is not my favorite person, but nobody can say that she didn’t do her duty.”
I also looked at the photograph, but my attention was on my sister. She was getting prettier as we grew older. Her features seemed to be settling into her face.
“What would happen to me if you were to die?” I asked my mother.
“You’re almost eighteen. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“But what if you were to die tomorrow?”
“I won’t die tomorrow.”
My mother and I bought ice-cream cones from Baskin Robbins and ate them as we watched people take in the image. The caption read only going to glory, so people didn’t know what to make of it. “I can’t believe they gave him four hundred dol ars for that” was a common response. Some other people took a moment to just stare in silence and then went away disquieted.
“This is probably not the best idea,” I said to my mother.
