The principal called while I was rinsing Letty’s cereal bowl and trying, for the forty-seventh consecutive morning, not to look at the empty hook by the door where Jonathan’s keys used to hang.
“Piper?” Principal Brennan’s voice was tight in the specific way of someone choosing words carefully because the wrong ones might cause damage. “You need to come in. Now.”
My hand slipped. The bowl hit the edge of the sink and cracked.
“Is Letty okay?”
“She’s safe.” Too fast. “But six men came in together this morning asking for her by name. My secretary called security.”
Three months earlier, a different careful male voice had told me that Jonathan was gone.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“They said they worked with Jonathan. At the plant. The second Letty heard his name she refused to leave the office. Piper, she’s physically safe but everyone in this building is emotional right now. You need to come.”
He hung up.
I stood at the sink with the water still running and looked at my phone and felt the specific fear that grief produces — the fear that never fully goes quiet, that waits near the surface of ordinary mornings for something to pull it back up.
Letty’s backpack was gone from the hook. Jonathan’s keys were still there because I hadn’t been able to take them down.
I grabbed my coat and ran.
What I Found When I Went to Her Room the Night Before
The night before, I had knocked on the bathroom door once.
“Letty? Honey, can I come in?”
No answer. But the light was on.
I opened the door.
My eleven-year-old daughter was standing in front of the mirror holding kitchen scissors in one hand and a rubber-band-tied bundle of her hair in the other. What remained on her head had been cut to her shoulders — jagged and uneven, clearly done by someone who had moved quickly before she could change her mind.
I looked at the floor first. Then at her. Then at the scissors.
“Letty. What did you do?”
She lifted her shoulders, bracing for something. “Don’t be mad.”
“I’m trying very hard to start somewhere before mad.”
That got the smallest exhale out of her. Then her eyes filled anyway.
“There’s a girl in my class named Millie,” she said. “She’s in remission, but her hair still hasn’t grown back right. Today in science, some boys laughed at her.” She stopped. “She cried in the bathroom, Mom. I was in the stall next to her and I heard her.”
She held up the bundle of hair, the rubber band holding it neatly the way she had probably watched a video tell her to do.
“I looked it up. Real hair can be donated for wigs. Mine isn’t enough by itself, but maybe it can help start one.”
“Baby.”
“I know it looks awful.”
Jonathan had lost his hair in clumps on his pillowcase in the third month of treatment. Letty had been nine years old and she had never said one word about it to him, but she had come to me after he was asleep and cried with her entire body. We had both sat on the bathroom floor for a long time. Neither of us had forgotten it.
I crossed the room, took the scissors out of her hand, and pulled her into my arms.
“No,” I said against her hair. “No, sweetheart. Your dad would be so proud of you right now. I know I am.”
She cried against my shoulder for a while. Then she leaned back and looked at herself in the mirror.
“Can we fix it? I look like a founding father.”
I laughed — actually laughed — for the first time in three months.
Teresa’s Salon and the Man Who Used to Work Eight Years With My Husband
An hour later, we were at Teresa’s salon on Elm, where Letty sat in a cape while Teresa studied the situation, sighed once with professional restraint, and got to work.
Luis, Teresa’s husband, came in partway through. He stopped in the doorway when he saw the rubber-banded bundle on the counter.
“What’s all this?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Letty said, from inside the cape: “A girl in my class needs a wig.”
Luis looked at her properly for the first time. Then he smiled at me in the mirror — not the polite social smile but the real kind, the one that contains something.
“Hi, Piper. That’s Jonathan’s girl, right there.”
Letty sat a fraction straighter under the cape. “You knew my dad?”
“Eight years,” Luis said. “We worked together every day.”
She touched the blunt ends of what was left of her hair. “Would he have liked this haircut?”
Teresa snorted from behind the scissors. “No decent human being supports a bathroom haircut performed without mirrors or training.”
“Teresa,” Letty said.
“But,” Teresa added, her voice softening, “he would have loved every reason behind it.”
Luis leaned against the station and looked at my daughter the way people look at children who remind them of someone they miss.
“Your dad couldn’t stand watching people suffer alone,” he said. “It made him restless. Like he’d physically rather do something, anything, than just watch someone hurt.”
Letty looked at her hands in her lap. “Millie tried to act like she didn’t care. But she did.”
“Of course she did,” I said.
Teresa stayed late. She worked on Letty’s hair and separately, using hair she had set aside from other donations, completed a wig before the next morning. She didn’t charge us for either.
