What She Gave Away
Every Sunday night for as long as I could remember, Emily sat on the floor between my knees.
It was the closest thing we had to a ritual, the two of us, and I say that having grown up in a family that observed actual rituals, church on Sundays, grace before dinner, candles on every birthday blown out with a wish made in genuine earnest. Those rituals had their place. But the Sunday night hair brushing was ours in a way that felt different from obligation or tradition. It was simply a thing we did because we loved doing it, because it was time that belonged to no one else, because in the particular arithmetic of a life with a kid who has school and activities and friends and the growing separateness of childhood advancing toward adolescence, it was forty minutes that still felt like when she was small.
Her hair was extraordinary. I say this not with the bias of a mother, or not only with the bias of a mother, but with the genuine recognition of something that was objectively remarkable. It was thick in the way that made hairdressers hold it in both hands and exhale slowly. It was a deep chestnut brown that caught light differently depending on the time of day, auburn in the afternoon sun, almost black in the evening, shot through with those natural streaks that people pay a great deal of money to approximate and usually cannot. And it was long. Past her hips, swaying when she walked, a source of enormous pride to her and, I will admit, to me, though I tried not to make it a thing I talked about too often because it was hers, not mine.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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