weeks she’d been watching Rolf’s clients traipse past her display windows, looking, if not gorgeous, at the very least fresh and totally transformed. During the lull after lunch today, Mya had flipped the Closed sign in the window and crept upstairs. Shutting the door on a gust of wind and the bawl of a far-off foghorn that sounded suspiciously like the voice of reason, she’d heard herself say, “Surprise me.”
Surprise me? Had she lost her mind?
Mya loved new trends: clunky-heeled shoes and boots of all kinds, low-slung pants and the latest jewelry. But other than an occasional trim, she never changed her hairstyle. Until today.
Even the window-shoppers and early tourists who’d never seen her before had watched her closely the rest of the day. Those who knew her were downright blunt.
“Whoa,” her after-school clerk exclaimed.
“You cut your hair!” the woman who owned the bookstore next door had said, in case Mya didn’t know.
Joe, the kindly deliveryman said, “Don’t worry. It’ll grow back.”
By the end of the afternoon, Mya had been ready to tell even the paying customers to stick their opinions. The old Mya would have. But the new Mya didn’t. The new and improved, cool, calm and collected Mya counted to ten and clenched so hard she nearly cracked a tooth.
Looking at her reflection in the safety of her own living room, she pulled at the wayward tresses. It was no use. She turned her back on the baroque mirror. Beseeching her two closest friends, she said, “What do you think?”
“Did you consult the personal emotional tides of the moon chart I gave you last Christmas?” Suzette Lewis asked.
Mya all but dropped her face into her hands. Until she’d met Suzette, the only thing she’d known about her astrological sign was that she was an Aries. “Do I look like I consulted anything?”
Suzette studied the uneven blond tendrils encircling Mya’s head. Petite and at times just a little too perky, Suzette said, “It isn’t that bad.”
Coming from Sunny Suzie, that meant it wasn’t that good, either. The accompanying smile was a bold-faced lie.
“Claire?” Mya asked the other woman.
As droll as Suzette was sunny, Claire O’Brien wore her dark hair long and loose, much the way she wore her clothes. Unlike Mya and Suzette, Claire wasn’t from Maine. Originally from upstate New York, there was something mysterious about her. Mya had never had a truer friend, or a more honest one, which Claire proved when she said, “In the future, I wouldn’t change your hairstyle the same week you become engaged.”
Suzette dropped into an overstuffed chair. “I still can’t believe you’re engaged.” Not many thirty-year-old women could pull off that whine. “I’m the one who’s always dreamed of marrying a doctor. It was my appendix that ruptured.”
Fighting queasiness, Mya muttered, “Don’t say ruptured.”
Pouting, Suzette said, “Fine. It was my appendix that expanded violently, and who was just coming off duty in E.R.? Only the best-looking doctor in the English-speaking world.”
Mya stopped tugging at her hair long enough to admit that Jeffrey was incredibly good-looking, although that wasn’t why she’d started seeing him.
“You’re right, Suzette,” Claire said from the sofa. “It was terribly inconsiderate of Mya to answer her phone in the dead of night when you called, sobbing. And it was thoughtless of her to throw on her clothes, brave a blinding snowstorm and her fear of hospitals and drive you to the Emergency Room, then wait not only until you came out of surgery, but until you were out of recovery, too.”
“Gosh, when you put it that way, maybe Mya does deserve that two-karat rock more than I do, even though I am the one who had emergency surgery. But Claire, she doesn’t even care about diamonds.”
Mya could only shrug, because it was true. Most of the time, she forgot the ring was there, which explained the fast little jolt she felt each time she caught the flash of it in her peripheral vision. She’d only been engaged for four days. Surely, she would get used to it.
“Where is the groom-to-be, anyway?” Suzette asked.
The door opened, and the three friends turned with varying degrees of interest. Mya was the only one who groaned, for it wasn’t Jeffrey at all.
“The cavalry to the rescue,” Claire said under her breath.
Never one to waste the spotlight, Mya’s mother lowered her umbrella and beamed all around. “Everyone I’ve talked to today has had it, HAD IT with this weather. That’s some dice-job, Mya.”
What little hair was left on the back of Mya’s neck stood on end. “This dice-job cost me eighty bucks.”
The older woman answered without missing a beat. “Which only proves what I’ve always said. Just because something’s more expensive doesn’t mean it’s better. Now let’s have a closer look.”
Mya had little choice but to succumb to the inspection that followed. After much tongue clicking and head shaking, her mother rummaged through her big, red purse for a pair of red-tipped scissors. Red was her mother’s favorite color. She wore red nail polish, red lipstick, red blush on her cheeks, red shoes, red everything. Even her ’95 Impala was red.
“Well? What do you think?” Mya asked.
“I think you paid too much. I only charge my customers twenty dollars for a shampoo, cut and blow job.”
Suzette gasped. Claire smirked. And Mya said, “I believe you mean blow-dry, Mom.”
“That’s what I said.”
Mya lifted her eyes heavenward. On her worst days, it behooved her to admit, with great lamentation, that it was still slightly, minutely, yet terrifyingly possible that she would become her mother.
Of course, that was her mother’s dream. “Let’s go to the kitchen. I think I can fix this.”
And the thing was, Mya was sure she could.
Millicent Donahue owned a hair salon, aptly named Millie’s Hair Salon. Despite the fact that the term had gone out of style in the eighties, she still called herself a beautician. For years the salon had been a bone of contention between mother and daughter. Eventually they’d called a truce of sorts. Now, Mya needn’t feel obligated to have her hair trimmed at her mother’s salon, and her mother needn’t feel obligated to shop at Mya’s store. Not that Mya carried red sweatshirts with glitter and sequins, anyway.
Mya pulled out a chair, her mother started clipping, Claire uncorked the wine and Suzette began unwrapping the trays of food she’d gotten from her favorite deli over on Market Street. The wind howled and rain pelted the windows. Sitting in her warm kitchen, surrounded by these quirky women who loved her, Mya relaxed. She liked her house. Built some eighty years ago of stone quarried from the area, it was a good house, Cape Cod in style, small and sturdy with a steep roof and a bay window overlooking the street. Oh, it wasn’t on Keepers Island, and it was old and drafty, but it had character and was close enough to the Atlantic to feel like home.
“I thought Jeffrey was going to be here,”
