I had brushed my daughter’s waist-length hair the night before. By five the next day, it was gone. She was crying, Grandma knew why, and neither of them would give me an answer.
Sunday nights in our house had a rhythm I could set my watch to.
The living room lamp glowed soft and gold, the TV murmured some quiet show neither of us watched. My daughter, Emily, sat cross-legged on the carpet between my knees while I dragged a soft brush through her hair.
Her hair was the kind strangers stopped to compliment in grocery lines. Thick, chestnut, spilling past her hips like something out of a storybook.
“Don’t. It’s Sunday.”
“Never cutting it, Mom,” she said that night, tilting her head back against my knee. “Not ever.”
“Not even a trim?”
“Not even a trim. You’re gonna have to bury me with it.”
I laughed, but she didn’t. At twelve, Emily meant the things she said.
I set the brush down and let my fingers sift through the ends. It was the only hour of my week that felt still.
Somewhere on the counter, my laptop pinged. I flinched.
“I have a deadline.”
“Don’t,” Emily said, without turning. “It’s Sunday.”
“I know, baby.”
But I already knew it was Melissa, my boss. She had a way of finding me at any hour, and I had a way of answering.
“Grandma’s taking me shopping tomorrow,” Emily said. “And ice cream.”
“That’ll be fun.”
My mother-in-law, Linda, drove Emily to school when I couldn’t, sat in the second row at every winter concert, and knew which friend was Maya from choir and which one was Sophie from math.
It was the last time I’d touch her hair like that.
With my husband traveling for work more weeks than he was home, Linda had quietly become the one Emily could always count on.
I told myself I was grateful, though sometimes gratitude felt uncomfortably close to jealousy.
“You could come.”
