Now he thought they didn’t get along?
She tried to remember the last time they’d spent a good amount of time doing nothing but be together. It was a month and a half ago, mid-August. They had a standing date for the Perseid meteor shower; every year they would hike to the highest point in the Jackson area—her dad carrying the telescope and Wren lugging the tent. They’d pull an all-nighter, watching the show that the sky put on for them, and then have pancakes at a diner at sunrise, and sleep the rest of the day away. But this year Wren had been invited to the movies with Mina and they’d heard that Ryan was going to be there with a group of guys from school. She and Mina had made an elaborate plan about how to best get Wren to sit beside Ryan in the theater, and to share a bucket of popcorn. Maybe their hands would brush. Maybe he would put his arm around her.
Wren almost backed out of the meteor overnight. She in fact had gone to break the news to her dad when she found him in the basement, wrestling with an inflatable sleeping pad. “I figure after all these years we deserve some creature comfort,” he said. “No more stones underneath our sleeping bags.” He looked up at her. “What’s up?”
She didn’t have the heart to cancel. So she called Mina and told her she had to do something with her dad. And it all worked out, because Ryan asked her to go to the movies alone a week later, and he didn’t just put his arm around her—he kissed her, during the credits, and Wren had felt the way she imagined a star did when it exploded.
On the night of the Perseid meteor shower, Wren and her father had hiked to their usual spot and pitched the tent and spread the bedrolls and arranged the sleeping bags. Her dad cooked hot dogs over a campfire on sticks, and they roasted marshmallows. They set up the telescope, and Wren scanned the night sky.
“Do you remember when I showed you Betelgeuse,” her father said, “and you asked which came first, the star or the movie?”
“I was, like, seven,” Wren protested.
He laughed.
She stepped away from the scope and stretched out beside him. “It’s dying, isn’t it?”
“Betelgeuse? Yeah. It’s a red giant. So it’s cooling.”
“That’s kind of sad.”
Her father grinned. “You won’t be around to see it die, if that makes you feel any better.”
“I guess if you have to go, a supernova’s a flashy way to do it.” One day Betelgeuse would explode in a tremendous spark of light, leaving behind a planetary nebula. And as all that dust and gas cleared, all that would remain of it would be a tiny white dwarf star. A core, without fire.
“Nothing lasts forever,” her father said.
She and her father had seen plenty of white stars through the telescope. She wondered which ones from her childhood were gone now, and whether they were actually dead, or if they were just too faint to emit light. Did you have to be missed to exist?
When the first streak of light had grazed the sky, she’d sat up, breathless. What followed was a visual symphony, strafing the dark, as if someone had shaken the constellations like dice and rolled them across the night. “Sometimes I forget how beautiful it is,” she whispered.
“Me too,” her father said, his voice tight. When she turned he wasn’t looking at the meteors. He was looking at her.
If she died, she would be missed.
Wren felt her eyes well up. What had she been doing this morning that was so important that she hadn’t spent an extra five minutes at the table with her father, telling him she loved him? Or, for that matter, about Ryan? Or that lately she woke up with the blankets tangled around her feet and her heart racing because she was afraid of never finding her tribe in high school and that she’d bomb her PSATs and never go to college and suddenly everything was happening too fast.
Last year for her birthday, her father had gotten her tickets to a Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture. They had traveled to Atlanta to hear him speak. The astrophysicist had talked about dark energy. It was a real, measurable pressure in the universe that scientists didn’t truly understand yet, which was forcing the universe to expand beyond our horizon. One day, he said, astronomers would only be able to track the stars of the Milky Way, and not other galaxies—they would have moved out of sight, like the last chapter of a book that had been torn away. Maybe we were already only seeing part of the story, already missing chapters.
You don’t know what you don’t know, Neil deGrasse Tyson had said, a year ago.
But now, for the first time, Wren really understood.
—
IT HAD BEEN PASTOR MIKE’S wife, Earlene, who first mentioned the problem to George: Lil’s hair. It was unmanageable.
He, too, had noticed that her baby-fine curls had somehow become matted in places. He had tried to brush it, but the bristles caught on the snarls and Lil would start to cry. Then Earlene stopped him when he was cleaning out the gutters of the church on a summer day that was easily a hundred degrees. She stood below the ladder with a glass of lemonade for him. He thanked her, and as he drank, she looked off in the distance to where Lil and some of the other kids from the church were playing on a swing set. “You know, one of mine had hair like that. Just as uncontrollable as she was.” Earlene laughed. “I used to wash her hair in the tub at night with shampoo and conditioner and braid it wet, so it couldn’t get tangled while she slept.” She took the empty glass from him and smiled. “Don’t you go getting sunstroke on me, hear?”
Earlene had the sweetest way about her, finding ways to make suggestions without being critical. George had never met a woman like that. Certainly his mama wasn’t that way, and if his wife had been more like Earlene, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten so angry all the time.
That night when he gave Lil her bath, he told her she was going to Daddy’s Hair Salon. He tugged a comb through her damp hair, working conditioner into the places where the tangles were tough, and razoring away one spot that had turned into the beginning of a dreadlock. Then he divided her hair into three sections, clumsily crossing his fists over each other to make a lopsided braid. He secured it with a rubber band, and tucked her in.
The next morning when he unwound the braid, Lil’s hair spilled over her shoulders like a shining waterfall.
“Daddy,” she said that night, “braid it again.”
George bought hair ribbons at the drugstore, and elastics that didn’t catch on Lil’s fine hair. It became a twice-daily ritual: he would sit her on a kitchen stool and stand behind her, brushing her hair rhythmically, and braiding it for bed. In the morning, he’d comb through the waves. As he got braver, he made a part, and fashioned pigtails. He learned how to pull her hair back into a barrette. He went to the library and watched videos on the free Internet about how to do a French braid, a bun, a fishtail.