“Six and a half,” I answered.
She grabbed my purse and sat in the salon chair next to me.
Alyssa twisted and clipped up my hair.
And as time wore on, I found it was astonishingly easy to pick up the pieces.
All you had to do was sit in a chair…
And have good women as company.
*
“Are you ready for it?”
It was hours later.
It was thousands of online shopping dollars later.
It was two sessions of makeup lessons (Alyssa’s salon did special occasion makeup and had a huge trunk full of it). This done in between me “cooking” and getting my hair washed out, Alyssa taking a client, then coming back to do a cut (with my side or back to the mirror), Alyssa taking another client, then coming back to do the style.
Now I was done.
Staring at the back wall, unable to see myself in any of the copious mirrors around me, I replied on a lie because I was anxious as anything, “Ready.”
She whirled me around.
I looked in the mirror and watched my face crumple.
“Girl, do not start crying!” Alyssa fairly shouted. “You’ll mess up your makeup.”
I took a breath in through my nose. I took another one in through my mouth.
And I stared at me.
Alyssa had cut in delicate layers, these making my now shining, gray-less, subtly highlighted hair less heavy. These layers were more distinct around my face where she’d feathered them down the sides and cut in a long bang that hung to my eyelashes and dipped lower at my temples. That and the increased blonde around my face giving my skin a healthy glow. And Josie’s expert makeup tactics that were all about proper use of color, perfect shading, all of this packing a punch, made my eyes pop even more than they used to do.
I looked younger, not decades, but definitely younger.
Mostly, I looked like I gave a shit. I looked like I cared. I looked like I was worth something…to me.
Worth taking care of.
Worth spoiling.
Worth everything.
“My husband who I loved more than anything on this earth, save my children, had an affair with a nurse at his hospital, put an engagement ring on her finger before he asked me for a divorce, and married her only days after we signed the papers,” I said to the mirror, my eyes on my eyes, something I’d thought when I was younger was my best feature.
Something that was my best feature again.
Finally.
“Oh shit,” Alyssa muttered.
I felt Josie lean into me.
I didn’t take my eyes from me.
“I lost it. Completely,” I stated. “I went absolutely insane and made them both pay for this betrayal at every opportunity. My kids saw it. It was unhealthy. They didn’t like it. It went on for years and got so bad my ex had to move across the country to escape me. He got a judge to award him my kids. They’re all here and I followed them to heal my family. My husband welcomed me to Magdalene by showing at my new house, shouting it down and threatening me. And last weekend, my children made it clear they hated me.”
“Amelia,” Josie whispered.
Alyssa sat down in the salon chair on my other side and grabbed my hand.
I looked between them and then back at the mirror.
“I messed up,” I whispered my admission.
Neither of them said anything.
“I kept doing it,” I went on.
They stayed silent.
“And now I’m trying with everything I have to fix what I broke but I’m afraid I’m going to fail because they’ve completely lost faith in me.”
My new friends remained quiet.
“I miss my family.” It came out almost like a whimper.
“Of course you do,” Alyssa said on a hand squeeze.
I kept going, “And I messed things up.”
“Of course you did not,” Alyssa declared, startling me, and I looked her way.
“I’m sorry?”
“So I take it you went batshit crazy when your husband left you,” she noted.
“Yes,” I confirmed humiliatingly.
“And those two, him and his new woman, don’t deserve that…how?” she asked.
I stared.
“Shit happens, babe,” she continued. “Marriages disintegrate for a lot of reasons. And you’re sittin’ in a chair that’s seen a lot of ugly tales told and those include women losin’ their men because those men fell outta love and into love with someone else. I don’t live those feelings so I can’t say if it’s okay or not for that shit to happen. What I can say is that it’s not okay for it to happen while anyone is still wearin’ a wedding band.”
“She’s right,” Josie added and I looked her way.
But I looked back to Alyssa when she again started speaking.