Blind Shady Bend. Adina Sara

from breaking through. “It’s privileged information and she swore me to secrecy but I’ll tell you and you got to promise not to breathe a word. She murdered her husband some thirty years back, claimed it was self-defense, and just got released from prison. Out on good behavior she assured me, and said she’s looking to get married again. I gave her your number.”

      “Fuck you Lundale,” he said, by way of goodbye.

      3.

      “GIRL, WHAT’S GOING ON?” Darlene was practically screaming into my message machine after I missed my second hair appointment. The first time, the day after I got my big news, I overslept, plain and simple. And then again the next week, I was headed to her but stopped off first at the hardware store, just for the hell of it, and got caught up in the drip irrigation department. It’s one of those little things I still do for myself, fiddle between overhead sprays and quarter inch drips. The guy there knows me already; when he sees me coming he goes the opposite direction. I don’t care. It’s something I can do, something I enjoy doing, rearranging my drip lines. For some reason, the news of Ray’s land got me thinking about irrigation. There I was, so busy pricing things I don’t even need, that I missed another appointment with Darlene. Worse things have happened.

      My hair’s getting a bit frazzled, the grey beginning to peek through but it’s not so bad, really. I shake my head and feel a new weight of curl on my neck. I can grab handfuls, softer now that I’ve washed out all the gunk she sprays on to keep it neat. Darlene has been trying unsuccessfully to smooth out my hair for twenty years at least, thick, painful, ugly rollers, stinky liquids that stung my skin and one that made my nose bleed.

      Darlene was never one for innovation, though she has provided a fair share of comfort, year after year, in the form of thick soft hands and endless chatter. Her ex-husband’s new girlfriend, her neighbor’s new twins, her son-in-law, oh that son-in-law, and I would close my eyes, let the hot water, soft finger tips and gentle pull of scalp lull me into a sense of being genuinely cared for.

      “You’re going to look like a banshee,” she advised, when I told her I was sick of getting color. Darlene cares about me, she does. She came by to visit when my back went out last year, brought muffins and a pot of soup she claims she made but I don’t believe it. Tasted canned.

      I raked my fingers through the dried-out tufts, weighing it against that tortuous two-and-a-half hour procedure resulting in an itchy nose and blue streaks down my neck. Left to its own devices, my hair was really a mat of weeds. They say vanity is one of the last things to go and I was beginning to feel it, finally, waving goodbye.

      “Let me know if you’re coming next Tuesday,” Darlene’s voice screamed. “I’ve got you down for 10:00. Girl, I hope you’re gonna show up this time.”

      Darlene called everybody girl, even Harry. Harry has the 9:30, right before me. He liked to stick around and talk to her while she spread the purple gunk in my hair. He made me nervous.

      “Goodbye Harry” were the only words I’d ever spoken to him. I didn’t like him seeing me undone like that, but it wasn’t me he was looking at anyhow. I could see his reflection in the mirror, standing behind Darlene, eyeing her backside like he was about to bite into a steak sandwich.

      “How do you stand him?” I have asked her but Darlene just ignored me, already busy pulling at my curls, intent on her next masterpiece. For all the attention she has given me over the years, nothing ever changed. Same mousy brown curls, short on the neck, and that one wave over my left earlobe, dipped and fussed over with her two fingers, tenderly, like she was dropping one last dollop of icing on a cake. Sometimes I imagined myself flat in a coffin, eyes sealed shut, skin sallow, but that soft mousy brown wave dipped over my ear, unfazed by the change in my circumstance. Darlene’s signature.

      Darlene’s about the closest thing I have to family, sad to say. I started going to her right around the time Mother got sick. Darlene listened to every gory detail. She could have shaved me bald and I would have kept coming. Saw me through the whole mess of it and a long mess it was.

      The first stroke left Mother shaky and the next one left her frozen up and down one side so all she could do was clasp one hand to her chest and look halfway up, her right cheek and eyebrow raised toward that God of hers, who was still not listening. Four years of that, Pa acting like nothing had changed, just plodding along like he always did, stopping from time to time to fluff her pillows or move a straw closer to her lips so she wouldn’t have to strain so hard to suck. He called that helping. I did the dirty work but that’s what daughters do.

      Going to Darlene helped me take my mind off nursing Mother. Other than my regular weekly hair appointments, my days were filled with picking up prescriptions, Digitoxin, Zestril, Pepto Bismol, Heparin, Diflucan which didn’t help Pa’s ringworm one bit, then over to Anderson’s for All Bran, fudge bars (they really perked her up), snail pellets, Raisinettes (my meager addiction), and sugar-free tapioca for Mother, all of which I could do with my eyes practically closed.

      And then it was just me and Pa. He lived on past her for more years than I’d like to remember. Like a couple of robot ghosts passing through antiseptic hallways, we shouted innocuous instructions “remember to pull out the recycling, it’s Friday,” “remember to pick up your Zestril its almost empty,” “why don’t you do it long as you’re going out” and so I would. He did all right for himself. Made it to 89. His heart finished him off finally. I could hear the breathing during the night, louder and louder, though he never complained. His heaving kept me awake sometimes and I’d lie awake wondering how many more years of this do I have?

      There isn’t much to say about my life. When I look around at what little there is, only the leggy, lovely fuchsia, sprawled alongside my front doorway, seems to keep my interest, only because it refuses to die. Each year it grows bigger and bolder, shooting red firecracker flowers out between dried winter limbs. Splaying itself over its tame background, it is the singular feature of my entire surroundings that holds any possibility of surprise.

      “Honey, is everything all right? Look here, you’ve got some gray coming in.” She said it like it’s a disease.

      “I’ve decided to go grey,” I blurted out.

      “You’re what?”

      “And maybe grow it out a little longer, not so short in back.”

      “Are you all right?” she asked again, her voice straining to understand.

      “I’m sorry about not calling. Time just gets away from me.”

      Darlene tapped my shin, “Uncross your legs,” she reminded me and I obeyed. What choice did I have with the scissors pointed at my brow? I could tell she wasn’t happy with me.

      A curve of brown fell into my palm. My real color hadn’t been brown, but the kind of black that turned reddish in the sunlight. And so thick. No hair clip was wide enough to hold it all up. Even when I fastened it with heavy elastic bands, I was always having to blow stray strands away from my mouth.

      I was never what anyone would call a beauty, but now and again a strange woman would stop me in the market, pick up a handful of my hair like she was considering taking it with her. “What I wouldn’t give,” she’d whisper. It happened more than once.

      While Darlene snipped and fussed, I finally opened up and told her about my latest news, how it got me to thinking about Ray again. She had heard bits and pieces about him over the years, what little I cared to tell. She knew about all the investigating I had done to find him, driving up and down and around the area searching for him, placing ads, calling what friends he had but no one turned up and no one knew a thing. Pa told me not to bother, it was good riddance for him. And Mother did the only thing she was good at, shaking her head slow from side to side then looking up to the sky, like she was trying to listen to something God might be telling her. But He knew about as much as we did.

      Darlene kept pushing me not to give up. Twenty years was nothing. She watched those TV shows and told me how on Cold Case Files, a woman found her missing husband working on a road crew twenty-five years after he had