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“To me.” She picked up a section and examined it. “How much are we taking off?”
“Just enough. I want it down today.” She wasn’t sure why she said that. She almost always pinned it back up at the salon door. “I’ve been wearing it up too much.”
Judy met her eyes in the mirror. “Down is nice,” she said, neutrally. “Suits you.”
They talked, about the festival, the kids, the panel display, Lauren’s sad sandwich situation. The salon moved around them in its rhythm. The other conversations wove in and out.
Judy worked in comfortable silence for a few minutes. Then she nodded at the sketchbook sticking out of the bag Allison had set on the counter. “You draw?”
“I teach art.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Allison laughed, and then, because the salon had that effect on people, she told her. About the lake from her porch every morning before school, the same gap in the same spruce trees. About how long it had been since she had made anything that was only for her, and how she was starting to again, a page at a time, and how it felt a little like getting into cold water. Bracing first. Then wonderful.
Judy listened with the scissors going. “Good,” she said when Allison finished, in the same voice she had used for the mountain air. A professional assessment. “You look like somebody who’s doing that.”
Allison looked at herself in the mirror, her dark hair loose around her shoulders now, a thing she almost never let it do, and she looked different with it down, or felt different, she wasn’t sure which. She looked like a version of herself that wasn’t in a hurry.
“So,” Judy said.
“No,” Allison said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You were about to.”
Judy picked up a comb. “Shane came in last week for a cut,” she said, in the tone of someone sharing purely factual information. “Quieter than usual. That’s all. I’m not saying anything.”
“I know, Judy.”
“Good.” Brisk professional air. “Deep conditioning. Yes or no.”
“Yes,” Allison said.
Judy smiled at her in the mirror, warm and knowing and entirely without apology, and Allison looked at herself again, at her hair down around her shoulders, at her own expression, which was doing something she wasn’t sure she had a word for yet.
Something growing. Something she couldn’t quite pin down or name or decide what to do with.
Something that had been getting quieter and more certain at the same time, the way important things did, the way the seasons changed in Merrybrook, not all at once but gradually, until one morning you looked up and it was just different.
* * *
She walked home through the November afternoon, her hair down, loose around her shoulders in the cold air, and it felt different from how it usually felt, the cold touching the back of her neck where it was usually covered, her whole face more open to the day somehow.
Main Street had shifted with the month. The harvest displays were gone from the storefronts, replaced with something quieter, pine boughs in some windows, the first suggestions of the season coming, a warmth in the lit interiors that was more pronounced against the gray afternoon outside. The Brook had candles on the tables now. Taylor’s window at Wild Rose had arrangements of dried things, winter things, berry branches and evergreen. The smell of the town in November was woodsmoke more constant, something baked more frequent, the smell of a place closing in around itself in the good way.
She was passing the hardware store.
She slowed down.
Through the window she could see the organized rows of shelving, Doug at the counter, and in the workshop doorway at the rear, a shape that was Shane, carrying something, moving with the economy she’d come to associate with him. Nothing wasted.
She stood on the sidewalk and looked through the glass and let herself feel, for a moment, the thing she’d been half feeling for weeks. The unnamed thing. The growing thing.
It felt like... she searched for it... like standing at the edge of something. Not a cliff. Something gentler than that. More like the edge of a lake, where you could feel the cold coming off the water before you stepped in, where you knew the temperature was going to be significant and you hadn’t decided yet whether to go forward.
She hadn’t decided yet.
