“I got it cut,” Jenny sobbed. “Grandma Lathrop took me to see Helen Barco last night, and she cut it all off.”
A wave of resentment boiled up inside Joanna. How like her mother to pull a stunt like that! She had to go and drag Jenny off to Helene’s Salon of Hair and Beauty the moment Joanna’s back was turned. Just because Eleanor Lathrop lived for weekly visits to the beauty shop Vincent Barco had built for his wife in their former two-car garage didn’t mean everybody else did. In Eleanor Lathrop’s skewed view of the world, there was no crisis so terrible that a quick trip to a beautician wouldn’t fix.
Joanna, on the other hand, held beauty shops and beauticians at a wary arm’s length. Her distrust had its origins in the first time her mother had taken Joanna into a beauty shop for her own first haircut. Eleanor had been going to old Mrs. Boxer back then, in a now long-closed shop that had been next door to the post office. Joanna had walked into the place wearing beautiful, foot-long braids. She had emerged carrying her chopped-off braids in a little metal box and wearing her hair in what Mrs. Boxer had called an “adorable pixie.” Joanna had hated her pixie with an abiding passion. All these years later, she still couldn’t understand how a place that had nerve enough to call itself a beauty shop could produce something that ugly.
“It’ll grow out, you know,” Joanna said, hoping offer to Jenny some consolation. “It’ll take six months or so, but it will grow out.”
“But it’s so frizzy,” Jenny was saying. “The kids t school all made fun of me, especially the boys.”
“Frizzy?” Joanna asked. “Don’t tell me. You mean Grandma Lathrop had Helen Barco give you a permanent?”
“It was just supposed to be wavy,” Jenny wailed. She really was crying now, as though her heart was broken. “But it’s awful. You should see it!”
Joanna had always loved the straight, smooth texture of her daughter’s hair, which was so like Andy’s. Had Eleanor been available right then, Joanna would have ripped into her mother and told her to mind her own damn business. As it was though, there was only a heartbroken Jenny sobbing on the phone.
“That’ll grow out, too,” Joanna said patiently. “Ask Grandma Brady to try putting some of her creme rinse on it. That should help. And remember, Helen Barco and Grandma Lathrop may call it
permanent, but it’s not. It’s only temporary.”
“Will it be better by Monday?” Jenny sniffed.
“Probably not by Monday,” Joanna answered. “But by Christmas it will be.” She decided to change the subject. “Are you looking forward to coming up tomorrow?”
“I am now,” Jenny answered. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me. Because of my hair.”
If there’s anyone to be mad at, Joanna seethed silently, it’s your grandmother, but she couldn’t say that out loud.
“Jenny,” she replied instead, “you’re my daughter. You could shave your hair off completely, for all I care. It wouldn’t make any difference. I’d sill love you.”
“Should I? Shave it off, I mean? Maybe Grandpa Brady would do it with his razor.”
Joanna laughed. “Don’t do that,” she said. “I was just teasing. Most likely your hair doesn’t look nearly as bad as you think it does. Now,” she added, “is Grandma Brady there? I’d like to talk to her.”
Moments later Eva Lou Brady came on the one. “Is Jenny right there?” Joanna asked.
“No. She went outside to play with the dogs.”
“How bad is her hair, really?”
“Pretty bad,” Eva Lou allowed. “Jim Bob says he could have gotten the same look by holding her finger in an electrical socket. Don’t be upset about it, Joanna,” Eva Lou added. “Your mother didn’t mean any harm. She and Jenny just wanted to surprise you.”
“I’m surprised, all right,” Joanna answered stiffly. “Now, is everything set for tomorrow?”
“As far as I can tell,” Eva Lou replied. “Kristin called and said you need us to bring along some papers from your office. We’ll pick them up on our way to get Jenny from school. We’ll leave right after that, between three-thirty and four.”
“Good,” Joanna said. “If you drive straight through, that should put you here right around eight o’clock.”
“That’s the only way Jim Bob Brady drives,” his wife said with a laugh. “Straight through.”
“How about directions to the hotel?”
“Jimmy already has it all mapped out. Do you want us to come by the school to pick you up? Jenny wants to see where you’re staying.”
“No, I’ll meet you at the hotel. It’s so close you can see it from here on campus. Jenny and I can walk over here Thursday morning so I can give her the grand tour.”
“Speaking of dinner, do we have reservations for Thanksgiving dinner yet?” Eva Lou asked.
“Yes. Right there in the hotel dining,” Joanna answered.
“Jim Bob needs to know if he should bring along a tie.”
“Probably,” Joanna answered. “From the outside, it looks like a pretty nice place.”
“I’ll tell him,” Eva Lou said. “I don’t suppose it’ll make his day, but since you’re the one asking, he’ll probably do it.”
Joanna put down the phone and left the lounge. Back in her own room, she realized she still hadn’t returned Adam York’s call, but she didn’t bother to go back down to the lounge. Instead, she lay on the bed in her room and thought about strangling her infuriatingly meddlesome mother.
Jenny’s long blond hair had been perfectly fine the way it was. Joanna remembered it floating in the wind as Jenny had waved good-bye.
Where the hell did Eleanor Lathrop get off?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Joanna Brady and Leann Jessup ate dinner at La Pinata, a Mexican restaurant near the capitol mall. Over orders of machaca tacos, the two women talked. In the course of a few minutes’ worth of conversation, they shared their life stories, giving one another the necessary background in the shorthand way women use to establish quick but lasting friendships.
“My mother divorced my dad when my brother was five and I was three,” Leann told Joanna. “The last time I saw my father was twenty years ago. He showed up at my sixth birthday party so drunk he could barely walk. Mom threw him out of the house and called the cops. He never came back.”
“You haven’t talked to him since?” Joanna asked.
Leann shook her head. “Not once.”
“Is he still alive?”
Leann shrugged. “Maybe, but who cares? He never called, never sent any money. My mother had to do it all. Most of the time, while Rick and I were little, she worked two jobs—one full-time and one half-time—just to keep body and soul together.
“In my high school English class, the teacher asked us to write an essay about our favorite hero. Most of the kids wrote about astronauts or movie stars. I wrote about my mom. The teacher made fun of my paper, and he gave me a bad grade. He said mothers didn’t count as heroes. I thought he was wrong then, and I still do.”
Joanna bit her lip. Thinking about her own mother and the flawed relationship between them, she felt a twinge of envy. “You like your mother then?” she asked.
“Why, don’t you?” Leann returned.
“Most of the time, no,” Joanna answered honestly. “I always got along better with my dad than did with my mother.”
She went on to tell Leann about her own folks, about how Sheriff D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop died after being hit by a drunk driver while changing a tire for a stranded motorist and about the high school years when she and her mother had been locked in day-to-day guerrilla warfare. Joanna finished by telling Leann Jessup how, that very afternoon and from two hundred miles away, Eleanor Lathrop had been able to use Jenny’s hair to push Joanna’s buttons.
From there—from discussing mothers and fathers—the two women went on to talk about what had brought them into the field of law enforcement. For Joanna it had been an accident of fate. For Leann Jessup it was the culmination of a lifelong ambition.