The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [52]
“Your hair!” I said.
“Like it?” She tilted her head a bit self-consciously. “I had this moment of inspiration, I guess. Inspiration or pure craziness. I went in just to have it trimmed, but then I found myself telling Josh to take it all off. I love it, I have to say. It’s so light. I feel like my head could simply float away.”
“It looks good,” I said as we walked inside, and it did. “It’s just so different.”
“Twelve inches came off. I gave it to Locks of Love. What’s all this?” she asked, nodding toward the books and papers stacked on the cabinet. She and Avery were already at the counter, unloading the canvas sacks: containers of tabbouleh and hummus, a roasted pepper salad, a pasta salad, loaves of fresh bread.
“Research, that’s all. Is it in the way?”
“No, you’re fine. Leave it,” she said, turning to take a plate of sliced watermelon out of the fridge, the line of her neck long and elegant. How strange that something as simple as a haircut could make her look so different. I found myself wondering how Andy saw her, remembering his voice, low and warm, on the answering machine. “I’m free,” she said, smiling and touching the nape of her neck. “I feel absolutely free.”
By the time I changed into my only dress and came back downstairs, Blake had fired up the grill and Avery was carrying bowls of food out to the patio. My mother had invited friends from work as well as family and neighbors. People began to arrive, parking on the grass near the road and carrying bottles of wine or plates of food across the lawn to the house. The balloons we’d inflated that morning floated like small suns and moons in the trees, and the tiny lights sparkled like emerging stars.
It was a lovely party, the sort of pleasant evening where the conversation drifted from one topic to another, settling lightly here, then there, laughter floating out over the water. I moved between groups, hugging people who remembered me. Mr. Hardesty from next door patted my back, and I was struck by how thin he’d gotten in the years since my father died, since I’d seen him last, holding on to my mother and Blake that terrible morning as if they might fly away if he let go. He had retired from being a weatherman, he informed me, and no longer looked at weather reports at all, preferring to carry umbrellas and boots in his car and let each day surprise him however it would. Georgia from across the street, however, had hardly aged. She was still making pottery—the wind chimes on her porch and the porches of the neighbors all sounded faintly, even at this distance—and she was excited about Keegan’s Glassworks, but she told me she’d started teaching art at the community college, too, for the steady income and the health insurance, now that their son was in college. At this she scanned the party and called out to Jack, whom I remembered as a wiry boy, full of energy, darting across the fields with his friends in games of hide-and-seek, and who was now a junior at NYU, studying acting, his hair pulled back in a ponytail: young, and supremely confident, in a way I never remembered being.
“You know, I invited Keegan,” my mother said, pausing on her way to the patio, a glass of wine in her good hand. “He was at the bank today and I thought, why not?”
She smiled, and I thought of the place where Keegan’s hair tapered to his neck beneath the ponytail, the heat of his arm against mine as we’d studied the windows.
“Is