It had been Heather who’d initiated the weekly routine years ago when she’d gone away to college. She’d insisted that it was for her own sake—that she was missing being away from home. But she suspected her mother knew the truth—that Heather’s weekly check-ins had been more for her mom’s sake than for hers.
Not that Joan Fowler was the clingy type. Far from it, in fact. Heather had grown up with her mother working two, sometimes three jobs, which meant they’d gotten used to being apart. Heck, Heather’s junior year of high school, her mom had taken the night shift at a twenty-four-hour diner, and it had seemed like they’d gone an entire year without seeing each other.
But college had been different. Although Michigan State was only an hour’s drive from her hometown, the distance meant Heather hadn’t been able to ensure her mom had healthy groceries stocked. Hadn’t been there to move her mom’s work uniform to the dryer before it started to smell mildewy.
It wasn’t that her mom was flaky; it was just that the two of them had always taken care of each other. Something that had been hard to do an hour away in college, and was even harder now that Heather had followed her dreams to New York.
Her mom had never begrudged her that. Not once in Heather’s entire life had her mom made her feel guilty for leaving. Quite the contrary, Joan had been her biggest cheerleader. The one who insisted that Heather not only aim high, but act on it.
When Heather’s friends’ moms in the trailer park had been encouraging their daughters to be realistic, Joan was telling Heather to reach for the stars.
The brightest star in Heather’s case being New York City.
Her mom’s blessing didn’t ease the guilt though. Nothing could, although maybe the Sunday phone calls helped a tiny bit.
“Hi, honey,” her mother chirped the second she picked up the phone. “How’s my darling girl?”
“Wonderful,” Heather said, settling into the couch and pulling her legs up to her chest, resting her mug on her knees as she made the expected response. “How’s my darling mom?”
“Red.”
Heather’s eyebrows went up. “Hot flashes again?”
“No. Well, I mean, yes. Menopause has officially sunk its teeth in. But no, I meant red haired.”
“I thought you were already red haired.”
“No, I went chestnut for a while. Remember?”
“Oh right,” Heather said, even though she rarely had a clue what color hair her mother had on any given day. Her mother had worked a good number of odd jobs in an effort to keep food on the table and, later, to help Heather pay for textbooks in college, but her bread and butter had always been hairdressing. The waitress gigs came and went, as did the occasional housekeeping duties, but Joan always said that she was a hairdresser through and through.
“You do it yourself?” Heather took a sip of tea.
“Nah, Sissy helped,” her mother said, referring to her longtime best friend and neighbor. “I helped her go gray.”
“How is Sissy not already gray? Isn’t she pushing sixty?”
“Mind your tongue,” Joan said without bite. “And yes, but it takes a rare skill to make the gray look intentional. Lucky for Sissy, I have that skill.”
Heather smiled at her mom’s complete lack of modesty.
“You’ll see one day, darling. Or maybe not. You always did have exceptional hair.”
Exceptional? Hardly. But then it was always people without the curls who wanted them.
In almost every way, Heather was a miniature of her mother. The same wide eyes, same slow-to-smile grin. Same narrow figure and sharp-winged brows.
But whereas Heather’s hair was a mess (okay, tangle) of curls, Joan’s hair was stick straight. The curls were the one and only thing Heather had gotten from her long-gone father. Though Heather didn’t like that any physical link connected her to her good-for-nothing absentee dad, she could appreciate the irony that a hairdresser would have a daughter whose locks were virtually untamable—the shoemaker’s children have no shoes, and all that.
“The girls at the shop nearly lost their minds when I told them you were doing Danica Robinson’s wedding,” her mother said.