“Please forgive me,” my dad pleaded. But on that night, his forgiveness had absolutely nowhere to sit.
The Salon in East Boston
The very next morning, I booked a bus ticket to Boston. Lily insisted on tagging along. Emma couldn’t bring herself to go; she said if she went, she’d scream until her throat gave out. My dad desperately wanted to come, but I firmly told him no. For the first time in my entire life, he didn’t get to dictate how my truth was going to hurt.
We left early, the morning sky still a dull, overcast gray. Along the highway, the quiet suburbs slowly gave way to the industrial outskirts of the city. When the Boston skyline finally appeared in the distance, Lily pressed her forehead nervously against the cold window glass.
“Do you think she’ll actually see us?”
I tightly gripped the letter in my fingers. “I don’t even know if I’m ready to see her.”
We arrived at South Station right around noon and took a yellow cab over to East Boston. The bustling neighborhood greeted us with the heavy smell of roasted coffee, diesel exhaust, and fresh bakery bread. We passed by vibrant street murals and weathered brick buildings with rusted iron fire escapes that seemed to hold a century’s worth of secrets.
The scribbled address led us straight to a small shop. A pink awning. Fading block letters. A sad potted plant by the glass door. I suddenly felt nauseous. Lily squeezed my hand tightly.
“You don’t have to do this alone, Chloe.”
I bravely pushed the door open. A tiny brass bell chimed right above our heads. Inside, the cramped space smelled intensely of hair dye, harsh acetone, and cheap fruity shampoo. There were two swivel chairs, a large wall mirror with stained, oxidized edges, and a small radio quietly playing an old acoustic ballad.
A woman was bent over near the back, putting away clean towels. “I’ll be right with you, hun.”
She looked up. My mother instantly dropped the stack of towels.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t rush forward to hug me. She just stared blankly at me as if she’d seen a ghost walking in wearing a middle school uniform.
“Chloe.”
Her voice was exactly the same. A little raspier. Definitely tired. But exactly the same.
I had mentally played out this moment a thousand different times. In some dramatic versions, I screamed in her face. In others, she begged for my mercy on her knees. In the absolute worst ones, I ran straight into her arms like nothing bad had ever happened. I did none of those things today. I just pulled out her letter and placed it firmly on a small waiting table covered in outdated magazines.
“I read it. Twelve years too late.”
My mom slowly closed her eyes. “Richard.”
“Don’t even start with him,” I interrupted. “You go first.”
She nodded slowly. She untied and took off her black apron. Her fingernails were deeply stained with dark hair dye. These certainly weren’t the manicured hands of the impeccable woman who had left us with a red suitcase, but they were the very same hands that had once braided my hair for a spring dance recital. It made me irrationally angry. The body remembers everything, even when you desperately don’t want it to.
“I didn’t leave because of you,” she said softly.
I laughed out loud, but there was zero joy in the sound. “How incredibly generous of you, Mom. It only took you twelve years to clarify that tiny detail.”
She took the verbal hit without flinching. “I had been seeing Dan for months. Your father and I were in a really bad place, but that doesn’t justify a single thing. I lied. I cheated on him. I was the adult.”
“And you blamed me.”
Her chin visibly trembled. “Yes.”
That single word did far more than any long-winded excuse ever could. Lily quietly cried behind me. My mother looked over at her with a soft tenderness that had arrived a full decade late.
“Lily…”
“No,” my sister snapped. “Don’t try to be sweet to me yet.”
Right at that moment, a young boy walked in wearing a prep school uniform, lugging a blue backpack and holding a greasy bag of takeout food. He looked to be about eleven years old. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw us, looking confused. He had my mother’s exact eyes. The old rumor was completely true. My chest tightened in a brand new, much uglier way.
“Who are they?” he asked.
My mom wiped her stained hands on her apron. “Leo, go over to Mrs. Gable’s shop for a little bit.”
“Are they customers?”
No one answered him. The boy looked at Lily, then over at me. He understood something in that heavy room—maybe through shared blood, maybe just through the deafening silence. He left the takeout bag on a salon chair and walked right back out.
I instantly felt like I was twelve all over again. “You raised him.”
My mother put a heavy hand to her chest. “Yes.”
“You made him his lunches, checked his math homework, went to his baseball games.”
“Yes.”
“But you left us.”
“Yes.”
Every single “yes” felt like a thrown stone. But at the very least, she wasn’t building a giant lie with them anymore.
“Dan left me when Leo was barely two,” she confessed. “He moved on with someone else from his new job. I stayed here in Boston, cutting hair, doing acrylic nails, selling cheap makeup door-to-door. I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because what I did to your father happened to me.”