I came back down, and I stood in front of the mirror, and I took my hair out of its bun. And I brushed it. Slowly. Gently. I counted out loud, the way she used to.
One. Two. Three.
By twenty, I was crying. By fifty, I was laughing at myself for crying. By a hundred, I was just standing there, breathing, with my hair smooth and shining over my shoulders.
Dad was leaning in the kitchen doorway holding two cups of coffee. I don’t know how long he’d been there.
“She’d be proud of you,” he said.
“For what? Brushing my hair?”
“For counting to a hundred.” He handed me a cup. “She always said you’d quit at thirty.”
I laughed.
We sat on the couch together and drank our coffee and looked at the mirror. The afternoon sun came in through the blinds and caught the new glass, and for a second it threw a little rainbow across the wall. Right across the spot where the hole by the fireplace used to be.
