He blushed at the thought. It had fluttered down around his face, unloosed, wild,
and he, surrounded by a cascade of her, would push his fingers through it.
Now her hair was gray, but still it was long, not as long, but still it fell down her
back. Now she fastened it into a taut, coarse braid, and its shine had dulled, like dust thrown over gold.
How many times she had wanted to cut it, and he forbid her. She did not want to
disappoint him. It was all they had of their youth, bundled up behind her back, hanging against her body.
“Nesting,� the doctor had said.
And Michele thought of birds gathering twigs and leaves to wind up into a home.
She said she did not want to wait for that to happen. She said she did not want to
wait to see it on her pillow in the morning, on the kitchen floor, on the carpet, where hair did not belong.
Pippina came out of the house. The screen door clapped shut behind her. Her
hair was loose, surrendering toward the ground like the leaves of a willow, falling over her cheeks, her shoulders, her breasts, falling in tired waves until it touched her waist. A blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She held her hand over her breast, a habit she had recently developed, as if she was trying to hold the catheter in; hold in the thing that fed to her the thing that would save her.
She looked down at her feet, watched them move, one foot, and then the other, to
be sure each step landed with a bit of ground beneath it. Michele had never seen her look so pale. Her eyes were sunken and dark, but her lips were red, as red as they had always been.
She lowered her body into the chair. She gathered her hair and then released it and
it fell over the back of the chair. It was dark and aged, like a tree, but like a tree, it was beautiful to look at; like a tree it held within it the whole story of their lives.
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