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“Nine. No, ten. Don’t laugh! Every once in a while I get brave and tell myself I’ll finally do something different, and then I get home and pull my hair back into a ponytail and go to work, and that’s it. I chicken out. Plus I bought two more today. What do think?”
“Well…”
Jenny set the lasagna on the table and passed out plates while Grace moved the boxes around.
“Definitely not the browns. You’ve got a great skin tone for your natural blond. But this one…” She pushed forward a gorgeous, warm blond permanent color. “Maybe with a few lowlights with this coppery one.” She moved another box toward Jenny. “That might be amazing.”
“Really?” she asked, bouncing up and down on her toes. “You think so?”
“Yes. Do you have good scissors?”
Jenny slapped a hand to her long hair. “Why?”
“I’ll just trim the ends. Then we can color it and straighten it. You’ll look amazing.”
An hour later, half the lasagna was gone, the cake had been massacred, Eve had given in and started her third glass of wine, and Jenny’s head was deep in the kitchen sink as Grace washed the dye from it.
“This is so exciting,” Eve said. She picked up a box of chestnut-brown and eyed it wistfully. “I can’t wait to see it dry.”
Grace wrapped Jenny’s hair in a towel. “That one’s a temporary color, you know. It only lasts six weeks. It would just add some shine a
nd a little depth to your natural color.”
Eve put the box down.
“Come on. You’re a photographer. You know how amazing a little color depth can be. Let’s do it. It’s six weeks. No big deal.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do it!” Jenny shouted. “Do it, do it, do it!”
Eve refilled her wineglass, even though only half was gone. “Okay. Fine. Yes. Let’s do it.”
Jenny screamed so loudly that Grace was worried her neighbors would complain. Then she decided maybe they were used to it.
“Come on,” she said to Eve. “Head in the sink, then.”
Grace was just putting the last of the color into Eve’s hair when someone knocked hard on the door. Maybe the neighbors had complained, because that sounded distinctly like the unforgiving knock of a policeman’s fist.
Apparently Jenny was a good enough person that she’d never heard that knock, because she breezed over with her wet hair and a smile and swung the door wide open. And revealed a sight more alarming than the police.
Standing in the doorway, scowl already in place, was Aunt Rayleen.
“Good Lord,” Rayleen barked, looking from Jenny to Eve. “I thought she was supposed to make you look better. You ladies look like a pair of drowned rats.”
“Sweet as ever,” Jenny announced.
“I am sweet. I brought you the sunglasses you left on the bar yesterday.”
“Oh, thank you.” Jenny took the glasses, but Rayleen didn’t give up her post.
“Why’s your hair wet?”
“Grace colored it.”
“Hmph. Some normal color, I hope.”
Grace had been too shocked by her aunt’s arrival to know what to think, but as Rayleen craned her neck to see in, Grace realized what was going on. Jenny seemed to see it at the same time. She tossed a helpless look toward Grace.
