And Tasha turned her phone around so Kayla could see whose name was on the screen. It was Daniel. Kaylas groom. The man she was marrying in three hours.
Somebody at the Fourth of July barbecue had filmed Kayla pulling the wig off a cancer patients head, and that video had found its way to the one person Kayla most needed not to see it, the kind man waiting at the end of the aisle.
I am the cancer patient. Forty one when I was diagnosed, six rounds of chemo, my hair in handfuls in the shower. My best friend Tasha, a hairstylist, made me a wig from real hair so I could feel like myself again. And at that barbecue Kayla grabbed it off my bald head in front of forty people and held it up and called it a squirrel, and my husband laughed, and I put it back on and smiled because I did not yet know I was allowed to do anything else.
Tasha knew. Tasha made that wig with her own hands, strand by strand, and when she saw the video she did not plan revenge. She just happened, months later, to be the top bridal stylist in Charlotte, booked a year in advance, the one Kayla hired online without ever asking her name.
Relax, Tasha told Kayla in the mirror, I am a professional, I am not going to touch your hair. Then she set the scissors down. But I am also not going to do it.
She did not ruin Kaylas hair. She is better than that, and so, in the end, am I. She simply declined, and told Kayla the truth, that the video existed and had reached the groom, and then she left, because a woman who makes wigs for cancer patients does not owe her morning to the woman who yanked one off in a backyard.
Daniel, the groom, had already seen it. He is a decent man, which is the thing Kayla had going for her and nearly threw away. He did not call off the wedding. But he sat his bride down, before the ceremony, and asked her to watch the video with him, all of it, my bald head in the sun and her laughing and the word squirrel, and he asked her one question. Is that who you are.
Kayla married him that afternoon with her hair done by a kind stylist Tasha found at the last minute, and she came to find me a week later, without the ring flashing, without an audience, and she apologized. A real one. She had watched herself on a screen and not been able to stand it, which is the beginning of becoming someone better.
I did not have to forgive her. My scans came back clear in October, and I had spent that whole year learning that my time and my peace are mine to spend as I choose. But I looked at a young woman who had finally seen herself, and I decided that holding the grudge would cost me more than it cost her, so I let it go, on my terms, in my time.
My husband, Ryan, is a different story. He laughed. He told me not to be so sensitive, she is just excited about the wedding, while I sat bald in a lawn chair in the sun. A stranger filmed it and a groom was appalled by it, and my own husband had laughed. That told me something no scan could.
Ryan and I are not together now. A man who laughs while someone humiliates his sick wife has already told you he will not be standing beside you in the hard rooms, and cancer taught me that the hard rooms are the only ones that count.
My hair is growing back, my own now, short and curly and nothing like the wig. I kept the wig anyway, in its box, because Tasha made it, and because it carried me through the year I learned to stop smiling at things that were never funny.
It is a squirrel, Kayla said, holding my hair over her head. It was my dignity, in a backyard, in the sun. I have it back now, every strand of it, and it is growing in curlier and more mine than it ever was before.