A Time for Us - By Amy Knupp Page 0,77
mirror, she relaxed her grip and took a step toward the vanity, slightly horrified by her appearance. She was unusually pale. Her eyes looked like hollowed-out holes in her head, complete with heavy shadows beneath. Her hair was a scraggly, overgrown mess that, come to think of it, she hadn’t done a thing with since she’d been back in town. Yes, she was busy, but that was no reason to scare patients in the E.R.—let alone herself when she looked in the mirror.
Feeling more in control than she had since the last time she’d forced herself into this bedroom, she marched out with purpose and went to find a current phone book. Unlike so many elements of her life, her hair was easily managed.
* * *
“I THINK YOU’RE GOING to adore this.” Angel the peppy stylist’s voice bubbled with excitement while Rachel’s nerves stretched even more taut.
The salon chair swiveled around so Rachel could see her reflection in the mirror for the first time since the job was finished. Her eyes took in the short, jet-black hair then zoomed downward to locate the faded U2 concert shirt that Rachel knew she had worn today. Check.
Holy smokes.
“What do you think?” Again, the annoyingly perky Angel person’s voice buzzed at her like a gnat.
What had she done?
“Umm.” Rachel tried clearing her throat against the panic that was inexplicably welling up. “It’s...different.” Her eyes widened as she continued to stare without blinking.
“It’ll take a couple days to get used to, huh?” Angel said, grinning widely.
“How...?” She didn’t even know what she wanted to say. “Yeah,” she finally responded. “Yeah.”
She looked away. Noticed the seventy-ish woman across the room who was having the same curl put into her hair she’d probably had done for the past thirty years staring at her as if Rachel was a freak show.
Darting her own glance back to the mirror, she saw someone else sitting there. A decently attractive woman she’d never seen before. Someone with hair so black it looked almost blue in places. Hair that was cut into a pixie style so short the woman in the mirror would be hard-pressed to run her fingers through it. She would be hard-pressed to run her fingers through her new hair.
“Are you okay, hon?” Angel switched from admiring her client in the mirror to sticking her head in front of Rachel directly.
Rachel had come to this salon, to this stylist, because she was anonymous here. Unlike the hair salon where she, Noelle and their mother had gone practically since the twins’ birth, no one knew her here. No one knew she had an identical twin sister. Used to have one...
“Want a mirror to see the back? God, you look good in that cut. Not many women can pull that off.”
Rachel robotically took the hand mirror as Angel spun her around to see the back.
Yep. Killer short.
“Okay,” she said, trying to breathe. “Yeah, nice job.” She knew she didn’t sound as if she meant it, but it wasn’t every day a natural blonde with chin-length hair went pixie and jet-black. On a whim.
“I need to get that,” Angel said, and Rachel belatedly registered a ringing phone in the background.
Being left in the wake of the ever-chattering hairstylist did nothing to lessen the churning in Rachel’s stomach. Using her foot on the white-tiled floor, she pushed herself back around to stare at the front again. She immediately averted her gaze and located her purse on the floor next to the styling station. Grabbing it, she whipped open her wallet and counted out cash. Lots of it. Hopefully enough to cover the cut and color. She anchored the money below a heavy bottle of hair product on Angel’s station and then, avoiding that mirror as if it could reach out and choke her, she walked out of the salon, attempting to look as nonchalant as possible...and likely failing miserably.
She’d thought when she’d woken up this morning that a radical change would be a good thing. A daring, bold move that showed she was in control.
What she hadn’t taken into consideration, though, was that when she looked into the mirror, no matter how hard she squinted, she could no longer find Noelle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“IT’S YOUR day, Mom,” Cale said as he climbed into the driver’s seat of his parents’ conversion van. “Whatever you want to do tonight, we’ll do it. You only turn sixty-seven once.”
“She’s probably too embarrassed to say, but she told me she wants to go to the gentlemen’s club,” Cale’s dad