She Sold Her Hair

Chapter 5 — Larkspur

Two weeks later I drove to Columbia.

Larkspur Hair Studio is on the second floor of a building behind a bakery, and there’s no sign on the street, just a name on a buzzer, which Bev Larkin told me later is deliberate, because a lot of her clients don’t want to be seen going in.

Bev is about seventy, tiny, with a gray braid and a jeweler’s loupe on a cord.

When I explained why I’d come she made me tea and then she pulled a shoebox of index cards out from under a table, because she does not use a computer and has been told about this by many people.

Lot 8817. She’d used it in a hand-tied cap in the December after I sold it.

Twenty-four inches was long enough to make a piece nearly anyone could wear.