She shrugged. “It bothers people. It shouldn’t. That’s the whole business. That’s every wig in this room. Somebody who needed a hundred and fifty dollars, and somebody who needed hair.”

I sat back down without being asked.

“I sold mine to find out if I had cancer,” I said. “That was the hundred and fifty dollars. That was the bus fare and the biopsy.”

Bev Larkin looked at me for a long moment.

“Oh,” she said. “Well. That’s a new one.”

And then she laughed, this shocked little bark of a laugh, and I laughed too, and it was the first time in two years that any part of that had been funny to me, and I sat in a wig studio in Columbia, Missouri, laughing with a seventy-year-old woman about the worst year of my life.