cut my hair,” she had just said. “He said we can’t. We have to wait until I’m seventeen.”
Her father looked as though someone had reached inside him and pulled out a secret he had spent years protecting.
“Goldie…” he whispered.
She lowered her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
He immediately crouched in front of her.
“No. You have nothing to be sorry about.”
A few seconds earlier, several parents had been criticizing him.
Now nobody seemed willing to speak.
Finally, one mother asked gently, “Why seventeen?”
Goldie looked at her father.
Then she answered for him.
“Because of my mom.”
His eyes closed.
Goldie pulled her braid around to the front and held it in both hands.
“My mom died when I was little,” she said.
Most of us already knew her mother was gone.
What we didn’t know was what had happened.
“She had cancer.”Her father sat down
