The next two weeks were quiet. Cindy didn’t call. She didn’t text. She skipped Sunday dinner at Uncle Gene’s, which she’d never done in thirty years.
But she did go to the beauty shop.
On the Friday after we told her, Cindy went to Darlene’s Shear Elegance for her standing ten o’clock appointment. Josh’s Aunt Peggy, who also gets her hair done there, told us what happened.
Cindy sat in Darlene’s chair and announced to the whole shop that her daughter-in-law had “stolen her cruise money” and spent it on “her daddy,” and that her own son had “turned against her.”
She expected sympathy.
What she didn’t know was that Darlene’s brother is Tyler’s father-in-law. Tyler was one of the cousins who walked the pond bottom until dark looking for the hearing aids. And Tyler had told his wife, and his wife had told her mother, and her mother had told Darlene, and by that Friday, every single woman in that beauty shop already knew exactly what had happened on that dock.
According to Aunt Peggy, Darlene stopped cutting Cindy’s hair. She set her scissors down on the counter. She looked at Cindy in the mirror.
