Flood Season

Maggie's gray roots were showing, just like the water line on the basement wall where last month's storm had risen to three feet. She sat in the salon chair watching a baseball game on the mounted television, the Mets down by two in the seventh.

"You're crying," the stylist said softly.

Maggie hadn't realized. Her husband had loved baseball. Had played in college until his knee gave out. Had coached their son's Little League team until the cancer made it too hard to stand. That was three years ago. The basement had flooded two weeks after the funeral.

"Just washing out the dye," Maggie lied.

Her phone buzzed. Her son, asking if she'd found his old baseball card collection in the basement yet. He wanted to give his own son—Maggie's grandson—something meaningful. Something that had belonged to the grandfather the boy would never meet.

Maggie had looked. She'd waded through waist-deep water in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, box after box ruined. The baseball cards had been in the bottom dresser drawer. She'd found them mush, the cardboard dissolving into pulp, the ink running together until Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays became unrecognizable smears.

She'd thrown them out without telling him.

"Your hair," the stylist said. "What do you want to do?"

Maggie met her own eyes in the mirror. The lines around them had deepened in the last three years. The gray was more stubborn now, harder to cover. But covering it felt like a betrayal somehow—like pretending her husband hadn't died, like pretending she wasn't someone who'd kept secrets from her only child.

"Cut it all off," she said. "Short as you can."

The water spray hit her scalp, shocking and cold. She watched the baseball game through the mirror. The Mets were rallying. A home run cleared the fence. somewhere, her grandson was probably watching too, waiting for baseball cards that didn't exist anymore.

Maggie closed her eyes and let the water run, deciding: she would tell him the truth. About the cards, about the flood, about how some things can't be saved no matter how hard you try. And then she would take him to a game. They would start something new.

The scissors made their first clean slice. Hair fell to the floor like rain.