When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

10. Beauty Parlor

I ran a comb through my father’s hair. His hair was brown, fine, with just a touch of a wave. Mom said once that she married Dad because she wanted children with long, curly eyelashes and wavy hair. Will and I both got the eyelashes, but our hair is vigorously, determinedly, even brutally straight. I used to wonder if our mother was disappointed to get only half of what she had bargained for. I guess I wondered, too, if curly eyelashes and wavy hair for your children was a reason to marry that could last as long as a husband did.