“YOU TURNED MY EIGHT-HUNDRED-DOLLAR HAIR INTO A KINDERGARTEN CRAFT PROJECT!”
Thirty-five thousand feet up, a young woman stood in the aisle of a crowded airplane with one hand stuck to her own head and murder on her mind.
She was pointing at me with the other one.
Every head in the cabin turned my way. The businessman in 22C took off his headphones. A baby three rows up stopped crying just to get a better look. The flight attendant froze halfway down the aisle with a pot of coffee in her hand.
And there I sat. Martha Delaney. Seventy-three years old. Retired school librarian. Grandmother of four. Lifelong member of the First Methodist choir.
With pink glitter on my fingers and absolutely no regrets.
Well. Almost none.
But two hours earlier, nothing in the world could have told you this was coming.
Two hours earlier, I was standing in a duty-free line with a present for my granddaughter.
I need to explain about the present, because it matters.
My granddaughter Emily was turning ten that Saturday. She lives in Phoenix with my daughter, Joanne, and her husband, and her three older brothers, who are all very loud and very large and eat like a pack of wolves. Emily is the only girl. She’s the baby. She’s also the smartest person in that house, and everybody knows it, including the wolves.
Three weeks before her birthday, I called and asked what she wanted.
“Grandma,” she said, very seriously, “there’s only one thing in the whole world I want from you.”
“And what’s that, sweetheart?”
“Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime.”
I wrote it down on the notepad by my phone. Then I looked at it.
“Slime?”
“It’s purple and pink and it has glitter and little stars in it and it smells like cotton candy and it stretches like four feet. A girl on YouTube stretched it across her whole kitchen.”
“Why on earth would anybody want to do that?”
There was a long pause.
“Grandma,” Emily said patiently, “it’s slime.”
As if that explained everything.
The problem was, Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime was sold out. Everywhere. Joanne had tried. Two of my friends from church had tried. I’d tried, on the computer, which took me forty-five minutes and two calls to my son, Robert, to figure out.
Sold out. Sold out. Back-ordered until March.
Then, the week before my trip, Emily’s oldest brother texted me a picture.
Grandma they have it at the airport. The toy store by gate B. My friend saw it.
Under it he’d added: Don’t tell Em I told you. She’ll freak.
So that’s how I ended up at the airport two hours before my flight, standing in a line at a little duty-free shop that sold perfume and chocolate and fancy liquor and, on one shelf in the back corner, next to stuffed airplanes and coloring books, exactly four enormous tubs of Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime.
I took one. Then, after some thought, I took a second, in case something happened to the first.
Then I put the second one back. I’m on a fixed income.
The tub was the size of a coffee can. It was sparkly. When you shook it, it made a soft, wet, sucking sound, like a boot coming out of mud.
I held it in both hands like a trophy.
The line was crawling.
And the reason it was crawling was standing right in front of me.
She was maybe twenty-eight. She had blonde hair that went all the way down to the backs of her knees. I’d never seen hair like that on a real person. It was thick and shiny and perfectly smooth, like something out of a shampoo commercial. It swung when she moved, a half-second behind her, like it had its own opinions about where to go.
She was holding her phone out at arm’s length, talking to it.
The phone case said BRITTANY in rhinestones. In case she forgot.
“Okay, guys,” she told the phone, “help me choose. This one or this one?”
She held two little perfume bottles up to the screen. Both pink. Both shaped like a woman’s body. Both very expensive, if the little velvet stand they’d come from was any clue.
The cashier, a tired young man with a nametag that said DEVON, waited.
“Ma’am, should I ring those up?”
“One sec,” Brittany said, without looking at him. “My chat is deciding.”
Honey, at my age, one second had better come with a chair.
I shifted the slime to my other arm. My hip was starting to complain. I’d been up since four-thirty. The cab driver had taken the long way. Security had pulled me aside because of my knee replacement, and a very nice young woman had wanded me in a little glass booth while I stood with my arms out like a scarecrow.
“I know!” Brittany said to the phone. “They’re both gorgeous. Ugh. Okay. Maybe I’ll just take both.”
She put both bottles on the counter.
Devon read out the total.
She blinked at it for half a second. Just half a second. I saw it, because I was standing right behind her, and I’ve raised three children and taught school for thirty-one years, and I know what that half-second blink means. It means I can’t afford this.
Then she smiled at the phone.
“Beauty is an investment, right?”
She tapped her card. It went through. She looked relieved, very briefly.
Then she grabbed a tester bottle off the counter and sprayed her neck. Then her wrists. Then, for good measure, her hair. A great big cloud of it.
The cloud reached me a second later.
It was heavy and sweet and smelled like a peach that had been dipped in honey and then set on fire. My eyes watered. I coughed.
“Excuse me, dear,” I said. “That’s quite a strong perfume.”
She glanced back at me over her shoulder.
“It’s French.”
“I don’t think the French intended us to taste it.”
Devon made a noise like a teakettle. He put his hand over his mouth and turned around to straighten the cigarettes.
Brittany turned back to her phone.
“Guys,” she said, “apparently my perfume is offending people now.”
And she flipped her hair over her shoulder.
All of it. A great golden sheet. It swung back like a curtain and hit me square across the face.
It was heavier than I expected. It was like being slapped with a wet bath towel that smelled like burning peaches.
“Careful, sweetheart,” I said. “Your hair just hit me.”
“Then don’t stand so close.”
“I’m standing in line.”
“Personal space is still a thing.”
I took a step back. I bumped into a man behind me carrying a bottle of Scotch, who said “Whoa,” and caught my elbow.
Brittany whipped her head around again to look at something on the shelf.
This time the hair caught my hand. My hand that was holding the slime. I nearly dropped it.
“Does it always need that much room?” I asked.
“What?”
“Your hair.”
She sighed, loudly. “It’s called volume.”
“I see. I thought Cousin Itt had finally found a conditioner.”
Devon lost it completely. He bent over the counter with his shoulders shaking. The man with the Scotch laughed so hard he snorted.
Brittany grabbed her little bag with her two perfumes and spun around to glare at me.
“Whatever. Some people just can’t appreciate good hair.”
She stalked to the door. Then she stopped and turned around, like she’d thought of something clever.
“Maybe you’re just jealous.”
“Of the perfume?” I said. “Not particularly.”
She left.
The smell stayed behind. It hung in that little shop like a guest who hadn’t noticed the party was over.
Devon was still wiping his eyes when I put the slime on the counter.
“Cousin Itt,” he said. “Oh my God. My grandma used to watch that show.”
“Your grandma has good taste.”
He scanned the tub. He looked at it, then at me.
“Galaxy Unicorn Mega Slime. Lucky granddaughter.”
“She’d better think so. I’m told it’s the only thing in the whole world she wants from me.”
He bagged it in a little plastic bag. I took it out of the bag and zipped it into my big brown purse, next to my reading glasses and my pill organizer and my book of crossword puzzles and three butterscotch candies.
“Have a good flight, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Devon.”
I went to find my gate.
I was certain of two things.
One. I’d never see that girl again.
Two. That slime was going to reach Emily in Phoenix in one piece.
I was wrong about both. 