She looks away from the window and back at her reflection—at the charcoal still staining her face and the knot, which seems only bigger now than it did before. She takes a breath and turns to the medicine cabinet behind her, but she pauses before opening it up. Their medicine cabinets are never well supplied, especially in the country. Her father keeps them stocked with stomach things—antacids, laxatives, and Pepto-Bismol—but always she has to search when she needs tweezers to pluck a splinter, or a needle to dig one out; there are rarely things like Band-Aids and ointment. And so, she thinks, the chance of her finding scissors in the cabinet is slim. If, as she suspects, there are no scissors inside, she will go downstairs and get her mother’s help, but if she does find scissors, she tells herself, she will cut her hair.

She is not sure whether the feeling is one of horror or excitement when she pulls the cabinet door open and sees, on the topmost shelf, behind a years-old bottle of calamine lotion, a pair of scissors. Her heart flutters as she reaches for them; they are sewing scissors, and they are rusty, but they are scissors. She takes them from the shelf and turns back toward the mirror, blurring her eyes at her reflection. She lifts the knotted lock of hair and holds it between the scissor blades, hesitating before she cuts and blinking her reflection back into clarity. She wonders how long the hair she is about to cut has been with her. Her hair has gotten long; the very ends of it have surely been with her for years, since Maggie was a puppy, since her grandmother was alive. She swallows, wavering for a moment in her resolve. But she has to do this now, she thinks; she made a bargain with herself and took a gamble, and the scissors were there. Now she has no choice but to cut her hair.

She should start feeding Isabelle orchid food, Ruth thinks, tying the spike of an orchid to a stake, the spike now grown too long to support itself, heavy with buds ready to bloom. This is the second time this year that this orchid has flowered, and the one beside it has been in blossom for three months already. Maybe if she added a little fertilizer to Isabelle’s cereal in the morning, Ruth thinks, she’d be growing, too. She finishes tying the spike to the stake and straightens up to look at the bench of orchids before her. She looks at the clock; it is getting late, and they need to get moving if they’re going to make it to the Christmas tree lighting. She curses herself for tending the orchids only at the last minute; she still has several to water, and, she notices, the moth orchid at the far end of the bench badly needs clipping.