“Sure do!” said the receptionist, and a minute later, Josh was sitting in a chair, a woman with pink highlights washing his hair. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“Providence.”

“Awesome!” she crowed, as if staying in his home city were award-worthy. “I’m Britney, by the way,” she said, squirting something new onto his head. Yes. Her nametag told him that. “My parents named me after Britney Spears, right?”

Thus cursing her. “That’s nice.”

“What’s your name, hon?”

“James.” He’d pay in cash. Telling her his name felt too personal.

“Oh, my God! I got a cousin named James. Jimmy, we call him. He’s in jail right now? But he’s not so bad.” She scrubbed his scalp with her fingertips.

Aside from sympathy hugs, Britney was the first woman to touch him since Lauren died. He felt nothing. Ostensibly, the warm water and brisk shampoo should’ve been pleasant. Instead, it was just something to be endured.

“Have you ever been to California?” Britney asked for no apparent reason.

“Yes.”

“That’s wicked awesome. California’s the best.” She didn’t ask which parts of California he’d been to, but apparently anywhere in California was good enough. “Me, I’ve never traveled much. I went to see my aunt in Pennsylvania once? It was wicked boring. Like, kind of a city? But not really? All these cornfields and antique stores. My aunt? She’s only eight years older than I am? So I’m like, ‘Girl, where do you pahty?’”

Her voice chattered on, requiring nothing from Josh. She asked what kind of haircut he wanted, and he said “short” so he wouldn’t have to do this again soon, and after fifteen or twenty or a thousand minutes, she was done, brushing off the back of his neck.

“There! You’re wicked gorgeous now, James.” She smiled and squeezed his arm, and he felt bad for disliking her. Left her a twenty for a tip, even though the haircut only cost twelve dollars.

He was weary, but he wanted to do what his wife had told him to do. Still wanting to make her happy.

It had been his life’s work, after all.

He walked aimlessly through the mall, past chain jewelry stores and women’s lingerie shops and kiosks selling hair extensions and sparkly jewelry, past the crappy food places that sold hot pretzels and ice cream, until he came to a store with men’s clothing in the window. More teenage girls, maybe the coven he’d passed earlier, cruised around him. Two of them walked with their arms linked.

Lauren and Sarah had done that sometimes. Maybe they’d been to this very same mall as teenagers, and been much the same as these girls, chattering, self-involved, too confident in their beauty. After all, that’s how he’d viewed Lauren the first time he met her. A shallow twit.