Eventually, Naomi realized she was completely isolated.
“So how did you get diagnosed?”
She touched her scarf.
That was when I understood.
Naomi had always had beautiful hair.
Thick, dark brown hair that fell nearly to her waist.
One morning, while Mom and Kendra were shopping, she locked herself in the bathroom and cut it off.
All of it.
She found a salon that purchased untreated human hair for custom wigs.
They paid her $420.
She used part of it for a bus ticket.
The rest went toward an imaging appointment at a low-cost clinic.
The clinic found something suspicious.
A charity program eventually helped arrange the biopsy.
Cancer.
Advanced.
My wife had sold her hair to find out whether she was dying while I had been sending thousands of dollars into the same house every month.
“Why are you living in this shed?”
She wiped her face.
“After I started getting treatment, I became sick a lot. Your mother said I was upsetting guests.”
