She did everything, but take the test - learned all the techniques and all the latest styles, even though she’d kept the same one since the 80’s, just couldn't bring herself to finish beauty school.

"Started getting panic attacks" She told me as she clipped my sides. "Every time the scissors got too close to their ear lobes or I heard the sound of razor scraping skin - just started shaking. Dunno why. Alls I had to do was take the pinche test."

My hairs shed like feathers onto the kitchen floor, covering the linoleum lilacs with black curls of dead roots.

“Your hair grows so quick, mijo,” she said, “You’re gonna have to find a new barber over by the university.”
“I’ll come back for visits, Tia,” I reassured her, “You can cut it then.”
“Yeah, that’s what you say now, cabrón. Let them white girls get a hold of you and I’ll never see you again. Hold on a sec, mijo, I gotta stir the beans.”

She turned from where I sat in the far corner of her kitchen to the stove top. The kitchen was long and wide. It had to be to fit her and her seven siblings growing up. Blue checkered wallpaper peeled away at the corners, glazed with layers of grease stains over the stove. It was lined with a border of a rooster walking through a field, repeated again and again as if they were marching in line.
When I was little, I imagined them to be an army of poultry, taking the kitchen by storm to retrieve their eggs. On the shelves across from the stove, dozens of barnyard bird figurines sat in rows to match. They were part of a collection my abuela had accumulated over a lifetime that my Tia Esperanza couldn’t bring herself to get rid of. The bottom shelf was occupied by a burning candle to the Virgen de Guadalupe that my Tia lit every day to watch over our family.
This had become a monthly tradition of ours. I saw my Tia a few times throughout the week, but once a month, my mother and I would come over for her to cut my hair as she made dinner. It was an unsanitary ritual, in theory, but no hair ever ended up in the food. During my haircut, mom sat with my cousins and watched whatever reality television show was popular at the time. With me leaving soon, this would be the last one for a while.

“Food’s done,” She announced as she came back to me, “Just gotta clean up the back of your head a bit, then we can eat.”

When all the hair had been swept into the trash, we gathered around the kitchen table for dinner. I sat next to my cousin Esperanza. She was my age, and inherited her mother’s smarts along with her name. She was the latest in three generations of Esperanza’s that started with our abuela. We’d gone to school together since pre-k. She taught me more than any teacher and could’ve gotten into college with me if only she’d applied.

“So are you all set for tomorrow?” she asked me as she passed the beans.
“Yup. Everything I need is ready to go, except you.”

We used to play doctor with our younger cousins. They'd come into the ER (Ranza’s treehouse) and we'd set their broken arms or perform an emergency surgery to get the bullet out of cousin Tino’s gut when he was shot in cops and robbers. The plan, since then, was to go to UCLA together. She never sent the application in. Told me her ma needed her here and promised to enroll in the community college.

“My mija’s gonna go places,” Tia Esperanza chimed in, “She just doesn’t gotta leave to do it.”
“Furthest Ranza’s gonna go is the market to buy groceries.” Esperanza’s little brother, Bobby, joked.

Tia thumped him in the back of the head and carried on dinner conversation with a new topic. He was just beginning high school and already a star athlete, but his giftedness in sports outweighed his brains. He didn’t have anyone his age like Ranza to force him through school like I did. No doubt he’d end up like his father with a factory job and a beer belly. Marry his high school sweetheart, have two kids and name one after his mother. He’d come home at 11 p.m. His wife would touch his acne scarred face and they’d go to bed to dream of what their children's lives might be like.
We visited a while after dinner until mom saw the time and said we’d better get going. We said goodbye. Tia gave me the name of a barber near Westwood.We headed for the car.

“Jude,” Esperanza called to me as I was leaving, “here.”

She unhooked a chain from around her neck. Strung on it was a golden medalla with the image of La Virgen de Guadalupe pressed into the gold oval.

“Take this. It was Abuela’s.”

She latched the necklace around my neck. I’d seen it before. Abuela had given it to Tia Esperanza when she dropped out of beauty school, and Tia to Ranza when we graduated. 

“But just until you come back for good, okay,” she said as a tear of joy rolled down her cheek, “Someone’s gotta watch over you while we're apart.”

Mom hurried me out the door with a blow of the car horn. I wanted to tell Ranza that I’d never be back for more than a visit. To come with me and apply next semester. That we were meant for more than putting cars together and burning prayer candles. But she had that look like she knew something no one else did. Like all this waiting would be worth it in the end.
I watched as the home so many of my family members grew up in shrunk in the rear view mirror, and held tight to the medalla, like a prayer caught in my throat.