His voice began to tremble.
“I asked him to cut my hair.”
His father stood still.
Goldie swallowed saliva.
“He said we can’t.”
Someone asked quietly:
“Why?”
Goldie looked at her father again.
His eyes were already filling with tears.
Then he whispered:
“Because we have to wait until I turn seventeen.”
No one laughed again.
But what his father finally explained about why that exact age was so important — and why he sometimes cried while brushing his daughter’s hair — made all the parents in that hallwise wish never to have judged him. 
Continued first comment 
The hallway was completely silent.chfar mngoli
Goldie was in front of her father, with her long braid falling on one of her shoulders.
“I asked him to cut my hair,” she had just said. “He said we can’t. We have to wait until I turn seventeen.”
His father looked as if someone had stuck his hand inside him and ripped out a secret he had protected for years.
“Goldie…” he whispered.
She looked down.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
He immediately crouched down in front of her.
“No. You have nothing to apologize for.”
Just a few seconds earlier, several parents had been criticizing him.
No one seemed willing to talk now.
Finally, a mother gently asked:
“Why seventeen?”
Goldie looked at her father.
Then he answered for him.
“For my mom.”
He closed his eyes.
Goldie carried the braid forward and held it with both hands.
“My mom died when I was little,” she said.
Most of us already knew that his mother had passed away.
What we didn’t know was what happened.
“I had cancer.”
His father slowly sat on the bench by the window.
Goldie stood next to him.
“When Mom got sick, she lost all her hair,” Goldie continued. “Dad says he used to joke that I had enough hair for both of us.”
His father let out a small broken smile.
“That was it.”
Goldie looked at his braid.
“Before they died, Mom and Dad made a plan. I had to grow my hair to seventeen years old.”
“Goldie,” his father said quietly, “you don’t have to explain this.”
