A Wife Who Wants Beauty - Conclusion

Lisa signed a check and touched the pen to her crooked lips. From the window in her office, she could see the picnicking lunch crowd in the park across the street — couples on blankets, nannies with children, puppies, frisbees, smiles. In half an hour, Harold would arrive with chicken salad sandwiches in a to-go sack, and they would take their place amid the flirting summer breezes. Lisa smiled and her smile ran downhill, toward a deeper sense of things. She glanced away from the window to the Matilda Thacker Award.

The award had arrived in the mail and she kept it on a shelf above her desk. It reminded her why she started the agency. Since that December night when the hotel valet thought she had lost her mind, Lisa's charity had grown to a national powerhouse. Macy's Mirror had provided counseling, career assistance, play therapy and plastic surgery for nine hundred women and girls, free of charge.

Macy was the girl with the newspaper bows. She had become Lisa's first client. Two weeks after Lisa had run into the street to retrieve Macy's bow — to pull a tattered, dirty symbol of beauty from the gutter — Macy was enrolled in school and shopping for uniforms at the department store with her name.

There had been no acceptance speech for the Matilda Thacker Award. In fact, Lisa had never again appeared before any crowd, nor in any plastic surgeon's office, nor, for that matter, at her own office at the newspaper. She had quit her job over the phone on the way to Macy's.

The war was over. Her cheek showed the broken lines of defeat. But her eyes told a different story. She kept the award on a shelf where every visitor to her office could see, propped up next to a photo of a homeless girl, a ribbon of newsprint, and an eyelash curler.