The Chair on My Mother’s Sun Porch

Nineteen Years at Station Three

Our town is the county seat, about three thousand people in the northeast corner of South Dakota, where the fields run flat to the tree lines and the wind does not stop from October to April.

Marlene Tollefson opened the Mane Street Salon in 1988. She hired me out of beauty school in Sioux Falls, and I was a renter at station three from the day I got my license.

Chair renting works like this. You pay the owner a flat amount each week for your station, and you keep everything you take in. You buy your own color and shears and keep your own book.

Marlene ran it fair. She charged what the chair was worth in a town our size, and she never once told me which days I could work. When she retired last spring, her knees gone and her grandkids in Minnesota, she sold the business to Kendra.

Kendra was thirty-three and had worked at a big salon in Sioux Falls for ten years. She had grown up two counties over. She came back with a bank loan, new paint, a coffee machine that made one cup at a time, and an online booking page nobody over sixty ever used.

I liked her, at first. I want to say that too.

That night I sat at our kitchen table with the paper in front of me. Dan came in at nine. He had been out since four in the morning on a line down past Big Stone, a farm co-op line that went out when a cottonwood came down in the wind.

He is a lineman for the rural electric co-op. He has been one for twenty-two years, and I can tell what kind of day it was by how he unlaces his boots. That night he did it slowly.

He saw my face and sat down across from me without taking his jacket off. “What happened?”

I slid the paper over. He read it the way he reads everything, every word, his lips not moving but his jaw working a little.

“That’s twelve hundred a month,” he said. “For the same chair.”

“Thirteen hundred, some months.”

“And Saturdays.” He set the paper down. “You want me to go talk to her?”

I knew he meant it. I also knew what it would look like, a big man in a co-op jacket walking into a salon full of ladies to have a word with a thirty-three-year-old woman about her own business.

“No,” I said. “I already talked to her. She said take it or leave it.”

Dan was quiet for a while. The furnace kicked on. Somewhere down the block a dog was barking at nothing.

“Well,” he said finally. “What do you want to do?”

That was the first time I let myself say it out loud.

“I think I want to leave it.”

The Thank You

I went in the next morning before my first appointment. Kendra was at the counter with her laptop open and a stack of invoices next to it. She had bags under her eyes I had not noticed the day before.

“I thought it over,” I said. “I’m going to go out on my own. I’ll finish out the month so nobody gets left without an appointment.”

She blinked at me. I do not think she had expected that.

“Where are you going to go?” she said. “There isn’t another salon in this town.” I told her I did not know yet, and that was true.

Then I said the thing I had decided on in the car, sitting in the parking lot with the engine running and the heater going.

“I want to thank you for keeping the place open, Kendra. Marlene was worried it would sit empty. You kept it a salon. That matters in a town like this.”

She stared at me like I had handed her something she did not know where to set down.

“Okay,” she said. “Well. Thanks.”

I said it because my mother raised me that you thank people for what they did right before you walk away from what they did wrong. And because it was true.

I also made myself a rule that morning, driving in. I would not ask one single client to follow me.

No calls, no cards in anybody’s hand. Those ladies had sat in that chair for years, and the chair belonged to the salon. If they wanted me, they would find me.