The Chair on My Mother’s Sun Porch

Dan and the Sink

Dan came over that Saturday with his tools and a tape measure and a cup of coffee Mom poured him before he got his coat off. He walked the porch twice. He went down to the basement and stood under it with a flashlight for a long time.

“The kitchen line runs right there,” he said when he came up, pointing at the wall between the porch and the back hall. “I can tee off the hot and cold in the basement and come up through the floor. Drain’s the trick.”

“Can you do it?”

“I can do it right,” he said, which is what Dan says instead of yes.

He did it over three Saturdays and four evenings after co-op shifts. I know how many because I made him supper every one of those nights.

He ran new PEX lines off the kitchen supply in the basement, hot and cold, with shutoff valves under the sink so Mom would never have to go hunting if something leaked.

He cut in a drain with a P-trap and tied the vent into the stack the right way. A sink without a vent, he said, will gurgle and pull the trap dry, and then the porch smells like a sewer and nobody comes.

He put a hair trap on the drain without me asking.

“You’ve cleaned enough hair out of drains,” he said when I noticed. “So has your mother.”

The shampoo sink itself I found used, a white porcelain bowl with the neck rest, from a salon in Aberdeen that was closing. I paid $240 for it and the black hydraulic chair that came with it. The chair needed a new seat cushion. Mom’s neighbor, Jeff, who does upholstery out of his garage, did it for the cost of the vinyl.

Then Dan did one more thing I had not asked for. He measured those three concrete steps up to the porch door, went to the lumber yard, and came back with a truckload of treated lumber.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Half your ladies are past eighty,” he said. “Half of those use a walker. Kendra’s got four steps up to the front door on Main, and no rail on the left side.” He set a sawhorse down in the driveway. “Your ladies aren’t doing steps on my watch.”

He built a ramp. Twenty feet long, with a turn in it, because the rule is you need a foot of length for every inch you climb, and those steps came up close to twenty inches. He put rails on both sides and stapled down that gritty anti-slip tape so it would not ice up so bad in January.

I stood in the driveway when he finished and I did not know what to say to him. He was wiping his hands on a rag. He has big hands, scarred up from twenty-two years of climbing poles.

“It’s just a ramp, Shell,” he said.

It was not just a ramp. I knew it and he knew it.

The Inspection

I filed the salon application with the state and paid the fee. I bought a towel cabinet and a lidded hamper and a jar of blue disinfectant, the same as every shop in America. I hung a mirror on the wall over a small rolling cart and lined up my combs and rollers on it.

Mom brought out all her geraniums and set them along the windowsills.

“They’ll like the company,” she said.

The inspector came on a Tuesday morning in late September, a woman about my age who covered half the state. She walked the porch with a clipboard, ran the hot water until it steamed, opened the towel cabinet, checked the lock on the inside door, and walked down the hall to the half bath and back.

Then she stood at the bottom of Dan’s ramp for a minute and asked who built it. I told her my husband.

“Tell him he did it right,” she said, and she wrote something down. “Most of these home salons, the ladies have to climb in through the garage.”

I got my license in the mail eight days later. Mom put it in a frame from the Ben Franklin and hung it by the door.