The Chair on My Mother’s Sun Porch

Kendra on the Porch

Kendra found out in the second week of November.

A town of three thousand does not keep anything quiet for long, especially not a young girl’s car parked in my mother’s driveway twice a week.

It was a Tuesday when she came. Kaylee was rolling Mrs. Iverson for a perm, slow and careful, and I was standing behind her, and Mom was out in the wicker chair with Gertie under the dryer, the two of them talking about canning.

We all heard the car pull in too fast. We heard the door slam. We heard the heels on Dan’s ramp, quick and hard, all twenty feet of it and the turn.

Kendra came through the porch door with her black blazer on and her keys still in her hand. She looked at me. She looked at Kaylee, standing behind the chair with a perm rod in each hand. She looked at the sink, and the license in the frame by the door, and Gertie under the dryer, and my mother with a coffee cup halfway to her mouth.

“Shelly,” Kendra said. Her voice was shaking. “What is my niece doing on your mother’s porch?”

I did not say anything right away. I did not need to.

Kaylee set the two rods down on the cart.

“She’s teaching me,” Kaylee said. “Aunt Kendra. She’s teaching me perms. For free. Because nobody else would.”

“You work for me.”

“I rent a chair from you on Saturdays,” Kaylee said. Her voice was small, but it did not shake. “And I’ve turned away nineteen perm calls since August because I didn’t know how. Nineteen. That’s money you never saw either.”

Kendra opened her mouth. Then she shut it.

My mother set her coffee cup down on its saucer.

“Kendra,” she said. “I knew your grandmother. Arlene. She sat right there in that chair at Marlene’s every Friday for twenty years.” She nodded at the wicker chair next to her own. “Sit down. You look like you’ve been running since spring.”

I will never forget what happened to Kendra’s face then.

It just fell. Everything she had been holding up, the blazer and the keys and the bank note and the invoices and her sister on the phone, it all came down at once. She did not cry. She just looked tired, all the way through, the way Dan looks after a storm.

She sat down in the wicker chair.

Mom poured her a cup of coffee in one of the blue-flowered cups.

Nobody said anything for a minute. Gertie’s dryer hummed. Out on the street a truck went by hauling a gravity box of corn to the elevator.

“Go on, Kaylee,” I said quietly. “Finish your wrap. Mrs. Iverson’s cold.”

Kaylee picked up her rods. And Kendra Moore sat in my mother’s wicker chair and watched her niece wrap a perm, one little panel at a time, my hand on Kaylee’s wrist when she needed it and off it when she did not.

It took forty minutes. Kendra did not say a word the whole time.

When Kaylee put the last rod in, Kendra set down her coffee cup.

“Shelly,” she said. “Can I talk to you outside?”