The Bride Who Ended Up in My Chair

She had never once set foot in my shop, not even to buy a bottle of shampoo. I had noticed, of course. You notice in a town that size. I had decided not to take it personally, and mostly I had managed.

Driving home that night, I sat in my car in front of my apartment above the salon with the engine running and cried for about five minutes.

Then I wiped my face and went upstairs, because I had a seven o’clock perm in the morning and Mrs. Albers does not like to wait.

The thing that stung was not the money. It was the word small. She had picked the one word every person in a town like ours has heard somebody from somewhere else say about us.

My grandmother did hair in her kitchen for forty-two years. Grandma June never had a license on a wall. She had a chair from a closed barber shop in Ogallala and a hood dryer she bought used in 1971.

Every woman in our church came through that kitchen on Friday afternoons. She charged five dollars for a wash and set until 1990, then raised it to seven because the price of perm solution bothered her conscience.

She taught me to roll a set when I was nine years old, standing on a step stool beside her chair.

She also grew lavender along the south side of her house and dried it in bunches from the porch ceiling. When she finished a set, she tucked a sprig into the woman’s coat pocket on the way out.

She said it was so they would smell like somebody had taken care of them.

Grandma June died two years before that Thanksgiving, at eighty-eight. I kept a jar of her last lavender on the shelf behind my register, where nobody but me ever looked.

So when Kendra said small-town salon, I heard Grandma’s kitchen. I heard every Friday afternoon of my childhood. I did not say any of that to anybody.

The wedding was set for the second Saturday in December at two o’clock, at the Lutheran church on Elm Street. The reception would be in the community building after, catered by the café, with a DJ from Kearney.

People asked me about the hair, of course. Customers would sit down in my chair and say, so I suppose you’re doing the bride.

I would say no, she has somebody coming up from Denver, and they would say oh, in a voice that meant a great deal.

I did not let anybody run Kendra down in my shop. When one of the Thursday ladies started in once, I said, “She’s going to be my sister, Marlene,” and Marlene let it drop.

I heard the price eventually, the way you hear everything in a small town. Eleven hundred dollars for the bride and seven bridesmaids, travel included.

To be fair to the Denver stylist, that is not a crazy price. City bridal hair runs over a hundred dollars a head, and she was driving four hours before sunrise. I just would not have charged it to family.

I bought a dark green dress for the wedding from the store in North Platte. I planned to sit on the groom’s side, cry when my brother cried, and dance with my dad. I planned to just be the sister.

The weather service started talking about the storm on the Wednesday before. Warm air riding over cold, freezing rain likely across the southern Panhandle and down the Platte valley.