The Bride Who Ended Up in My Chair

Linda kept the coffee pot going. She did not sit down once. Every time she came past me, she touched my shoulder and said thank you, quieter each time.

At ten after ten, someone knocked on the back door. Linda went to answer it, and I heard her laugh for the first time that morning.

It was Brandon, in his Carhartt coat with the hood up and ice in his beard. He was holding a carrier of eight coffees from the Cenex by the interstate, with a dozen donuts balanced on top.

His eyes were squeezed shut. “I’m not allowed to see the bride,” he said loudly. “Is the bride in the kitchen? I’m not looking.”

“She’s in the kitchen,” Linda said. “Stand right there.”

He held out the coffee and donuts at arm’s length, and Linda took them. Then he reached blind toward the sound of my curling iron, and I put my free hand in his, and he squeezed it hard.

“Dad sanded the whole church lot,” he said. “And the steps. And the community building. He’s doing Elm Street now, and nobody even asked him.”

“Of course he is,” I said.

“Brooke,” he said. That was all. Then he let go, turned around with his eyes still shut, walked straight into the door frame, and every girl in that kitchen laughed.

He waved over his shoulder and went back out into the ice.

I looked down the table after he was gone. Kendra had her hand over her mouth, and her eyes were wet again, but she was almost smiling. She caught me looking and looked back down at her coffee.

The fifth girl, the sixth, the seventh. A cousin, a friend from the co-op, a girl Kendra had known since she was twelve. Curl, pin, cool, brush, twist, pin.

My forearms ached. Somebody put old country music on a phone, low, and somebody else sang along.

At eleven o’clock, I set the curling iron down on the towel and shook out my hands. Seven bridesmaids sat around that table with their hair done, eating Cenex donuts and taking pictures of each other’s buns.

There was one chair left, the kitchen chair in front of the mirror. The room went quiet. Nobody planned it. Amy put her donut down. Linda stopped walking with the coffee pot.

Kendra stood up from the far end of the table. She walked the length of that kitchen with eight women watching her, seven bridesmaids and her own mother, and she sat down in my chair.

I did not say anything. I picked up my wide tooth comb and worked it through her hair from the ends up, gentle, the way you do on a bride.

Her hair was thick and dark blonde, nearly dry by then, with a good Denver color job in it. She looked at me in the mirror for a long time. I looked at her hair, because that was my job.

Her hands were knotted in her lap. Then she said, “Brooke, can I tell you something?”

“You can tell me anything,” I said. “I’m a hairdresser. Ask anybody.”

A couple of the girls laughed a little. Kendra did not. Her hands were holding each other under the white robe so tight her knuckles had gone pale.

“I grew up in Highlands Ranch,” she said. “Outside Denver. Do you know it?”

“I’ve driven through,” I said.

“It’s very nice,” she said. “Big houses. Good schools. We lived in a basement apartment under one of the big houses.”