The Bride Who Ended Up in My Chair

“They all walked out of there looking like somebody loved them,” I said. “There is nothing small about it. There never was.”

Kendra was crying so hard by then that Amy came around the table, put both arms around her from behind, and held on.

“Thank you for telling me,” I said. “I mean that. Now, I don’t have time to do your makeup twice, so cry it all out right now while I work. Can you do that for me?”

That got a laugh out of her, wet and surprised, and out of half the room besides. Linda set the coffee pot down and wiped her face with a dish towel.

Kendra took a long breath and let it out. Then she looked at me in the mirror again, and her face changed. It went soft somehow, younger.

“Brooke,” she said, “will you do it the way you would do it for your own wedding?”

I had not expected that. I had planned a sleek, polished chignon for her, very Denver, because I figured that was what she wanted. I had been building it in my head the whole drive out.

“Are you sure?” I said. “That might not be what you pictured.”

“I don’t want what I pictured,” she said. “I want what you’d want.”

So I put the plan away.

What I would want, if I ever got married, was soft. I would want to look like myself, only more. Up, but loose enough that it might come down if somebody spun me hard on the dance floor.

I curled her whole head in big sections with the inch and a half iron and let each curl cool in my palm. I brushed them out with my fingers so they stayed soft, and I pulled a few pieces loose around her face on purpose.

Then I gathered the rest low and a little off center, behind her left ear, and built the bun one curl at a time. Pinned, tucked, pinned. Nothing sprayed stiff. Forty-one pins.

The bridesmaids had pulled their chairs into a half circle around us. The only sounds were the hiss of the iron, the old furnace kicking on under the floor, and the ice ticking against the window over the sink.

When the bun was done, I reached into my coat pocket on the back of the chair and took out Grandma June’s jar.

“What’s that?” Kendra asked.

“Lavender,” I said. “My grandma grew it on the south side of her house. This is the last of it, from the summer before she died.”

“She used to tuck a sprig in a lady’s pocket on the way out,” I said, “so she would smell like somebody had taken care of her.”

I unscrewed the lid. For a second the whole kitchen smelled like Grandma’s porch in July, and I had to stand there and breathe before I could go on.

I picked the best sprig in the jar, a long one with the buds still full and gray-purple, and worked it into the bun just above the pins. It sat there as if it had grown there.

“Something old,” I said. “If you want it.”

“I want it,” she whispered.

I stepped back, and Amy stepped back, and I turned the big mirror against the cereal boxes so it caught her full on.