The Haircuts I Gave at the Nursing Home

It was Daddy’s chair.

I knew it before I let myself know it. The Koken from station one, rebuilt and bolted to the floor, the enamel white as a refrigerator. Somebody had put a new black seat on it, and the chrome footrest had been polished until it showed the ceiling.

A cape lay folded on the arm.

It had not gone to Berea at all, or if it had, it had come here instead of home.

In front of it, on the wall, was a mirror. A big one, hung square, with a light on either side.

The first thing I did was look at that mirror to see which way it faced. I could not help myself. Forty years ago the aides had turned my father’s mirror to the wall, and he had asked them to.

This one faced the room.

“Jean,” I said.

“It’s the right height,” she said. “I gave Bobby your inseam.”

I could not say a word.

A young woman in a black apron was standing beside the chair with her hands folded, trying not to look at me. She was maybe thirty-eight, with her hair pulled back and a comb in her back pocket.

It took me a second. Then I got it from the chin.

“That’s Katie Abney,” Pam said. “Lonnie’s granddaughter.”

Lonnie Abney was the man in the next bed the first Thursday, the one who said, “If you can do him, can you do me?” He lived at Cedar Knob about ten years, and I cut his hair every one of them.

Katie used to come with her mother when she was six or seven and sit on the floor by Lonnie’s bed with a coloring book. She never colored in it. She watched my hands. I remember telling her mother once that the child ought to be careful or she would catch it.

She caught it. She had gone to barber school in Louisville, worked and saved for it the long way, and passed her state board in June. She had been cutting hair at a shop in Berea ever since.

“She’s asked for the Thursdays,” Pam said. “Thursdays here, and every other Saturday for the ones whose families come on weekends. It pays what the job pays. It’s hers if she wants it.”

“I want it,” Katie said. It was the first thing she had said, and it came out small.

I looked at Jean. She was crying without any fuss, the way she does, with her chin up.

“Sit down, Orin,” she said.

“In that?”

“It’s the right height. I told you.”

The room made a sound that was half laugh and half something else. I let her walk me to the chair. Daddy cut my hair as a boy in the second chair, and after he went down it was Cecil the feed salesman, the one who caught him, who did mine on Tuesday evenings.

In my whole life I had never once sat in my father’s chair.