The Salon I Sold For My Son
I had done their hair for their daughters’ weddings and their husbands’ funerals.
Donna Kruger was the first. She was seventy-six and came in every week for a wash and set.
When I told her, she reached up and held my wrist while I had the rollers in her hair.
“Is it the boy?” she asked. I said yes. She did not ask anything else.
She just patted my hand and said, “Then you did right, honey,” and I had to go into the back room for a minute.
Word moved through town the way word does. By the end of the week, half the women in Elm Lake knew I had sold the shop.
A few of them figured out why without me saying anything at all.
Nobody said Rod’s name to me. But I saw it in their faces at the grocery store.
A town our size does not need a newspaper. It needs a beauty shop and a cafe with a long counter.
I did not spread it. I want that clear. When people asked, I said Tanner needed surgery and I sold the business to pay for it.
If they put the rest together, they did it themselves.
Tanner found out from a boy at school whose mother was one of my regulars. He came home and dropped his backpack on the kitchen floor so hard the zipper split.
“You sold the shop?” he said. “For me? Mom, you love that shop. You’ve had it since before I was born.”
“Since you were two,” I said. “And I love you more than a shop. That is the whole conversation, Tanner. It is done and I am not sorry.”
He sat down at the table where Rod had sat. His voice cracked when he said he would pay me back.
I told him he could pay me back by standing up straight at graduation and not wearing that hoodie in the pictures.
He laughed a little, and then he put his head down on his arms.
I rubbed his back, the crooked part of it, and neither of us said anything for a long time.
Morgan took over the shop the first of December. She asked what I wanted done with the sign, the old hand-painted one over the door that said Jessica’s on Main.
I told her to paint over it and make it hers.
I took a job doing hair at the Prairie View care center, Tuesday through Friday.
They have a little salon room off the dining hall with one chair and a sink. I did sets and trims for women in their eighties and nineties.
I will tell you something I did not expect. I loved it.
Those women had stories about threshing crews and dances at the Legion and husbands who came home from Korea. They held my hand while I worked.
But Saturdays were hard. Saturday had always been my big day at the shop, wedding hair and prom hair and the farm wives who only had time on weekends.
Now Saturday was just a day with nothing in it.
We drove up to St. Neil on the fourth of January in a snowstorm.