The Saturday Grandma Got Her Curls Back

“Don’t look at me, Nicole,” Grandma Lorraine said, and she put one hand flat on top of her head like she was holding down a hat in the wind.

She had not called me Nicole since the day I married her grandson. To Lorraine Brandt I had been Nikki for fourteen years, and Nikki was the name she used when she was pleased with me.

It was the first Monday in November, the one day my shop is closed, and I had driven out to my mother-in-law’s ranch house with a pan of scotcheroos and no plan beyond a visit.

The back bedroom door was shut. The room was dim and warm and smelled like the lotion Grandma has used on her hands since before I was born. She was sitting in the recliner Darla had moved in for her.

“I brought bars,” I said. “Peanut butter. The ones you say are too sweet and then eat three of.”

“Set them on the dresser,” she said. She did not take her hand off her hair.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I have done hair for nineteen years. I know the way a woman holds herself when she is ashamed of her head, and Grandma was holding herself exactly that way.

“Grandma,” I said. “When did you last get your hair washed?”

She looked at the window instead of at me. The blinds were down.

“It itches,” she said finally. “It has itched for weeks. I can’t get my arm up high enough to do it myself, and I won’t be dragged to that tub again. I’d sooner it fell out.”

Then she said the thing that stopped my breath. “Don’t you tell Pastor Hoffman why I quit coming. I told his wife I had a cold.”

Lorraine Brandt had sat in the third pew on the left at the Lutheran church in town for sixty-one years. She had missed it for her husband’s heart attack, for two of her own surgeries, and for the blizzard of ’79. That was the whole list, as far as anyone knew.

“I won’t tell anybody anything,” I said. “That’s your business.”

“And don’t go making a fuss with Darla,” she said. “She has enough on her.”

I promised her I wouldn’t make a fuss. Then I went out to the kitchen and very nearly broke that promise.

Darla was at the stove browning hamburger for chili. She had the radio on the Marshfield station, and she did not turn it down when I came in.

“She eat any of those bars?” Darla asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “Darla, when was Grandma’s hair washed last?”

Darla kept stirring. “August, maybe. Early September. She fights me on it.”

“She says she can’t lift her arm.”

“She can lift it fine when she wants the remote.” Darla set the spoon down hard on the rest. “She fights me on it, and I’m not her maid, Nikki. I cook three meals a day. I do her pills. I’m up with her twice a night. I’m not going to wrestle a ninety-one-year-old woman into a bathtub so she can tell me the water’s cold.”

I had words lined up behind my teeth. I let them stay there.

I drove home on County Trunk A with the heater on high and my hands tight on the wheel, and I made myself think about it the way Joel’s grandmother would have, plainly.

Here is how we got to that Monday.