“Dad’s out in Nebraska somewhere,” he said. “He’s been gone seventeen days. When he calls in tonight, I’m telling him. Not to start anything. He just ought to know.”
“That’s fair,” I said.
“And Saturday,” Joel said, “you load up whatever you need. I’ll carry it.”
Before I loaded one towel, I called Grandma. I did not want to arrive like a rescue squad. Lorraine Brandt has never been rescued in her life and would not care to start at ninety-one.
Darla answered the house phone and passed it to her without a word.
“Grandma,” I said, “I’ve got an opening on Saturday at two. I’d like to put you in it.”
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There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear the television in the background, a game show.
“I’m not a charity case, Nicole.”
“No, ma’am. You’re a two o’clock. I’ll bring the shop to you since you can’t get in the car easy yet.”
“I can pay you.”
“You can tip me,” I said. “Same as everybody.”
Another long quiet. Then her voice changed. It got brisk, the way it used to get when she told me my pie crust was overworked.
“Bring the good setting lotion. Not the drugstore kind that leaves it sticky. And the double prong clips, not bobby pins, bobby pins leave a dent.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And a towel. A real towel, not one of those plastic bibs. My mother always used a towel.”
“I’ll bring towels,” I said.
“Two o’clock,” she said, and she hung up on me, which is how I knew she was pleased.
I need to tell you about Lorraine’s hair, or none of this makes sense.
For sixty years, every Saturday morning, Lorraine Brandt washed her hair at her own kitchen sink and set it in pin curls. She did it after breakfast and before she baked. Rain, harvest, funerals, it did not matter.
She would sit at her kitchen table with a hand mirror propped against the sugar bowl and wind each curl around two fingers, flat to her head, and pin it with a crossed clip. Left side going one way, right side the other, two rows across the back.
Then she would tie a scarf over the whole business and bake bread and listen to the polka hour on the radio. By noon she would brush it out, and it would hold until the next Saturday with nothing but a hairnet at night.
When I opened my shop on Main Street eleven years ago, Grandma was the first person through the door. She brought a potted geranium and said, “Very nice. I’ll never need you, but very nice.”
She never did need me. She came in once a year for a trim, sat in my second chair, told me exactly how much to take off, and watched every snip in the mirror. Then she tipped me five dollars and told the other ladies in the shop that her grandson had married well.
My shop has two chairs. One is mine. The second chair was for a girl I trained who moved to Eau Claire, and after she left I kept it for overflow, for kids’ cuts, and for Grandma once a year.
That was the woman who was sitting in a dim back bedroom in November with her hand on her head so nobody could see.
Saturday came in gray and raw, the kind of November day in central Wisconsin when the sky sits right down on the corn stubble and the light never quite gets started.