The Saturday Grandma Got Her Curls Back

I set up the bonnet dryer on the table and fit the plastic hood over Grandma’s clips and tied it under her chin. The motor hummed. Grandma folded her hands in her lap.

“Forty-five minutes,” I said.

“Forty,” she said. “My hair is thin. You’ll cook me.”

“Forty,” I said.

Under the dryer she could not hear much, and she did not try. She watched the gray light at the window and drank her coffee and once or twice closed her eyes.

Darla and I sat at the table with that hum between us.

“Ron called Thursday,” Darla said, low, so Grandma would not hear over the dryer. “Joel told him something. I don’t know what. Ron asked me if I was all right.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said I was fine.” She turned her coffee cup in a circle on the table. “I’m not fine. I haven’t been fine since July. I’m sixty-three, Nikki. My back is shot. I lie awake listening for her to get up, because if she falls on my watch, that’s on me.”

“I know.”

“The money,” she said, and stopped, and her face went red. “I know what you think about the money.”

I did not tell her what I thought. I waited.

“It felt like the only thanks I was going to get,” she said. “That’s the truth. Nobody was going to say thank you, so I paid myself. And every month it felt worse, and every month I kept it anyway, because if I gave it back, that would mean I’d been wrong to take it.”

She wiped her eyes with the dish towel from her shoulder.

“I’m not proud of it,” she said. “I’m just tired.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on her wrist for a second. That was all. Then I took my hand back, and we sat there, and the dryer hummed.

At forty minutes I turned the dryer off and lifted the hood. I touched a curl at the crown. Dry all the way through.

I took the clips out one at a time and set them in the box, and every curl came down a tight, neat little coil, just the way she had done them for sixty years.

Then I brushed them out. Slow, with the paddle brush, the way you brush out a set so it softens without falling. The curls turned into waves, and the waves fell into place around her face, white and soft and full the way thin hair only looks when it is clean.

I put a little spray on it, the light kind, not the helmet kind. Grandma would never have forgiven me the helmet kind.

Then I picked up my hand mirror.

Darla had stood up. She was at the end of the table with her arms uncrossed, holding the dish towel in both hands.

I put the mirror in Grandma’s hands.

Her hands were shaking. They shake a little all the time now, since the fall, but this was more than that. She lifted the mirror and looked.

She looked a long time.

Then she let go of the mirror with her right hand, and she reached up and touched her own hair. Just the tips of her fingers, on the waves over her ear, very lightly, like she was checking that it was real.

“There she is,” Grandma said.

That was all. Just those three words, and her voice broke on the last one.