The First Chair I Washed Her Hair In

The Morning I Decided

I called the home at seven and asked Miss Carol if I could sign my mother out for a couple of hours. I told her the plain truth about why.

Miss Carol has heard every kind of family story there is in that building. She was quiet a second.

Then she said, “You bring her back by lunch, and you tell that woman hello for me.” The way she said it was not friendly.

I got Mama dressed myself. The aides were short again, two of them for the whole hall, so I did it. I put her in the good lavender blouse she likes, the one with the little pearl buttons she can still work with her own fingers if you give her time, and I give her time.

I did her face light, a little powder, the pink lipstick she has worn since Eisenhower was president. I dabbed a touch of the rose water she likes behind her ears.

I wanted her to feel like herself. I wanted her to walk into that shop as Opal Hartley.

As the woman who put a chair in that building before any of them were born. Not as some poor forgotten thing somebody dumped and ran from.

“Where are we going, honey,” she asked me in the car. She had my name that morning. Some mornings are better than others and the Lord gave me a good one.

“We’re going to get your hair done, Mama,” I said. “At the shop.”

“June’s shop,” she said, and she smiled, and she looked out the window at the fields going by. “I used to have a shop.”

“I know you did,” I said. “You had the first chair by the window.”

“The first chair,” she said. “That was my chair.”

I had to drive a minute before I could talk again.

Walking Her In

The shop was full when we got there. It always is on a Saturday morning. I planned it that way. I am not going to pretend I did not.

I could see them through the glass as I came around the car and opened her door. The row of pink hood dryers along the wall, every one of them full. June at her station with a comb in her hand. And under the third dryer, with foils in her hair and a magazine in her lap, Renae.

I got my mother out of the car slow and careful, the way you move an eighty-one-year-old woman who does not always remember that her legs are not what they were. I put her hand through my arm. I squared up the lavender blouse. And I walked her in through the door, and the little bell over it rang.

The room went quiet. Not all at once, but in a wave, the way a pond goes still after you take your hand out of it.

June stopped with the comb in the air. The Simmons girl, who had been laughing about something, closed her mouth.

One by one the women under the dryers turned and looked. A lie about a woman had been hanging in that air since the afternoon before.

And here was that woman, walking in on a Saturday morning with the mother on her arm.

I did not look at Renae. Not yet. I walked my mother past the dryers, slow, letting every one of them get a good look at her, powdered and lipsticked and upright in her good blouse, and I walked her to the front of the shop.

To the first chair. The one by the window. The one that had been my mother’s chair for forty-one years and was now just the chair where June hung her smocks.

“Here, Mama,” I said. “Your chair.”

And my mother, who does not always know what day it is, ran her hand along the arm of that chair and said, clear as a bell, “This is my chair.”

Somebody behind me made a small sound. June set her comb down.