The First Chair I Washed Her Hair In

I rinsed her slow, cupping the water in my hand so none of it ran down into her eyes. You learn to shield a face. My mother taught me that too.

I wrapped her head in a towel and I sat her up. I walked her, still caped, to the first chair, and I sat her down facing the big mirror where forty-one years of this town had watched themselves get beautiful.

Then I got out my own rollers from my bag. The pink dollar-store rollers. And I started to set my mother’s hair in the first chair, in front of the whole shop, with everyone who had heard the lie watching me do the exact thing the lie said I would never do.

I took my time. I was not in a hurry.

Firm at the crown. I rolled her thin white hair the way she taught me when I was twelve.

I pinned each roller and I smoothed the next section and I pinned again, and the little pink rollers went in one at a time, and the clock on June’s wall ticked, and nobody rushed me.

In the mirror I could see her face, soft and content and pretty, an old woman being tended by her daughter.

And there was not one person in that room who could look at it and believe what Renae had said. Not one.

What Mama Told the Room

It was Darlene who finally spoke. She leaned forward under her dryer and she said, gentle, “Opal, honey, you look just beautiful. Your girl takes good care of you, don’t she.”

And my mother, with a roller half set in her hair, looked around that shop at all those faces she had known for half a century.

Then she said the thing I will hear in my head for the rest of my life.

“My Loretta comes every single day,” she said. “Every single day. She does my hair at the home when the girls are too busy. She washes me and she feeds me and she tells me about the redbirds.”

She reached up and patted my hand where it rested on her shoulder.

“I don’t always know what day it is,” my mother told the room, plain and unashamed. “But I know my girl comes every day. A body always knows who comes.”

Nobody breathed. June had given up on hiding her tears. The Simmons girl was crying too, and she is nineteen and did not even understand all of what she was crying about.

And in the mirror, past my mother’s soft rolled head, I could see the third dryer, and I could see Renae.

She had the magazine up in front of her face, but her hands were not steady, and the foils were still in her hair, and her set was not even half done.