The Prom Dress Grandma Bought

She had posted it for one person, and he had read it in eleven minutes, sitting alone in his living room with a ball game on.

By that evening the picture had a hundred and some likes. Half of Howard commented.

Women Darla had done hair for since the Nixon administration wrote things like “What a beauty” and “She looks just like you did, Darla” and “Grandmas are the best.”

Tasha did not comment. Madison did not comment. Rory did not comment either. That was the strange part.

The man who liked every sunset his mother ever posted did not touch that one, and I think everybody who knew him noticed.

I didn’t hear from him again for almost three weeks. Sadie texted him a couple of times about small things, a test, a volleyball camp in the summer.

He answered short, a thumbs-up, a “good job kiddo.” She showed me the texts without me asking, which told me she was watching too.

I saw him once in that stretch, at the Cenex on the highway. He was filling his truck and I was getting milk.

He nodded at me across the pumps, and I nodded back, and he looked like a man who had not been sleeping.

He was thinner. His work jacket hung on him. I almost walked over. I almost said something kind.

Then I decided that whatever was going on in him was not mine to fix either, and I got in my car and went home and made goulash.

Prom was the third Saturday in April. That morning was gray and cool, with the kind of fine mist that doesn’t count as rain but still frizzes your hair, which is exactly what every girl in eastern South Dakota prays won’t happen on prom day.

Darla came over at one o’clock. She carried in a tackle box, an old black styling cape folded over her arm, two curling irons, a can of hairspray the size of a fire extinguisher, and a plastic bag of bobby pins that she said she had been saving since the Reagan years.

She set up in my kitchen. She put a chair in the middle of the linoleum, right where the light from the window over the sink falls in the afternoon, and she snapped that cape around Sadie’s shoulders the way she must have done ten thousand times in her shop in Howard.

“Tell me what you want,” Darla said, picking up a comb.

Sadie pulled up a picture on her phone, some girl from the internet with her hair swept up loose on one side and long curls on the other.

Darla looked at it for a long moment over her glasses.

“That’s a fifty-dollar updo in Sioux Falls,” she said. “In my kitchen, that’s free, and it’ll hold better. Sit still and don’t look at your phone. I need your head straight.”

I sat at the table and watched. Darla’s hands shake a little now, when she holds a coffee cup or signs a check. But they did not shake that afternoon.

She sectioned Sadie’s hair with the end of a rat-tail comb, clipped it up, and started curling from the bottom, one piece at a time, slow and sure.

While she worked she talked. She told Sadie about the hundreds of brides she’d done, and the funerals.

She said nobody tells you, when you go to beauty school, that you will do the hair of the dead.

She said she’d done it for her own mother, and it was the last kind thing she ever got to do for her.