Mom’s Friday Chair at the Beauty College

After

That was nearly two years ago now.

Trina kept the shop. The woman by the highway still has the Friday nine o’clock, and she sends two friends, and Trina caught up on her rent by summer. I am told she raised her prices on the regular sets, and nobody minded, because everybody in town knew why.

She has never once said a word about the picture, and nobody says it to her.

But I have noticed that when a new young girl comes out of the beauty college looking for a chair to rent, Trina is the first one to call her. And I have noticed that she tells every one of them the same thing: give the old ladies your first Friday. They will make you.

Lorna told me Trina keeps the cutout of Mom’s picture from the paper taped to the mirror at her station. I went in once to check. It is still there, a little yellow now, Mom laughing in the window chair with two girls at her shoulders.

Dwight comes to Sunday dinner at Mom’s every week with Trina. Trina brings the rolls. They are not as good as Mom’s, and Mom tells her so, and Trina says, “I know, Velda,” and everybody laughs.

Fridays

Mom is 85 now. She still goes to Salina every Friday at ten.

The six girls from that first spring have all passed their state boards and gone on to shops of their own. One of them, the tall girl with the braid, rents a chair in a little town out west of Hays. She sends Mom a Christmas card every year with a picture of her own Friday regulars in it.

Rochelle still runs the clinic. She puts Mom in the window chair every week, in the best light in the building, and she makes every new class watch Mom’s set at least once. “This is a Friday regular,” she tells them. “Learn her.”

Mom still brings a dollar for every student who touches her hair. She irons them on Thursday night. I have stopped asking her why.

And every Friday, when she is done, when her hair is set up high and white the way it has been all my life, I walk her two blocks down the street to the cafe for the chicken fried steak.

We sit by the window. She orders the same thing every time and tells me which girl did the best job that week and whether she thinks that one will make it.

I took Friday mornings off from the elevator for good after that first spring. Fritz covers the office until noon. He says he does not mind, and he says it every week, and every week he asks how Mom’s hair came out.

It came out fine, I tell him. It always does.

Mom kept her Fridays in Salina. And she kept lunch with me after. And she kept her daughter-in-law too, which, when I think about it now, was the only thing she was ever really worried about losing.