Mom’s Friday Chair at the Beauty College

Why I did not call my brother

I got up from the table and reached for my phone, and my mother put her hand over mine.

“No,” she said.

“Mom, Dwight needs to know what his wife said to you.”

“Gwen.” She held on. Her hand was cool and dry and stronger than it looked. “I will not have my children fighting over a hairdo. And I am not losing my daughter-in-law over one either. You promise me.”

I want to be honest about this part, because I have had people ask me since why I did not just pick up the phone. That is why. My mother asked me not to, and she is my mother, and she had already been embarrassed once that day.

Besides, Dwight was not even home. He is a lineman for the electric cooperative, and he had been out west with a crew since the week of the ice storm, setting poles and stringing wire after the ice storm took down half the lines between Hays and the Colorado line. He was working sixteen-hour days in the cold.

I was not going to call him on a bucket truck and tell him his wife had shamed our mother.

“I promise,” I said. “But you are not going without your hair done.”

“I’ll manage.”

“Mom, you can’t roll it.”

She smoothed the scarf. “Then I’ll wear a scarf. Plenty of women do.”

I drove back to the elevator that afternoon and did not hear a word anybody said to me. Fritz, who runs the scale, asked me twice if I was feeling all right.

Trina’s side

I found out Trina’s side of it later, and I am going to tell it, because Mom would want me to be fair.

The shop was failing. Not slowly, either. Two of Trina’s longtime ladies had passed that winter, and three more had moved to the assisted living in Salina, where a hairdresser comes in on Wednesdays. The young women in town drive to Salina for color and cuts at the big places with the music playing.

Trina had a woman from the new houses out by the highway who wanted a standing color appointment, and the only hour that woman could come was Friday at nine. Color and a cut was forty dollars. Mom’s set was fourteen and a two-dollar tip.

She could sell that hour for forty dollars, and she was behind on the rent for the building. That was the reason. It was a real reason.

But I will say this, and I will only say it once. There is a way to tell an 83-year-old woman who has sat in your chair since you were nineteen that you need her hour back.

You call her at home. You sit with her. You do not say it in front of four women under the dryers with the cape still around another woman’s neck. And you do not throw her two dollars back in her face.