Mom’s Friday Chair at the Beauty College

The picture

Rochelle posted the picture on the college’s page that afternoon. She wrote something simple underneath it about how proud she was of her students and how lucky they were to have a Friday regular who had been getting her hair set for thirty years.

By Saturday it had been shared a few dozen times. By Monday it had been shared all over Saline County, and a few counties past it. Women I had not seen in years were commenting on it. Some of them were ladies who had gone to school when Mom cooked there.

They wrote things like, “That’s Mrs. Kreutzer! She made the cinnamon rolls!” and “Look at that hair! Still beautiful.” One man wrote that she had slipped him an extra roll every Thursday in third grade because she knew there was not much food at his house.

Mom does not have Facebook. I read every comment to her over the phone. She was quiet most of the time and then she said, “Well, I’ll be.” Then she said, “I didn’t know anybody remembered those rolls.”

On Wednesday, our town paper came out. The editor, who goes to church with Mom, had asked the college if he could use the picture. There it was on page three, under the heading Neighbors: Velda Kreutzer, 83, in the window chair at the beauty college in Salina, laughing.

The shop

I was not there for what happened at Trina’s shop that Wednesday and Thursday. But in a town our size, you do not have to be there. I heard it from three people before supper.

The ladies who still came to Trina’s brought the paper in with them. They did not do it to be cruel, I think, or not most of them. They just did what women in a beauty shop do. They talked.

One of them, a retired teacher, held up the paper while Trina was rolling her and said, “Isn’t that Velda? Why on earth is Velda getting her hair done in Salina?”

Trina said she did not know.

Lorna, who had been under the dryer that last Friday in February, said, “Well, I know.” And she told it, right there, in front of everybody. She told it plainly, the way it happened, the cancellation, the two dollars, and Mom walking home in the wind with no hair done.

The shop went quiet. Trina finished the set, I am told, and took the money, and said thank you. And then she went into the back room and did not come out for a long time.

Thursday noon

On Thursday at noon, my phone rang at the elevator. It was Dwight.

He was on his lunch break in Colby, sitting in the cab of the line truck. His voice sounded tired, the way it does after a long stretch out on the road.

“Gwen,” he said. “Why is Mom sitting in a window in Salina?”

One of the men on his crew had a wife in our county, and she had sent her husband the picture, and he had shown it to Dwight at lunch thinking it was a nice picture of his mother. Dwight had looked at it a long time. He knew she had had the nine o’clock at Trina’s for thirty years. Everybody did.

I had promised Mom I would not call him. But he had called me. And I was not going to lie to my brother.

So I told him all of it. Five till nine, the woman in the chair, the four ladies under the dryers, the two dollars, the scarf, the half hour into Salina, the six girls, the laughing.

He did not say anything for a long time. I could hear the radio in the truck and the wind outside it.

“Did Mom tell you not to tell me?” he said at last.

“She did.”

“Because she didn’t want us fighting.”

“And because she didn’t want to lose Trina.”

He was quiet again. Then he said, “What time does she go?”

“Ten.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Dwight,” I said. “Don’t you make a scene. Mom will never forgive either one of us.”

“I’m not going to make a scene,” said my brother. “I’m going to drive my wife to Salina.”