Mom’s Friday Chair at the Beauty College

Six dollars

The comb out was beautiful. Trina did it herself and then let the tall girl with the braid finish the back, and Mom’s hair came up high and soft and white and full, the way it had come out every Friday for thirty years.

Mom looked at herself in the mirror for a long moment. Then she stood up and went to the front desk.

She paid her eight dollars. Then she reached into her coat pocket and took out the thing she had been touching all the way to Salina.

It was six one-dollar bills. She had ironed every one of them flat on her ironing board at home. I know because I saw the board still standing in her kitchen when I picked her up, and I had wondered what she had been pressing.

She walked down the line of students one by one. She put a dollar into each girl’s hand and folded the girl’s fingers over it.

“You washed,” she said to the first one. “You rolled. You rolled. You ran my dryer and got me coffee. You combed me out. You combed me out.”

Six girls. Six dollars. Every one of them was crying a little, and so was I, and so was Rochelle, and I am fairly sure so was my brother, though he would tell you it was the wind.

Then my mother turned to her daughter-in-law and took out two more dollars, folded once.

Trina put her hands behind her back. “Velda, no.”

“Everybody who does work gets tipped,” said Mom. “That’s how I was raised.”

Trina took the two dollars. She held them for a moment like they were worth a great deal more. And then, very carefully, she put them in her pocket.

The nine o’clock

Outside on the sidewalk, in the late-morning sun, Trina said it.

“Velda, I want you to have the nine o’clock back. Starting next Friday. I’ll call the other lady tonight. She can come Tuesdays.”

Mom stood there in her good coat with her hair set high and white. She looked at the big window of the college, where the students were already sweeping up, and the tall girl with the braid saw her and waved.

“No, honey,” Mom said. “You keep that forty-dollar lady. Your shop needs her more than my hair needs that chair.”

“But Velda…”

“I like it here,” Mom said. “Those girls need somebody who wants a real set. And Rochelle needs ladies for her clinic. And I like the drive with Gwen.” She looked at me. “And I’ll tell you something else. There is a little cafe two blocks down that serves a chicken fried steak on Fridays, and my daughter is going to buy me lunch.”

I laughed. “Am I?”

“You are.”

Trina looked like she did not know what to say. Mom reached up and patted her cheek.

“But you’ll do my hair for Easter,” Mom said. “And for Christmas. And you’ll do it when I die, and you’ll do it right, and you’ll lift it at the crown, because the church is going to see the back.”

“Mom,” said Dwight.

“Well, it’s true,” said Mom.

Trina laughed then, wet and surprised, and hugged her. She held on a long time, right there on the sidewalk in Salina, with people walking by.