The Bride Who Ended Up in My Chair

Kendra set her fork down on the edge of my mother’s good plate, the one with the gold rim, and smiled at me the way you smile at a child who has offered you a drawing.

“That’s so sweet, Brooke,” she said. “Really. But a forty-five dollar small-town salon just isn’t my vision.”

It was Thanksgiving. There were fourteen of us around two tables pushed together in my parents’ dining room, and every one of them heard it.

My aunt Carol stopped buttering her roll. My cousin’s little boy kept humming to himself, because he was four and did not know any better.

I had only offered to do her hair. Hers and the bridesmaids’, for free, as my wedding present. I had said it in front of everyone because I thought it was a nice thing to say.

“I want it to look like I’m from somewhere,” Kendra went on, still smiling. “I found a girl in Denver. She does editorial work. She’s booked for the whole party.”

“That sounds beautiful,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of that would let my mother keep passing the sweet potatoes.

My name is Brooke Larsen. I was twenty-seven that fall, and I owned a two-chair salon on Main Street in a town of thirty-two hundred people in western Nebraska, a mile north of Interstate 80.

An updo in my chair cost forty-five dollars. A cut and color ran ninety. I had bought the business three years earlier from a woman named Darlene, who had run it for thirty-one years before deciding to winter in Yuma.

I paid her with a loan from the bank across the street and four years of savings from working behind somebody else’s chair in North Platte.

It is not a fancy place. It has a pressed tin ceiling Darlene painted white in 1994, a coffee maker that has to be smacked on the side, and a front window where I put a paper turkey every November.

I am proud of it. I want that said plainly, because the rest of this story might make it sound like I am not.

My brother Brandon had not heard what Kendra said. He was out in the yard with my dad, pulling my uncle Jim’s pickup out of the ditch at the end of the lane, where it had slid on the way in.

He came back with his ears red from the cold, kissed Kendra on the top of her head, and sat down happy. Nobody told him. That was a decision we made without discussing it, the way families do.

My mother caught my eye across the table and gave the smallest shake of her head, and I gave the smallest nod back.

Brandon is two years older than me. He worked at the John Deere dealership out by the interstate, fixing combines and sprayers. He is the kind of man who stops for every stranded car he passes and never mentions it.

He had met Kendra three years before at the co-op, where she ran the front office. She had moved to town after college to be near her mother, Linda, who had come back to her own parents’ farm south of town.

Kendra was beautiful in a careful way. Her nails were always done. Her coats matched her boots. She drove to Denver every six weeks for her color, four hours each way.