He calls Darla every night at nine. He’s home maybe four days a month.

“And Grandma’s hair still won’t be washed,” I said.

Joel looked at me for a long moment.

“So what do you want to do?” he asked.

“Let me go first,” I said. “Saturday.”

“Go do what?”

“What I know how to do,” I said.

Part Eight: The Phone Call
The next evening, I called Grandma.

I waited until seven o’clock, when I knew Darla would be at the Kwik Trip for her evening shift.

Grandma answered on the fifth ring. Her voice was thin.

“Hello?”

“Grandma, it’s Nicky.”

“Oh,” she said. “Hello, Nicky.”

“Grandma,” I said. “I’d like to book an appointment.”

There was a pause.

“An appointment for what?”

“For you,” I said. “A wash and set. Saturday. At Darla’s house. I’ll bring my things.”

The line was quiet for a long time.

“I’m not a charity case,” Grandma said finally. Her voice was sharp. The old voice. The Beauty Nook voice.

“No, ma’am,” I said. “You’re my two o’clock.”

A long quiet on the line.

I could hear the game show playing in the background. I could hear her breathing.

I could hear her thinking.

For sixty years, Lorraine Pederson had a two o’clock appointment every Saturday. First in her own chair, setting her own hair. Then in my chair, for three years, before her eyes got too bad to drive to Main Street.

Two o’clock on Saturday was the most sacred hour of her week. More sacred, I think, than Sunday morning.

“Bring the good setting lotion,” she said finally. “Not that cheap stuff from the drugstore.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And a real towel,” she said. “Not one of those paper capes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

There was another pause.

“Two o’clock,” she said. “Don’t be late.”

She hung up.

I sat at my kitchen table with the phone in my hand.

And I cried.

Part Nine: Saturday
On Saturday, I packed my kit.

Not my everyday kit. My good kit. The one I take to weddings and funerals.

Two bottles of gentle shampoo, the kind for sensitive scalps. A bottle of conditioner. The good setting lotion, the kind Grandma taught me to use, in the brown glass bottle with the old-fashioned label. A wide-tooth comb. A fine-tooth comb. A rattail comb for parting.

A box of steel pin curl clips. Two hundred of them. The double-prong kind she liked.

A handheld dryer with a diffuser. A round bristle brush. A can of hairspray.

My black vinyl shampoo cape.

And three white bath towels. Thick. Soft. Brand new. I’d bought them at the Farm & Fleet in La Crosse on Wednesday.

I drove out to Darla’s at one-thirty.

It was a gray November day, cold and still. The maple trees in her front yard had dropped all their leaves. Biscuit the dog was barking at the mailbox.

I carried my kit up the front steps. I knocked.

Darla met me at the door in a red sweatshirt.

She looked at me. She looked at my kit. At the towels over my arm. At the folding chair I’d brought from the shop.

“What is all this?” she said.

“Grandma’s appointment,” I said.

Darla stared at me.

“Her appointment,” she repeated.

“Two o’clock,” I said. “She booked it Tuesday.”

Darla didn’t move out of the doorway for a long moment.

Then she stepped aside.

She didn’t say anything. She just walked into the kitchen and stood by the refrigerator with her arms crossed.

Part Ten: The Lavender Cardigan
At one fifty-five, Grandma came down the hall.

She was using her walker. The one with the tennis balls on the feet. She was moving slowly, carefully, the way she does now.

She was wearing her lavender cardigan.

That cardigan is fifty years old. Walter bought it for her at a department store in La Crosse in 1975, for their twenty-second anniversary. It’s pilled at the elbows. One of the pearl buttons has been replaced with a plain white one.

She wore it every Saturday to the Beauty Nook. And every Saturday to my shop.

She’d put it on for her appointment.

She’d put on lipstick too. Pink. A little crooked, because she couldn’t hold the tube steady with her bad wrist.

And she’d tied a silk scarf over her head. Navy blue with little white flowers. Knotted under her chin. Hiding her hair.

She stopped at the edge of the kitchen. She looked at me.

“You’re early,” she said.

“Five minutes,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Early is on time.”

I dropped my black cape on the counter.

Grandma looked at it. She frowned.

“Not that,” she said. “A towel.”

“The cape keeps your cardigan dry,” I said.

“I don’t care about my cardigan,” Grandma said. “I want a towel. Around my shoulders. The way my mother did it.”

Her mother, Ingrid, used to wash Lorraine’s hair in the kitchen of their farmhouse when she was a little girl. In a big enamel basin. With water heated on the wood stove and a white flour sack towel around her shoulders.

Grandma told me that story once, on a Saturday in my shop, while she was under the dryer. She said it was the reason she became a beautician.

“My mother’s hands,” she said. “In my hair. In the kitchen. I never felt so safe in my life.”

I put the cape away.

I took out one of the new white towels. I unfolded it. I tucked it around Grandma’s shoulders, over her lavender cardigan. Snug around her neck, the way she taught me. Not too tight. Just enough so it wouldn’t slip.

She nodded.

“That’s right,” she said.

Part Eleven: The Sink
Darla’s kitchen sink is a double steel sink under a window that looks out over her vegetable garden. The garden was done for the year. Brown tomato cages. A row of dead cornstalks.

I unfolded my folding chair. I backed it up to the sink. I adjusted the height so the back of the chair would tilt just right.

I put a rolled-up hand towel on the edge of the sink, for her neck.

Darla stood in the doorway to the living room.

She had her arms crossed. She didn’t say anything. She just watched.

“Grandma,” I said. “Can you sit?”

She let go of her walker. I took her good arm. I helped her lower herself into the folding chair.

She sat very straight. Her hands folded in her lap.

Then she reached up with her right hand, the good one, and untied the silk scarf under her chin.

She held it for a moment.

Then she pulled it off.

I didn’t look at Darla. I didn’t look at anything but Grandma’s hair.

Flat and matted. Greasy at the roots. The walnut-sized knot behind her left ear. Her scalp red and flaking.

Grandma closed her eyes.

“Well,” she said quietly. “Go on. Get it over with.”

I helped her lean back. Slowly. One inch at a time. Until her neck rested on the rolled-up towel at the edge of the sink.

Her eyes were still closed. Her hands were gripping the arms of the folding chair.

I turned on the faucet.

I tested the water on my wrist. Too hot. I adjusted it. Tested again. Too cool. Adjusted it again.

Warm. Like a bath. Like the water her mother heated on the wood stove.

I cupped my left hand at her forehead. Right along her hairline. So nothing would run in her eyes.

The way she taught me.

That’s the whole job, Nicky. Making somebody feel safe with their eyes closed.

Then I let the first warm water touch her head.

Grandma’s whole body went still.

Her hands let go of the arms of the chair.

Her shoulders dropped.

She let out a breath I think she’d been holding for three months.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, honey.”

I had to look at the faucet for a minute.

Part Twelve: Two Shampoos
I washed her hair twice.

The first shampoo didn’t lather at all. Three months of oil and dead skin and the residue of old hairspray. It just slid off her hair like water off a duck.

I rinsed. I worked the shampoo into her scalp with my fingertips. Slow circles. Gentle. Around the red patches where she’d been scratching. Behind her ears. At the nape of her neck.

She kept her eyes closed.

The second shampoo lathered.

White foam, soft and thick, all through her hair. I massaged her scalp for five full minutes. I could feel her relax under my hands. Her jaw unclenching. Her breathing slowing down.

At one point, I thought she’d fallen asleep.

Then I rinsed. Slowly. Thoroughly. Every bit of soap. One hand cupped at her forehead the whole time.

Not one drop ran into her eyes.

Then the conditioner.

Then the knot.

The knot behind her left ear took forty minutes.

I worked it with my fingers first, then the wide-tooth comb, then the rattail comb. One strand at a time. Holding the hair above the knot so the comb wouldn’t pull at her scalp.

Grandma sat with her eyes closed, her neck on the towel, her hands in her lap.

“It pulls,” she said once.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go slower.”

“No,” she said. “It pulls the way it ought to pull.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at me. Upside down, from the sink.

“The way it does when somebody’s taking care of it,” she said.

Part Thirteen: Darla
Halfway through the knot, Darla spoke from the doorway.

I’d almost forgotten she was there. She’d been so quiet. Standing with her arms crossed, watching.

“Nobody in this family came out here once,” she said.

Her voice was low. Shaking.

“Not once,” she said. “To see if I was drowning.”

I stopped combing.

I looked up at her.

Darla wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Grandma, lying back in the folding chair with her eyes closed and her wet hair spread out in the steel sink.

“Ron’s gone three weeks out of every four,” Darla said. “Joel lives in town but he works sixty hours a week. His brother’s in Minneapolis and calls on holidays. Nobody else came. Not once since July.”

Her voice cracked.

“I work at the Kwik Trip four nights a week. I cut my hours from thirty to twenty when she moved in. I get up at six to give her pills. I drive her to La Crosse twice a week for physical therapy. I do her laundry. I cook her meals. I help her to the bathroom at two in the morning.”

She looked at me.

“And every single day,” Darla said, “she tells me I’m doing it wrong.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

Grandma’s eyes were still closed. But I could see her jaw tightening.

“She fights me on everything,” Darla said. “The food. The pills. Getting dressed. And the hair.”

She swallowed.

“I tried, Nicole,” she said. “In September. I filled the bathroom sink and got a towel and asked her if she wanted me to wash her hair. She looked at me like I’d slapped her. She said she’d rather go bald than let me touch her head.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“So I stopped asking,” she said. “Because I was tired. Because I was so, so tired.”

She was right about that.

About all of it.

“We didn’t,” I said quietly. “We didn’t come out. I’m sorry, Darla.”

Darla stared at me.

I don’t think anyone had said that to her before. Not Ron. Not Joel. Not anybody.

She didn’t say anything. She just stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and tears running down her face.

Part Fourteen: The Curls
When the knot was out, I sat Grandma up.

I wrapped her head in a second white towel. I patted her hair until it was damp, not wet. The way you have to for a good pin curl set.

Then I pulled a kitchen chair over and sat down in front of her with the box of pin curl clips.

“Okay, Grandma,” I said. “Tell me how you want it.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she told me.

“Left side one way,” she said. “Clockwise. Toward my face.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Right side the other. Counterclockwise. Away from my face.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Two rows across the back. Flat curls. Not stand-ups. And don’t you dare put them crossways.”

“No, ma’am.”

She couldn’t reach up yet with her bad wrist.

But she could hold the box.

So she held the box of clips in her lap. And every time I wound a curl around my finger and pressed it flat against her head, she handed me a clip.

One at a time. With her good hand. Holding it out between two fingers, the way she’d held them out for sixty years.

I set the left side.

She handed me twenty-two clips.

I set the right side.

She handed me twenty-four.

Twice, she made me redo one.

“That one’s crooked,” she said. “Take it out.”

I took it out. I wound it again. I pinned it flat.

“Better,” she said.

The second time, she didn’t even look in a mirror. She just reached up with her good hand and touched the curl and said, “No. That’s too tight. You’ll give me a headache.”

She was right. It was too tight.

Halfway through the back rows, something happened.

Darla came in from the doorway.

She walked across the kitchen. She didn’t say anything. She went to the coffee maker on the counter. She filled the pot from the tap. She measured out coffee into the filter.

She started it.

While it brewed, she got three mugs down from the cabinet.

When it was done, she poured three cups of coffee.

One black, for herself.

One with cream and two sugars, for me. I don’t know how she knew. I’d never had coffee at her house.

And one with just a little cream, in a white mug with blue flowers, for Grandma.

She set Grandma’s mug on the counter beside her chair. Close enough to reach with her good hand.

Grandma looked at the mug.

She looked at Darla.

Neither of them said anything.

Then Darla pulled out a kitchen chair. She sat down across from us.

And she watched me set the last row of curls.

Part Fifteen: The Mirror
Grandma’s hair took an hour and a half to dry.

I used the handheld dryer with the diffuser on low. Moving slowly. Back and forth. Never too hot, never too close.

Grandma drank her coffee. Darla drank hers. Nobody talked.

Biscuit came in from the living room and lay down at Grandma’s feet.

When the curls were dry, I took the clips out.

One at a time. Seventy-four of them. Dropping them back in the box. Each curl springing loose, soft and white and round.

Then I brushed them out.

With the round bristle brush. Gently. The way she taught me. Brushing each curl around my finger so it would fall into place. Fluffing the crown. Smoothing the sides.