The Back Bedroom

On the first Monday in November, I found Grandma Lorraine in Darla’s back bedroom with the door shut.

It was a little after four in the afternoon. I’d driven out to drop off a bag of the cinnamon bread Grandma likes from the bakery next to my shop. Darla’s car was in the driveway, but nobody answered when I knocked, so I let myself in through the kitchen like I’ve done a hundred times.

The house was quiet except for the television in the living room. A game show. Nobody watching it.

I walked down the hall and tapped on the back bedroom door.

“Grandma? It’s me.”

There was a long pause.

“Don’t come in,” she said.

I opened the door anyway. Just a crack.

She was sitting in the old green recliner by the window, the one Darla had hauled up from the basement when Grandma moved in. Her legs were covered with an afghan. Her left wrist was still in a soft brace from July.

And she was holding one hand flat on top of her head.

Pressing down. Like she was trying to hold her hair in place in a strong wind.

“Don’t look at me, Nicole,” she said.

She hadn’t called me Nicole since my wedding.

Seven years ago, at the reception in the Legion hall, she’d hugged me in the receiving line and said, Welcome to the family, Nicky. She’d called me Nicky ever since. Nicky this. Nicky, come here. Nicky, you’re putting too much product in that child’s hair.

Not Nicole. Never Nicole.

Nicole is what you call somebody you want to keep at arm’s length.

“Grandma,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

She turned her face toward the window.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I’m tired. Go on home.”

I came all the way into the room. I pulled the little wooden desk chair over and sat down in front of her.

That’s when I saw it.

Her hair.

Grandma Lorraine’s hair is white. Pure white, soft as dandelion fluff. For sixty years, she set it in pin curls every Saturday night and brushed them out on Sunday morning before church. Short and soft and perfectly round, like a cloud sitting on top of her head.

It wasn’t a cloud anymore.

It was flat. Matted. Greasy at the roots and tangled at the ends. There was a knot behind her left ear the size of a walnut. Her scalp was red and flaking around her part line, where she’d been scratching.

I didn’t say anything.

Thirteen years doing hair teaches you one thing above all others. You don’t say anything about a person’s hair until they ask you to.

But my throat closed up.

Because I knew what I was looking at. I’d seen it before, on women at the nursing home in town where I do volunteer hair every other Tuesday.

It’s what hair looks like when nobody’s washed it in a very long time.