Part Two: Lorraine

I need to tell you about Grandma Lorraine.

She’s ninety-one. She’s my husband Joel’s grandmother on his father’s side. She was born in a farmhouse outside Viroqua, Wisconsin, in 1934, and she’s lived within ten miles of that farmhouse her whole life.

She married Joel’s grandfather, Walter, in 1953. They had two sons. One of them is Joel’s dad, Ron.

But that’s not the most important thing about her.

The most important thing about Grandma Lorraine is that for forty years, she ran Lorraine’s Beauty Nook on Main Street in Viroqua.

It was a two-chair shop in a narrow brick building between the hardware store and the bank. Pink walls. Black-and-white checkered floor. Two big hooded hair dryers that looked like spaceships. A wall of mirrors with her license framed in the corner. Lorraine Pederson, Licensed Cosmetologist, State of Wisconsin, 1956.

Every woman in Viroqua went to Lorraine. Brides and widows and girls getting ready for prom. Farm wives who came in once a month for a wash and set and stayed two hours to gossip.

She closed it in 1998, when Walter got sick.

I bought that building in 2016.

I was twenty-two. Fresh out of cosmetology school in La Crosse. I’d grown up in Viroqua and always wanted my own shop. The building had been empty for eighteen years. The pink walls had faded to the color of an old eraser.

I didn’t know it had been Lorraine’s.

On my first day, before I even had my sign up, an old woman walked in.

White hair set in perfect pin curls. A lavender cardigan. A purse hanging from her elbow.

She stood in the doorway and looked around for a long time. At the empty space where the hooded dryers used to be. At the checkered floor I’d decided to keep.

“I set hair in this room for forty years,” she said.

That was Lorraine.

She sat in my chair that afternoon and let me wash and set her hair. She watched every move I made in the mirror. She corrected me six times.

“Too much tension on that roll,” she said. “You’ll give me a headache.”

“Pin it flat. Not crossways. It’ll leave a dent.”

“Honey, you’re using too much setting lotion. You’re not glazing a ham.”

When I was done, she looked at herself in the mirror for a long time.

Then she nodded once.

“You’ll do,” she said.

She paid me twelve dollars and tipped me five. Then she said, “I’ll be back next Saturday. Two o’clock. Don’t be late.”

She came every Saturday for three years.

She taught me everything they don’t teach you in beauty school. How to set a pin curl that lasts a week. How to tell a woman her husband’s having an affair without saying a word. How to keep your hand cupped against a client’s forehead at the sink so not one drop runs into her eyes.

“That’s the whole job, Nicky,” she told me once. “Making somebody feel safe with their eyes closed.”

In the third year, she brought her grandson to the shop.

He needed a haircut. He was home from his job in Madison for Thanksgiving. Tall, quiet, with a farmer’s tan and nervous hands.

Lorraine sat in the waiting chair and watched me cut his hair. When I was done, she said, “Joel, ask her to dinner.”

He did.

We were married two years later.