Part Five: What Grandma Said
Back in the bedroom, I sat in the little desk chair and didn’t say anything for a long time.
Finally, Grandma took her hand off her head. She folded both hands in her lap. She looked at them.
“My scalp itches,” she said quietly. “It’s itched for weeks.”
“When did you last wash it?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
“Grandma.”
“I can’t lift my arm high enough,” she said. “Not since the wrist. I tried in the shower. In September. I couldn’t get my hands up to my head.”
She looked at the brace on her left wrist.
“And I can’t bend over the sink,” she said. “I get dizzy. I almost fell.”
“Did you ask Darla to help?”
Grandma’s mouth went tight.
“I’m not asking that woman to wash my hair,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“She’d do it rough,” Grandma said. “She’d get soap in my eyes. She’d yank the comb. She’d stand there and sigh the whole time.”
She looked out the window.
“And she’d know,” she said quietly. “She’d know I couldn’t do it myself.”
That was it.
That was the real thing.
Not the soap. Not the comb. Not the sighing.
Lorraine Pederson, who’d washed and set the hair of every woman in Viroqua for forty years, could not stand to have her daughter-in-law see her helpless.
“Grandma,” I said. “How are you getting to church?”
She didn’t answer.
“Grandma.”
“I quit going,” she said. “In September.”
Grandma Lorraine has gone to Viroqua Lutheran Church every Sunday since 1941. She was confirmed there. Married there. Buried her husband from there. She sits in the fourth pew on the left side, the one with the brass plaque that says In Memory of Walter Pederson.
“I told Pastor Dahl’s wife I had a cold,” she said. “Every week. Seven weeks.”
She looked at me.
“I can’t go to church looking like this, Nicky,” she said. “I’d rather die.”
She’d called me Nicky again.
I don’t think she noticed.
Part Six: The Kitchen
I left Grandma in her recliner and walked down the hall to the kitchen.
Darla was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of chili. She was wearing her blue Kwik Trip polo shirt and jeans. Her own hair, gray-blonde and frizzy, was pulled back in a scrunchie.
She looked tired. More tired than I’d ever seen her.
“Oh,” she said when she saw me. “Nicole. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I brought cinnamon bread,” I said. I set the bag on the counter.
“That was nice of you.”
She went back to stirring.
I stood there for a long moment.
“Darla,” I said carefully. “When was Grandma’s hair last washed?”
Darla’s spoon stopped moving.
She didn’t turn around.
“August, maybe,” she said. “Early August. Right after she got here.”
She went back to stirring.
“She fights me on it,” Darla said. “Every time I bring it up. She says she’ll do it herself. She won’t let me near her head.”
She tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. Hard.
“And I’m not her maid,” she said.
I didn’t answer her.
I wanted to. I had a whole speech ready. About August being three months ago. About Grandma’s scalp being red and raw. About a woman who hadn’t missed church in eighty-four years sitting alone in a back bedroom on Sunday mornings because she was ashamed of her hair.
I didn’t say any of it.
Because I was looking at the kitchen.
At the pill organizer on the counter, the big kind with seven days and four slots per day, every slot filled. At the calendar on the refrigerator, with doctor’s appointments written in Darla’s handwriting. Orthopedic. Cardiology. Physical therapy, twice a week.
At the stack of laundry on the kitchen chair. Grandma’s nightgowns, washed and folded.
At the case of Ensure on the floor by the pantry.
At the dark circles under Darla’s eyes.
I picked up my purse.
“I’ll see you, Darla,” I said.
She didn’t turn around.
Part Seven: Joel
That night, I told Joel.
We were sitting at our kitchen table in the apartment above the shop. I’d made spaghetti. Neither of us was eating much.
When I finished, Joel set down his fork.
“August,” he said.
“That’s what she said.”
“Three months.”
“Almost.”
He pushed back from the table.
“I’m calling her,” he said. “Right now.”
He picked up his phone.
“Joel, wait,” I said.
“Nicky, she’s keeping twelve hundred dollars a month of Grandma’s money, and she can’t wash her hair once?”
“I know,” I said. “I know. But listen to me.”
He stopped.
“If you call her tonight,” I said, “she’s going to get defensive. She’s going to yell. You’re going to yell. Then she’s going to call your dad in Nebraska and cry, and he’s going to call you and yell, and nothing’s going to change except everybody’s going to be mad at everybody.”
Joel’s dad, Ron, drives a semi for a trucking company out of Tomah. He hauls paper rolls from the mill in Port Edwards to printing plants all over the Midwest. He’d been gone seventeen days on this run. Somewhere around Lincoln, Nebraska, by now.
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.
