I did not need to open the card to know what was inside it. I had written the same word in that appointment book thirty nine years before, across a week of Saturdays, in the neat round hand of a young woman trying not to cry. Free. I held the cracked leather in my lap and listened to Crystal breathe, and Lorene under the dryer was breathing too, pretending to read a magazine she had been holding upside down since we started.
In October of 1987 the shoe factory at the edge of Sikeston closed its doors without a week of warning. Forty seven women, most of them with children, walked out onto the parking lot with a final paycheck and a notice. The new plant in Cape Girardeau was hiring, but it wanted people who looked ready. They were ready. But a woman who has just lost her job does not feel she can walk into an interview with flat curls and her heart in her shoes.
So I crossed out every slot of that week, and I did them all, one after another, for nothing. Perms and sets and trims and one very serious updo for a woman of sixty who had never in her life had a thing done for her. Ray brought sandwiches. The girls from the beauty school came to help sweep. By Friday night the floor of the Beauty Box was a carpet of clippings, and forty seven women had walked out looking like women who had somewhere to be.
Crystal was six that year. She remembered a week when her mother was never home for supper and her father made peanut butter sandwiches and cut off the crusts. She had been told nothing. She sat in the chair by the sink, turning the card over, and said that she had thought for thirty years that her mother simply loved work more than she loved her. I told her I had not been giving up my daughter. I had been showing her what a pair of hands was for.
Curtis, the young man from the activities office, stood in the doorway then, rubbing the back of his neck. He confessed that he had known the story before he met me. His grandmother was one of the forty seven. She had never stopped talking about the woman at the Beauty Box who made her feel like a person. When Lorene mentioned the name Darlene, the pieces slid together. He had spent three weeks, he said, finding the other women or their families, and asking each of them to sign.
I read the names one at a time, aloud, as if calling a roll. Many of them I knew in my body before I knew them in my mind: the line of a jaw, the way a woman holds her purse. There was the woman who cried so hard I had to stop in the middle of a curl. There was the girl, nineteen then, who now ran a daycare. Thirty one of the forty seven were still alive. The rest were signed by daughters and sons, in careful block letters, with a few words of their own. She did my mother. She did my wife.
A kindness given freely to a stranger is never spent; it returns by the hands of people she never expected.
Crystal got up, wiped her face, and called the woman in Cape Girardeau herself. She apologized, told her the set was not for sale, and offered to refund the deposit out of her own pocket. The woman, who turned out to be sweet, said she understood completely and asked whether she might come to the nursing home some Friday to have her own curls done. I said she would be welcome. I said to bring quarters.
The next Friday there were eleven ladies in the activities room and a line out the door. Crystal brought a folding table and a pot of coffee. Her daughters, aged nine and twelve, handed me pins and rollers and acted as the chorus. Lorene went first. When I turned the chair to the mirror, she looked for a long time and said, in a small voice, that she looked exactly like she did in 1987. I told her that was the idea.
That evening in the garage I opened the drawer under the pink chair and took out the comb of Ray. Crystal watched me do it. I told her what her father had said when I closed the Beauty Box. You never know, Darlene. She said she had always thought he meant the chair would be worth something someday. I told her he meant we would be needed again, and he was right, as he was about most things.
Then Crystal sat down in the pink vinyl with her feet on the chrome rest and let me pin up her prom curls again, though it was thirty years since the dance. We did not talk. The garage smelled of dust and lavender spray. In the little mirror on the wall I saw my daughter looking at herself, and then at me, and then at herself again, as if she had finally been introduced.
The chair is still in the garage, the pink vinyl as bright as a new lipstick. On the first Friday of every month Crystal and I load it into the back of her van along with the dryer and drive to the nursing home, where we set up under the fluorescent lights and run a salon for the day. Curtis calls it Darlene Day. Last month a woman I had never seen came through the door, took one look at me, and said, “You did my mother in 1987.” I said I did. I did everyone.
