Mr. Yancey turned the frame around while the first fireworks went up over the cul-de-sac in Bozeman, and in the picture was an old woman in a nursing-home bed with her white hair set in soft curls, wearing lipstick, smiling like she was about to go somewhere.
Thats my wife, he said. Her name was June. She lived in your house, Prescott, for fifty-one years. This was taken on her last Tuesday.
Every other Tuesday for three years, my sister Marguerite drove to the nursing home on Durston Road and did Junes hair for free, and on the last Tuesday of Junes life she made her look like the woman in that frame, which is the picture Mr. Yancey keeps beside his bed.
Mr. Yancey told it the way old men tell things, without hurry. June had a stroke in 2021 and went to the home, and the one thing she still cared about was her hair, because she had been a schoolteacher and never in forty years gone to work with it undone. He could not afford a salon to come out. Then a lady showed up one Tuesday with a bag of rollers and a hand mirror and said she had heard there were some ladies down the hall who could use a set, and she did not charge a dime, and she came back every other Tuesday after that for three years.
On the last Tuesday, June could not sit up anymore. Marguerite did her hair lying down, slowly, talking to her the whole time about the garden June used to keep on the corner lot, the one with the lilacs. When she was done she held up the mirror, and June looked, and said, well, now I can go. She died that Thursday. Mr. Yancey took the picture that Tuesday with his phone, and had it printed, and it is the one he kept.
Then he said, gently, that the house June kept for fifty-one years was the one Prescott bought two years ago, and that the first thing Prescott did was take out the lilacs and put up the fence, the one that was not to code, and that he had walked over from the senior apartments tonight because he smelled the barbecue and because he had wanted, for two years, to show somebody in that house what June looked like.
I am Marguerites sister. My sister is sixty-four and cuts hair in a one-chair shop on North 7th for twenty dollars a head, and has for forty years, and for the last ten she has driven to that nursing home every other Tuesday on her own gas. So when Prescott, the HOA president, a software consultant from California, stood up on his tailgate with a craft beer and said his college intern bills more than that, and somebodys gotta sweep up the clippings I guess, and a few of the new neighbors laughed, my husband told me to let it go. Marguerite took another ear of corn and said, pass the salt, Prescott.
But I saw her look across the cul-de-sac at the old man with the Walmart bag, and I saw him hold the frame against his chest with the picture facing in, and I knew my sister had been waiting too.
Prescott did not have a joke for that. He looked at the photograph of the woman whose lilacs he dug out, in the house he was standing in front of, and he said he did not know. Mr. Yancey said that was all right, nobody knows who lived in their house before, that is why he brought the picture.
A couple of the older neighbors, the ones who had known June, came over and looked at the frame and got quiet. One of them said, out loud, that Marguerite had done her own mothers hair at that same nursing home, and never charged her either.
Prescott took his fence down the next month, on his own, and he put in lilacs where the fence had been, and I do not know whether that was the HOA or his conscience, and it does not matter.
Twenty bucks a head, Prescott said. My sister did one head for free, every other Tuesday, for three years, and on the last Tuesday she made a dying schoolteacher look ready to go somewhere, and a widower walked across a cul-de-sac with the picture in a Walmart bag to make sure somebody in that house knew. Marguerite finished her corn. She never said a word. She did not have to. June said it, in the mirror, three years ago. Well, now I can go.