Because the beam of my flashlight landed on a face, and it took me a full second to understand that the face was painted on wood.
It was a sign. A long board, hand lettered and hand painted, the kind you used to see hung over a shop door before everything was plastic. A womans face in profile in the corner, a pair of scissors, and across the middle in gold letters that had hardly faded, the words Ruby and Daughters.
Behind it, wrapped in a quilt, were the rest. Six more signs. A barber pole with the paint still bright. A hand mirror with a silver back. A cash drawer, empty, with the key still in it. And a hatbox full of photographs.
I brought the couple out and handed the hatbox down to the wife without opening it. She sat on the porch step and went through the pictures while her husband and I stood there not knowing what to do with our hands.
They were photographs of a beauty shop. A small one, two chairs, with a plate glass window and the same sign over the door that was now lying on their porch. Women in the chairs, women in the doorway, women laughing in curlers. Every photograph had a date on the back, and the dates ran from 1948 to 1971.
And in every one of them, the woman holding the scissors was the same woman, growing older a little at a time, with two girls beside her who grew from children into young women over the course of the box.
Ruby and her daughters.
The wife found the letter at the bottom of the hatbox. It was from one of the daughters, written in 1972, and it was addressed to nobody. It just started.
It said that Ruby had opened the shop in the front room of this very house when the daughters were small and their father had not come back from the war. It said that for twenty-three years she had cut the hair of every woman in St. Marys who could not afford the salon in town, and that half of them paid in eggs and pie and promises, and that she had never once sent anybody away.
It said that when Ruby passed, the daughters had closed the shop and sold the house, and that they could not take the signs with them because it hurt too much to look at them, and they could not throw them away because it hurt worse. So they had built a pocket above the porch where their mother used to sit of an evening, and they had put her shop up there where she could keep an eye on it.
Two grieving girls had hidden their mothers whole life above the porch ceiling because it was the only place in the house she had ever been able to rest.
The wife turned out to be a hairdresser herself. I did not know that until she told me, sitting on the step with the pictures in her lap. She had bought the house because the front room had good light and she had been thinking about going out on her own.
I re-hung the ceiling, new beadboard, tight and level. But I left the pocket, and I framed a little hatch into it so it could be opened without a pry bar.
Most of the signs went back up there, wrapped in the quilt. But one of them did not. Ruby and Daughters, with the face in profile and the gold letters, is hanging over the front door of that house in St. Marys as of last month.
The wife tracked down one of the daughters through the church. She is eighty-four now, and she drove up to see it. I was not there for that, but I was told she stood in the yard for a long while and then said that her mother had always wanted a third chair.