But the next morning I got up, put on my good dress, and drove to the salon before anyone else. Not to pack my station. I went because Miss Dorothy had a standing Tuesday appointment, and Miss Dorothy had just buried her husband, and I was not about to let a rebrand take that from her.
Clients want a young face, not some old lady cutting hair since the disco days, the new owner had said, right in front of the woman I had styled for twenty years.
Miss Dorothy was already there when the doors opened, in her black dress, needing her hair done for the funeral. The new owner tried to hand her off to one of the young girls at the good chairs. Miss Dorothy looked at her and said, plain as day, that woman has done my hair for twenty years and held my hand through worse than you can imagine, and she is the only one touching my head today.
I did her hair one last time in that salon, gentle, the way you do for a woman going to bury the love of her life. And when I was done, Miss Dorothy stood up, took my hand, and walked out the door with me, and she did not come back.
Neither did the others. Because a hairdresser is not a look, and it is not a fresh face. It is the person you have trusted with your head and your secrets for forty years, the one who styled you as a bride and then styled your daughter, the one who held your hand through your divorce and your diagnosis. That does not rebrand.
I did not open a fancy new place. At my age I did not want to. Instead I started going to the women the salon did not want, the widows and the shut ins, doing their hair in their own kitchens and at the nursing home, the ladies who could not get to a chair anymore and had been going unkempt and low because of it. I brought the salon to them.
Word spread the way it does in a town like ours. Within a few months I had more standing appointments than I could keep, all of them the older women the rebrand had no use for, all of them lighting up when I came through the door with my bag and my shears.
The salon downtown, all sleek and modern, lost the very clients who had kept it alive for forty years, and I hear it struggles now.
Since the disco days, she said, like it was a smallness. But forty years of a towns most private hours do not clear out of a drawer. They walk out the door on the arm of a grieving widow, and they set up wherever you go.
I am past sixty. I do hair in kitchens now, for women the world forgot. And I have never in forty years felt more like exactly who I am.