I opened the blue stationery with the little embossed dogwood on a Friday afternoon, in the middle of the salon of Paisley, with a comb still in my other hand, and I read the note in the mirror with Starla sitting in my chair. The handwriting slanted hard to the left, as if the writer were leaning into a wind. I knew it now. I had seen it on a hundred checks, signed in the same careful lean, handed across my front desk on a hundred Friday mornings. The name at the bottom was Pauline Shelton.
“Mrs. Shelton,” I said, in a voice that did not sound like mine. “Pauline.” Starla turned in the chair and looked at me in astonishment. “You know my mother?” she whispered. I laid the letter on the shelf beside the brushes. “Child,” I said, “I did the hair of your mother every Friday at ten for eleven years. Booth number three. She never missed.” I put my hand on the back of the chair to steady myself. “And you sat under the dryer next to her in a yellow dress and ate butterscotch candies.”
She stared at me. Her mouth opened and closed. The shop had gone completely quiet, and Paisley, at the next station, stopped her blow dryer. Slowly, as if she were watching a film start up in a dark room, the face of Starla changed. “The lady with the pink chair,” she said. “The one who gave me the lollipops. The lady who curled my hair when I was seven and let me look in the big mirror.” She began to cry, helplessly, into her hands. “I forgot. I forgot your name. I forgot all of it.”
I knelt down beside her, and my knees complained, and I did not care. I told her what I remembered. Pauline Shelton had been a cleaning woman at the hospital, a quiet, proud woman with one daughter and not much money. She had saved every week for her set, because she said a woman ought to walk into the world with her head high. She had paid in cash, in dollar bills, and tipped in quarters. When the child got her first lice from school, I had washed her hair myself, in the back, free, and told no one.
The hands that once shaped a curls of a stranger may, many years later, be the only ones permitted to say goodbye.
The letter itself was short. Lula Mae, it said. If you are reading this, I have gone, and my daughter has brought you to my hair. I never told her where I had my set done, because I did not want her ashamed that I cleaned floors. You were kind to me at a time when kindness cost something. Please do my hair one last time, the way you did for Easter of 1991. And Starla, my girl, do not let anyone make you feel small about what you do not know. I knew a woman who made me feel tall.
Starla read it twice, in the mirror, with her shoulders shaking. When she turned back, I put my arms around her, in my pink smock, in the middle of the salon, and she held on to me like a child. Paisley wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her smock. A customer under the dryer, who had not understood a word, cried anyway. “I called you an old lady helmet,” Starla said into my shoulder. “In front of everyone. I am so ashamed.” I told her to hush. “You did not know who I was,” I said. “And I forgot who you were. We are even.”
On Monday morning I drove to the funeral home in Marion, with my case of rollers and combs and my own bottle of setting lotion, and I did the hair of Pauline Shelton one more time. It is a task I have done for a great many women, and I have never once done it without prayer. I set her in the old way, a shampoo and set, with pin curls and a soft wave at the front, the way she wore it in 1991. I held her hand when I finished. It was cold and light as paper. I told her she looked beautiful.
Starla stood in the doorway of the room and watched me work. When I stepped back, she came in and looked down at her mother for a long time. Then she said, in a voice I could hardly hear, “She looks like herself.” I said that she did. “I will never forget this,” Starla said. “Not as long as I live.” I took her by both hands. I said that she had brought her to me, which was the whole of it, and that I would have done it for free. She laughed through her tears and said that she knew.
Dewey and the children came for the service, and so did half of Abingdon. I sat in the third pew with Starla beside me, her hand in mine. Afterward, at the luncheon in the fellowship hall at Sinking Spring, with the chicken salad and the lime sherbet punch and the good tablecloths, she stood up in front of the eleven women with a glass of water in her hand. She said that she wanted to apologize to me in public, as she had insulted me in public. Then she said it. All of it. Nobody looked at their plates this time.
The hairpiece in the pink box is on a mannequin head now, in the window of the salon, with a small card. Given in unkindness, kept in kindness. People ask about it and Paisley tells them. In January, Starla enrolled in the cosmetology program at the community college, evenings, at thirty nine years old. She comes to the salon on Saturdays to sweep the floor, as Paisley once did, and I teach her to roll a pin curl. She has terrible hands for it and the heart of a champion.
This Friday, as I do every Friday, I sat in the pink chair of Odell in my sunroom, but I was not alone. Starla stood behind me with the comb, and her tongue between her teeth, setting my hair. It took her forty minutes, and the curls were crooked, and it was the best set I ever had. When she finished, I looked in the mirror, and there she was behind me, in her yellow dress, seven years old, holding out a butterscotch candy.