Saturday morning, eight a.m., I stood in front of that little storefront directly across from the Magnolia, new sign still wet, twenty-six years of my appointment book on a fresh page, turned my key in the door for the very first time, and Miss Beulah was already on the sidewalk behind me with her walker.
Seven forty. Her brother had told her eight and she got there at seven forty.
She was my first client in that chair and she will be my first client in that chair every Thursday at ten until one of us cannot do it anymore.
Here is what we found in that building on Wednesday. Beulah’s brother kept it from me on purpose because he wanted to see my face.
That storefront was a beauty shop before. From 1954 to 1971. It has been a bail bond office and a vape store and empty since.
When my nephew pulled the paneling off the back wall to run new outlets, there was a closet nobody had opened since the seventies, and in it were four boxes of church fans.
A church fan is stiff cardboard on a wood stick that a funeral home or a local business gives out, with advertising printed on the back, and every church in this parish had a rack of them in the pews before air conditioning.
Eleven hundred fans. Printed in 1961. Odessa’s Beauty Shop, this address, and a phone number with a letter exchange.
Odessa was Miss Beulah’s mother.
Under the address, in that old squeezed-up type, is the line she paid extra to have printed:
Come as you are and stay as long as you need to. There is coffee. There is no charge for sitting. If you cannot pay this week you can pay another week or you can not pay, and nobody in this shop will ever bring it up to you.
Miss Beulah is eighty-one years old and she had not seen one of those fans since her mother’s funeral in 1979.
The shop is called Odessa’s. That was not my idea either. I was going to put my own name on it and Beulah’s brother said the sign man had already been paid.
There is a fan in a frame by the door and about nine hundred left in a box in the back. I hand them out, and grown people from three churches come in and stand there reading the back of a piece of cardboard.
Two of my girls came over in November. I made both give the Magnolia two weeks and one argued with me about it.
That woman from Houston is still open and I hope she stays open, and I have told my girls I do not want to hear one word about her in my shop. Bad talk sticks to the person saying it.
Miss Beulah’s scan in March was clear. She got her nails done that Thursday and her hands did not shake and mine did.
She told me a beauty business is not a tent revival. A woman who ran a shop in that exact building in 1961 had already paid a printer to say otherwise on eleven hundred pieces of cardboard, and half this town fanned themselves with it in church without once turning it over.