She Was Paid $1,200 a Month to Care for Grandma, So Why Hadn't Anyone Washed Her Hair Since August

Chapter 1: The Closed Door

The first Monday of November, I let myself in through Charlene's side door with a loaf of sweet potato bread still warm under a dish towel. It was Grandma Winnie's favorite. I had baked it at six that morning before my first client, the way I used to bake it for her every fall when she still lived in her little yellow house on Pickett Lane.

The kitchen smelled like burnt coffee and lemon cleaner. The TV was going in the den. Charlene's purse sat on the counter next to a stack of mail, and I could hear her on the phone in the other room, laughing about something.

I didn't call out. I just walked down the hall toward the back bedroom.

The door was closed.

That stopped me. In all the years I'd known Grandma Winnie, her door had never been closed. At her own house, she kept it propped open with a cast-iron doorstop shaped like a basset hound, because she said a shut door made a room feel like it was hiding something.

I knocked softly and pushed it open.

She was sitting in a vinyl armchair by the window, a crocheted blanket over her knees and the gray light of a cloudy morning on her face. Her right wrist was still in its brace, resting on a pillow. The TV in the corner wasn't on. There was nothing in her lap. No crossword, no Bible, no bag of yarn.

She was just sitting.

"Grandma? It's me. I brought your bread."

She turned her head. For half a second her whole face lit up the way it always did. Then something crossed it, fast and awful, and her good hand shot up to cover the top of her head. She ducked down like a child caught doing something wrong.

"Don't look at me, Celeste."

I stood there holding that warm loaf like a fool.

My chest went tight. Not once, in eleven years, had she ever called me by my name. From the day Travis brought me to her Fourth of July cookout and I helped her shuck forty ears of corn on the back porch, I had been "my girl." My girl, come try this. My girl, sit by me. My girl, you've got hands like an angel.

Now I was Celeste. Now I was someone she didn't want to see.

I set the bread on the dresser and knelt down beside her chair.

"Grandma, what's wrong? Are you hurting somewhere?"

She shook her head but wouldn't lower her hand.

"It's nothing. I'm just not fit to be seen."

That was when I noticed it. The smell. Not strong, but there, the sour, stale smell of hair that had gone too long. And at the edge of her hand, where her fingers didn't quite reach, I could see the flattened gray strands, matted and dull, pressed down against her scalp.

Grandma Winnie was ninety-one years old, and for sixty of those years, she had set her hair every Saturday night without fail. Pink foam rollers. A rattail comb with a chipped handle she'd had since Eisenhower. A spritz of setting lotion that smelled like violets. Small, neat curls, tight as a row of buttons, ready for Sunday service at Tillman Street Baptist.

"I don't care how old a woman gets," she used to tell me, pointing that comb at me like a teacher's ruler. "She's still got the right to be clean and put together. Nobody gets to take that from her."

Then July happened. She slipped on a wet step coming in from her tomato plants and broke her wrist. Charlene, her only daughter, said she couldn't possibly live alone anymore and moved her into this back bedroom. Charlene took over her pension, too, and her bills. Grandma's pension came to about sixteen hundred dollars a month. The family agreed that twelve hundred of it would go to Charlene for room, food, and day-to-day care.

I'd never argued with that. I knew Grandma's money was supposed to cover what she needed, as long as the books were honest and the money truly went to her.

She had food. She had a clean bed.

But looking at her now, I understood that something had been quietly left behind.

"Grandma," I said gently, "does your head itch?"

She was silent for a long moment. Then, barely above a whisper:

"For weeks now, honey. I can't get my arm up high enough. I tried once with my left hand, and I near about fell over in the tub."

"And church? Ida Fairbanks told me she hasn't seen you since summer."

Her eyes filled.

"When the ladies call, I tell them I'm feeling poorly. I can't walk in there looking like this. I'd rather they think I'm sick."

I stood up so fast my knees cracked. I walked out of that room, down the hall, and straight into the kitchen, where Charlene had just hung up the phone and was pouring herself another cup of coffee.

"Charlene, when was the last time anybody washed Grandma's hair?"

She shrugged without even turning around.

"I couldn't tell you. August, maybe. She's a lot of work. All she does is complain." She stirred in her creamer. "I'm not her maid."

Chapter 2: The Kitchen Sink

I didn't say another word to Charlene that morning. I didn't trust what would come out of my mouth.

I kissed Grandma's cheek, told her I'd be back before supper, and drove straight to Shear Grace Salon on the square in Dunmore Ridge, where I'd rented the second chair for nine years. My two o'clock was a regular, a sweet retired mail carrier named Bonnie, and when I told her I needed to cut her appointment short, she took one look at my face and said, "Go on. Whatever it is, go on."

I loaded my rolling kit like I was packing for war. The gentle shampoo I use on clients after chemo. A soothing scalp treatment with tea tree. Three thick towels. My handheld sprayer that hooks onto a faucet. A wide-tooth comb. Pink foam rollers, a whole bag of them, and a bottle of setting lotion I had to drive to two drugstores to find, because I wanted the one that smelled like violets.

By four o'clock I was back at Charlene's side door.

She was at the kitchen table doing a word search. She looked at my kit, then at me.

"What's all that?"

"I'm washing Grandma's hair."

"In my kitchen?"

"Your tub's too low for her to lean over, and she can't hold her arm up in the shower. The kitchen sink is the right height. I'll clean up after."

Charlene opened her mouth, then closed it. She set her pen down. She didn't help, and she didn't stop me. She just sat back in her chair and folded her arms.

I went and got Grandma. She walked down that hall slowly, gripping my arm, still trying to cover her head with her braced hand. When she saw Charlene at the table, she stopped and shrank a little.

"It's all right," I whispered. "It's just you and me. Pretend she isn't here."

I pulled a kitchen chair up to the sink, backed it against the cabinet, folded a towel over the edge of the counter, and tucked another around her shoulders. I hooked up the sprayer and tested the water on the inside of my wrist the way my first instructor taught me, until it felt like a warm bath and not one degree hotter.

"Lean back for me. I've got your neck. I won't let you slip."

She leaned back. Her eyes were squeezed shut.

When the water touched her scalp, she made a sound I will hear for the rest of my life. It wasn't a cry, exactly. It was smaller than that. It was the sound a person makes when something they've been holding finally gets set down.

The water ran gray at first. Then lighter. I worked the shampoo in with the pads of my fingers, slow circles, the way you'd rub a baby's back. Her scalp was red and flaking in patches where she'd been scratching. I was as gentle as I knew how to be.

"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, my girl. Oh, that's heaven."

My girl. I had to look up at the ceiling for a second.

I rinsed and shampooed again. And while my hands moved, my mind went somewhere I don't let it go very often. My own grandmother, Mamaw Ruth, back home in Corrigan County. She passed during my last semester of beauty school. She'd been the first person to ever let me practice on her, sitting on an overturned bucket in her carport while I botched pin curl after pin curl, laughing and telling me I'd get it. When she got sick, I told myself I'd go home after finals. I didn't make it in time. I never got to do her hair one last time for her service. Somebody at the funeral home did it, and it was wrong. Flat on one side.

I had carried that for fourteen years.

I worked the tea tree treatment into Grandma Winnie's scalp and let it sit. The kitchen was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the tick of the clock over the stove. Grandma's shoulders, which had been up around her ears when she sat down, slowly came down.

Charlene hadn't moved. I could feel her eyes on my hands the whole time. Every now and then I'd glance over, expecting her to be rolling her eyes or checking her phone.

She wasn't. She was watching the water. Watching my fingers in her mother's hair. Her face had gone strange and still, like she was looking at something a long way off.

I rinsed the last of the treatment, and the water finally ran clear.

That was when Charlene spoke. Her voice was so low I almost didn't catch it over the faucet.

"She never once did that for me."

My hands stopped.

Grandma Winnie's eyes opened. She was still leaning back over the sink, water dripping from her temples, and she was looking straight up at the ceiling.

"What did you say?" I asked.

Charlene didn't look at me. She looked at her mother.

"I said she never once washed my hair. Not one time in my whole life."

Chapter 3: Fifty Cents a Head

I turned off the water. The silence in that kitchen got thick enough to stand a spoon in.

I wrapped Grandma's head in a warm towel and helped her sit up. She kept her eyes down, her good hand pressed flat against her knee.

Charlene was still sitting at the table, but her arms weren't folded anymore. She was gripping the edge of it.

"Every Saturday," she said. "Every Saturday of my life, growing up, our kitchen was full of church ladies. Mrs. Fairbanks. Mrs. Odom. Old Mrs. Tate with her blue rinse. She'd wash them one after the other in our sink, and set them, and they'd sit under that hood dryer in the corner smoking and gossiping until suppertime." She swallowed. "And I'd be sent out to the yard. 'Go play, Charlene. Mama's working.'"

Grandma's lips pressed together.

"I asked her once," Charlene went on. "I was about eight. I had a school picture coming up, and the girls in my class all had their mamas curl their hair. I stood right there by the stove and asked if she'd do mine after Mrs. Tate. And you know what she said?"

She turned and looked at her mother for the first time since she started talking.

"She said, 'You've got two good hands, Charlene.'"

The words just hung there.

I looked at Grandma Winnie. I expected her to deny it. I expected her to get defensive, the way Charlene would have.

Instead, her chin trembled.

"I remember," she said quietly.

Charlene let out a short, bitter laugh. "Well. That's something."

"I was charging them fifty cents a head," Grandma said. Her voice was thin but steady. "Your daddy had been gone two years by then. The plant had cut his pension down to nothing when he passed. Fifty cents a head, six ladies on a good Saturday. That three dollars was your shoes. That was your lunch money. That was the light bill." She finally lifted her eyes. "I was so tired by the time Ida Tate left, I couldn't feel my fingers. I thought if I let myself sit down and be soft with you, I'd never get back up."

"I was eight, Mama."

"I know you were." Grandma's voice cracked. "I know it now. I didn't know it then."

Charlene stood up so suddenly her chair scraped. She went to the window and stood with her back to us.

I didn't know what to do with any of it. Part of me ached for that eight-year-old girl in the yard. I'm a hairdresser. I know what it means to a little girl to have someone's hands in her hair. It's how a lot of us first learn we're loved.

But I also looked down at the woman in front of me, ninety-one years old, scalp raw from scratching, too ashamed to go to the church she'd attended for seventy years.

And I thought: a wound that old doesn't give you the right to make somebody pay for it now.

I didn't say that out loud. Not yet. I just picked up my comb.

"Let's get you set, Grandma."

I combed out her wet hair gently, section by section, and rolled it in the pink foam rollers, small and tight, the way she liked. I spritzed each one with the violet setting lotion. The second that smell hit the air, Grandma closed her eyes and smiled, and two tears slid down into the creases of her cheeks.

"That's my Saturday," she whispered. "That's my Saturday smell."

Charlene didn't turn around from the window. But I saw her shoulders shake once.

I sat Grandma under my travel hood dryer for forty minutes. Then I took out the rollers one by one and brushed out the curls with my fingers, soft and full. I held up my hand mirror.

Grandma Winnie looked at herself for a long time. Then she reached up with her good hand and touched one curl, very lightly, as if it might break.

"There I am," she said. "There I am. I thought she was gone."

I had to step away and pretend to look for a bobby pin.

When I came back to start packing up, Charlene had left the kitchen. I heard the den TV come back on, loud.

Grandma caught my wrist with her good hand. Her grip was stronger than I expected. She pulled me down close, and her voice dropped to a whisper.

"My girl. I need you to do something for me."

"Anything."

She glanced toward the den.

"Ask her where my money goes. I haven't had one dollar in my pocketbook since July. I asked her for my church offering, and she said there wasn't any to spare."

Chapter 4: The Shoebox

I drove home that night gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles ached.

Travis was at the stove making grilled cheese when I came in. He took one look at me and turned off the burner.

"What happened?"

I told him everything. The closed door. Grandma covering her head. August. The gray water in the sink. Charlene at the window. And then the last thing, the whisper.

He was quiet for a long time. Then he rubbed the back of his neck the way he does when he's trying to find a way out of something.

"Celeste, my mom's been through a lot. You heard what she said about growing up. Maybe Grandma's just confused about the money. She's ninety-one."

"She isn't confused, Travis. She remembered fifty cents a head from sixty years ago. She knows what's in her pocketbook."

"So what are you saying? That my mother's stealing?"

"I'm saying twelve hundred dollars a month is a lot of money for a woman who can't get a bottle of shampoo."

He didn't answer. He went out to the garage, and I heard him banging around out there for an hour.

I lay awake most of the night. What I couldn't stop thinking about was the arithmetic. Charlene's house was paid off. Grandma ate like a bird. Twelve hundred dollars. Where was it?

Travis came to bed at two in the morning. He lay on his back in the dark.

"I'll go over with you tomorrow," he said. "I want to see her myself."

The next afternoon, Charlene was out at her bunco group. Mitch, Charlene's husband, let us in and went back to his recliner without asking questions. Mitch has never been one for questions.

We went to the back bedroom. Grandma's curls had held overnight, and when she saw Travis, she pressed her good hand to her heart.

"Look at you, sugar. You came."

Travis knelt by her chair the way I had the day before. And I watched my husband's face as he took in the room. Really took it in, for the first time.

There was no shampoo on her dresser. No lotion. One bar of motel soap worn down to a sliver. A single washcloth, stiff and dry, hanging over the trash can. Her church offering envelopes sat in a neat stack by her Bible, every one of them empty, dated week after week since August.

On her nightstand was her old pocketbook. Travis opened it gently. A comb. A tube of lipstick worn down to the metal. A folded bulletin from July. And nothing else.

His jaw went tight.

"Grandma, has Mom bought you anything since you got here? Clothes? Your pills?"

"My pills come in the mail. The insurance does that." She looked down. "I asked for some new house shoes. These have a hole. She said maybe at Christmas."

Travis stood up, walked out of the room, and I heard him in the hall, breathing hard.

When Charlene's car pulled into the driveway an hour later, he was waiting in the kitchen. I was standing by the same sink where I'd washed Grandma's hair.

Charlene saw us and stopped in the doorway. Her eyes went to me, and her mouth went thin.

"Well. I see she's been talking."

"Mom," Travis said, "we need to see where Grandma's money goes."

"Excuse me?"

"The twelve hundred. Every month. We need to see the receipts."

Charlene's face went red from the collar up.

"I took her in. I gave up my sewing room. I cook for her, I do her laundry, I listen to her complain all day long, and you two walk in here like I'm on trial?"

"Nobody said trial," I said. "It's her money, Charlene. She has a right to know where it goes."

She looked at me for a long beat. Something hard settled in her eyes.

"You want receipts? Fine. I'll give you receipts."

She marched down the hall to her bedroom. We heard the closet door slam. A minute later she came back carrying a battered Payless shoebox, and she dropped it on the kitchen table so hard the lid popped off.

"There," she said. "Knock yourselves out."

Travis sat down and started pulling papers out. Grocery receipts, mostly. Ninety dollars here, sixty there. Pharmacy co-pays. A light bill.

Then he went still.

He was holding a bank statement. He read it once, then again. Then he turned it around and slid it across the table to me, and his hand was shaking.

There was a payment going out on the third of every month. Three hundred eighty-nine dollars.

To Lindell Auto Finance.

And underneath it, from September, a charge for six hundred dollars. Starlit Seas Cruise Line. Deposit.

Chapter 5: The Sunday Table

Charlene snatched the statement out of my hand.

"That's a joint account. Everything goes in there together. You can't untangle it like that."

"Then untangle it for us," Travis said quietly.

She couldn't. Or wouldn't. She said she was done talking and went to her room, and that was where we left it on Tuesday.

But Travis called his uncle Dale that night. Dale is Grandma's son, Charlene's younger brother, a retired long-haul trucker who lives four hours away out past the Corrigan County line. He's the one who'd agreed to the twelve-hundred-dollar arrangement in the first place, over the phone, back in July, when everybody was scared and nobody asked many questions.

Dale said he'd be there for Sunday dinner.

By Sunday, everybody knew. Mitch knew. Travis's younger sister Kendra drove up from Haverlin with her two kids. Charlene had cooked a pot roast like it was any other Sunday, and the whole house smelled like onions and gravy, and every single person at that table knew exactly why we were there.

Grandma sat at the head. I'd washed and set her hair again the night before, and her curls were neat and soft. She'd put on her lavender blouse with the pearl buttons, the one she used to wear to church. She looked like herself again.

Charlene sat at the other end and didn't look at her once.

We got through the blessing. We got through passing the rolls. Then Dale set down his fork.

"Charlene. I drove four hours. Let's not pretend."

Charlene's fork clattered on her plate.

"So it's all of you now. Fine. Go ahead. Tell me what a terrible daughter I am."

"Nobody said that," Dale said. "But Mama's shoes have a hole in them. And your car's got a new payment on it."

Kendra's head snapped up. "Mom. You told me Dad bought that car."

Mitch stared down at his pot roast. His ears went red.

Charlene looked around the table, at all those faces, and I watched her realize there was no one left on her side.

"I earned it," she said, and her voice rose. "Do you people have any idea what it's like? Getting up three times a night when she calls? Listening to her tell me how she used to do it, how the ladies at church did it, how her daughter-in-law in Haverlin does it? I needed something. Just one thing for me. And it was her money. She owed me."

The whole table went silent. Kendra's little girl looked up from her mashed potatoes, confused.

Then Grandma Winnie set down her napkin. She folded it in a neat square with her good hand. She didn't raise her voice.

"I'm ninety-one, Charlene. Not dead and gone."

Every head turned.

"You're right that I owe you. I owed you that Saturday when you were eight, and I've owed it every Saturday since. I am sorry. I am so sorry for that little girl in the yard." Her voice wavered and then steadied. "But you don't collect it by letting me sit in that back room like something you're ashamed of. You don't collect it out of my church offering."

Charlene's eyes filled, but she held her chin up.

"I told Celeste I wasn't your maid."

"No," Grandma said softly. "You're my daughter. That was supposed to be better than a maid."

Charlene's face crumpled. She pushed back from the table and walked out the back door into the yard, the same yard, I realized, where she must have been sent to play all those Saturdays. Nobody followed her. Mitch started to stand, then sat back down.

Dale cleared his throat. "Then here's what happens. Starting this month, that pension goes in an account in Mama's name only. I'll handle the paperwork. Charlene pays back what went to that car and that cruise. Every dollar."

"Where's Mama going to live?" Kendra asked.

Grandma looked down the table at me. Then at Travis.

Travis didn't even hesitate. He reached over and took her good hand.

"With us, Grandma. If you want. We've got the room off the kitchen. It gets the morning sun."

Her eyes shone.

"I want," she said.

Later, while everybody was clearing the table, Charlene was still out in the yard, sitting on the edge of the old picnic table in the cold. I watched her through the kitchen window over the sink.

Grandma came and stood beside me, leaning on her cane.

"My girl," she said. "Will you set my hair Saturday night?"

"Of course."

"Good." She was quiet a moment, still watching her daughter through the glass. "Because Sunday morning, I'm going to church."

Chapter 6: The Back Pew

We moved Grandma into our spare room on Wednesday. Travis painted it the soft yellow of her old house on Pickett Lane, and I propped the door open with the basset hound doorstop, which Dale had driven to her storage unit to find.

She cried when she saw it. Then she laughed and said the dog looked more tired than she did.

On Saturday night, I washed her hair in our kitchen sink. No one watched in silence this time. Travis sat at the table and told her about his week, and she laughed at his jokes, and the whole kitchen smelled like violets.

Sunday morning, Tillman Street Baptist was cold and bright, the stained glass throwing colored squares across the carpet. Grandma took my arm at the door. I felt her hesitate.

"What if they ask where I've been?" she whispered.

"Then you tell them you've been resting," I said. "And now you're back."

We hadn't made it three steps inside before Ida Fairbanks spotted us from across the vestibule. She's eighty-eight and walks with two canes, and she came across that floor like a woman half her age.

"Winifred Ashby, as I live and breathe."

She threw her arms around Grandma, canes and all. Then she pulled back and looked at her hair.

"Well, would you look at those curls. I thought you'd been laid up for good. I've been praying for you every night."

Within a minute there were six of them, the old Saturday ladies and their daughters, crowded around Grandma, touching her arm, kissing her cheek, telling her how they'd missed her in her spot on the third pew. Mrs. Odom's daughter asked who'd done her hair. Grandma squeezed my arm.

"My granddaughter-in-law. She's got hands like an angel."

I didn't trust my voice, so I just smiled.

The service started. Grandma sang every word of "Blessed Assurance" without looking at the hymnal, her voice thin and true, her good hand resting on the pew in front of her.

Halfway through the sermon, I turned to look for Travis, who'd gone to park the car.

And in the very last pew, alone, sat Charlene.

She wore her navy coat. Her hands were folded in her lap. She wasn't looking at the pastor. She was looking at the back of her mother's head, at those small, neat curls.

I didn't tell Grandma. I wasn't sure how she'd take it.

The weeks before that had not been easy on Charlene. Word travels in a church like Tillman Street, and plenty of people had heard about the car and the cruise. She'd sold the car back to Lindell Auto at a loss and was driving Mitch's old pickup. The cruise deposit was gone. She'd set up a payment plan with Dale, two hundred dollars a month into Grandma's account, and Mitch had quietly taken over their checkbook. She'd quit the bunco group. Kendra wasn't returning her calls.

I'd be lying if I said part of me didn't think she had all of it coming.

After the final hymn, people filed out slowly. Grandma was surrounded again, everybody wanting a hug. By the time we reached the vestibule, Charlene was standing by the coat rack, holding her purse with both hands like a shield.

Grandma saw her and stopped.

The Saturday ladies went quiet. Ida Fairbanks looked from one to the other and slowly moved her canes aside to give them room.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

"Your hair looks nice, Mama," Charlene finally said. Her voice was rough.

"Celeste does it Saturdays."

"I know." Charlene looked at the floor. "I drove past your house last night. I saw the kitchen light on." She swallowed hard. "I sat in the truck a while."

Grandma didn't answer. She just looked at her daughter.

Charlene reached into her purse and pulled out a small paper bag from the drugstore. She held it out.

Grandma opened it slowly. Inside was a brand-new pair of house shoes, lavender, lined with fleece.

"I know it doesn't fix anything," Charlene said. "I know a pair of shoes doesn't fix August."

"No," Grandma said quietly. "It doesn't."

Charlene nodded, eyes wet, and turned to go.

"Charlene."

She stopped.

Grandma held up her right wrist, still in the brace.

"The doctor says this comes off in the spring." She paused. "When it does, you come by the salon. On a Saturday."

Epilogue

It was the second Saturday in April when the brace came off for good.

Shear Grace Salon closes at three on Saturdays. By four, the square outside was quiet, and the late sun came through the front windows and lay across the black-and-white floor. I had the door locked and the sign turned to CLOSED.

Grandma Winnie stood by my shampoo bowl, flexing her right hand slowly. Open, closed. Open, closed. The physical therapist had given her a little rubber ball to squeeze, and she'd squeezed it every night all winter, in her chair in the yellow room, while Travis read the box scores out loud.

"Are you sure about this?" I asked her.

"I've been sure since November," she said.

The bell over the door jingled. I'd left it unlocked for one more person.

Charlene came in slowly. She'd had her hair cut short since winter, and she was wearing a plain blue sweater. She looked older, and somehow softer. She stopped just inside the door.

"Hi, Mama."

"Sit down, Charlene."

Charlene looked at the shampoo chair like it might bite her. Then she sat. She leaned back until her neck rested in the curve of the bowl, and she stared up at the ceiling, her hands knotted in her lap.

I tested the water on my wrist and handed the sprayer to Grandma.

Her hand shook a little. Then it steadied. She ran the warm water over her daughter's hair, slowly, carefully, her lips pressed together in concentration. She worked in the shampoo with her fingertips, small slow circles, the way she'd done it for half the women in Tillman Street Baptist for more than sixty years.

The way she had never once done it for the little girl in the yard.

Charlene closed her eyes. Her chin began to tremble, and then the tears came, running sideways from the corners of her eyes and disappearing into the water.

"Mama," she whispered.

"I know, baby," Grandma said. "I know. Hold still now."

I stepped back to the front counter and pretended to sort appointment cards. I wanted to give them that.

When the rinse water ran clear, Grandma wrapped Charlene's head in a warm towel and sat her up. Then she reached into the pocket of her lavender cardigan and pulled out a rattail comb with a chipped handle.

"Your granddaddy bought me this in nineteen fifty-four," she said. "I'd like to do your curls with it, if you'll let me."

Charlene nodded. She couldn't speak.

Grandma rolled her daughter's short hair into pink foam rollers, one at a time, a little crooked, a little slow. I didn't fix a single one. I spritzed the violet setting lotion when she asked for it, and the whole salon filled with that smell, and Grandma smiled and said it smelled like Saturday.

When the last roller came out and the curls were brushed soft, I held up my hand mirror. Charlene looked at herself. Then at her mother, standing behind her in the glass.