He was moving from the shadows of the Procter & Gamble smokestacks to the commercial strip north of the city. For the big event, Mom bought a misty-green chiffon dress and scheduled an extra trip to Ken’s Beauty Shoppe for a fancy up-do. In the salon I waited for Mom under a broken hair dryer and checked my own Joan-of-Arc haircut in the mirror. It had a gap in the front where I’d lopped off my bangs in an attempt to look like my sisters, who all wore their hair long and parted off-center. I smiled: more gaps where there had once been teeth. Humbled, I watched the owner wash Mom’s hair, coat it in goop, and wind it into tight curls, leaving pinwheels at her ears. She came out of the hair dryer talking: “As if the nuns weren’t enough, Ken, I tell you, it’s those priests ...” The hairdresser ratted Mom’s hair while she addressed him in the mirror, black frizzle shooting up from her scalp, the pin curls like quotation marks on either side of her mouth.
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