Roots

Lorraine Haas had her roots done every five weeks, and Tessa didn't need to pull her card to know it. She ran the steel tail of her comb along the crown, laid the hair over to either side, and down at the scalp a stripe of gray opened up exactly three notches wide. She had filed those notches into the handle her first winter in the shop, one every five millimeters, and ever since then a notch had meant about twelve days to her.

Tessa held the comb up to the mirror and said, "Five weeks to the day."

Lorraine laughed and said her doctor in Seattle did a worse job guessing her age off an X-ray. Tomorrow was the ball at Centennial Hall, and on Sunday, for the nineteenth year running, she would climb Castle Hill as the wife of a Russian officer, in a dress she had sewn from a pattern in a reenactors' magazine back when she was still married to her first husband. Nobody knew yet who was playing the American commissioner this year, and people were saying it would be some lieutenant from the Coast Guard air station. Her grandkids in Anchorage weren't coming down again, because the oldest had a hockey tournament. While the color processed, Lorraine told her how in eighteen sixty-seven the people here had gone to bed on a Friday and woken up on a Friday too, only eleven days later. The Russians had kept one calendar and the Americans another, and to this day nobody had paid her pension for those eleven days.

The bell over the door jingled when Lorraine had already gone past the window under her plaid umbrella and the door had been shut behind her for a good while. Tessa looked up at it, thought about the spring, and on the back of an old client card, where she kept her running list for the hardware store, she wrote "bell" under "foil" and "gloves M."

That morning, like every morning, she had taken the tweezers off the windowsill and tipped her head to the light to pluck the gray hairs at her left temple, which had started showing up around thirty and had kept coming at two or three a week ever since. For the third week running the temple was dark and even. She stood a while longer with the tweezers in her hand, then dropped them into the cup with her combs and went down to the shop humming a tune from some commercial.

In the evening she stood in her dark kitchen and listened to the Seattle flight leave Japonski. The roar built up beyond the bridge and took a long time dying away over the channel, and the whole time she stood at the window without turning on the light. The October she was twenty-two she'd had a chair waiting for her at a salon on Capitol Hill and a boarding pass on her phone. She drove over the O'Connell Bridge, pulled into the airport lot, left the engine running and sat there while the plane taxied out and climbed away, then turned around and told everyone her mother had had an attack. Her mother lived in Arizona now, still remembered that attack she never had, and every so often asked on the phone what year Tessa had pushed Seattle back to this time.

Tessa kept her own card the same way she kept her clients': "T. Lindquist, 5N, 20 vol, 25 min," and under it a column of dates four weeks apart. The last one was September tenth. She hadn't gotten to it on Thursday the eighth, or that Monday either, and she'd decided to leave it until after the holiday. Now she read the date twice and remembered an ordinary Thursday, rain, a perm at ten in the morning, and then she took the hand mirror, sat down under the lamp and parted her hair with the tail of the comb. The edge of the color lay right against the scalp, dark and clean, just as she had left it five weeks before. Tessa decided she had written down the wrong date, that the dye had stained her skin, that she was tired, and she went to bed at ten.

On Saturday morning she bought a new bell at the hardware store, a brass one on a wrought-iron curl, and stood on a stool to screw it in with Shawna's screwdriver. Shawna handed up the screw and asked whether she'd like to hang a horseshoe on the door while she was up there. The new bell ran exactly as late as the old one.

Shawna George had been renting the second chair for going on four years and took mostly men: fishermen, guys from the air station, high school boys before prom. Saturday she started off with a helicopter pilot whose neckline had filled in over three weeks by just as much as it should have. Then Brent came in, a nurse from Boise who had come up in September on a thirteen-week contract at the hospital on Japonski and was getting his second cut from Tessa. She lifted the hair at his nape and stopped. The line along his neck was clean and sharp, the way she had cut it four weeks ago, and under her fingers there wasn't a single bristle.

"You've got what I've got," she told him, and heard her voice go husky. For a second she seriously thought it was catching and going around town with the fall colds, and then she laughed. Brent shrugged, said that just meant she gave a good haircut, and left her a ten for a tip.

The rest of Saturday she checked everyone who sat down in her chair, and everybody's hair was growing the way it should, half an inch a month, faster on the young ones and slower on the old. Then it came to her that she hadn't filed her nails since September, and she stood a long while with the scissors held up, looking at her fingers.

Toward evening Shawna said, "You're answering me today like my uncle on the seiner over the sat phone."

She was sweeping around her chair and talking mostly about her own business. Her son wanted to go to the university in Fairbanks, the FAFSA had to go in before spring, half the questions on it were written for people who had an accountant, and Shawna had been meaning to see the school counselor for three weeks and still hadn't made it. She wasn't going up the hill tomorrow, she'd be at her aunties', and anyway it was a holiday for the tourists and for Lorraine. Then, blowing the hair out of her clippers, she said, "Same thing every year. One bunch sells, another bunch buys, and nobody ever once asked ours," and in the same voice she asked whether Tessa had given any more thought to the lease. If Tessa ever did leave after all, she would take the whole place, chairs, bell and all.

Tessa watched Shawna lean on the broom and wait for an answer, and she gave one after Shawna had already turned away. That night she locked the door, waited for the bell, and sat for a long time in her own chair in front of the mirror. The helicopter pilots, the older ladies and the boys before prom were all growing hair the way they always had, and it had stopped only on her and on the nurse from Idaho, whom she was trying not to think about anymore. The gray at her temple still hadn't come in, and before she turned off the light Tessa turned her left side to the mirror one more time.

On Sunday she opened at six-thirty. The women from the reenactment came in one at a time with wet umbrellas and their dresses in garment bags, and Tessa gave them the eighteen-sixties: a straight part from the forehead to the crown, smooth sections laid down over the ears, a knot at the nape in a net, and pins, a great many pins. The youngest, a teacher from the elementary school, asked if she could keep her bangs, and Tessa told her bangs came in about ten years after sixty-seven. Lorraine arrived already dressed, and the dress smelled of mothballs and of the trunk it had lain in since last October. Around noon she ran in again and set a whole rhubarb pie from the Lutheran church sale on the counter, though she knew Tessa didn't eat rhubarb.

From ten in the morning there was no parking on Lincoln Street, orange cones went up, and the street outside the window turned wide and empty, and at one-thirty the parade came down it. Tessa stood in the doorway with a cold coffee and watched the school band go by, the veterans, old cars with little flags on their antennas, the pipers from Seattle in their kilts, and the floats throwing candy to the kids. The bass drum passed fifteen feet from her. She saw the mallet hit the head, and she heard the beat once the drummer had taken two more steps. An orange Coast Guard helicopter went over low above the roofs, and its clatter caught up with her when the helicopter itself was already over the bridge. Tessa told herself something about the speed of sound, though sound crosses fifteen feet quicker than a blink.

She went up to the top with everyone else, by the ramp, past the plaques nobody reads, and Lorraine held her arm with a cold hand and gathered up her hem with the other. Up top the wind came off the sound, the old cannons stood along the parapet, and the crowd was packed tight in rain gear, with kids up on shoulders. A lieutenant in somebody else's frock coat was reading from a sheet, holding it against the wind with both hands. The Russian flag started down, snagged halfway, and the crowd laughed, and Lorraine whispered in her ear that it had gone the same way the first time and a sailor had to shinny up the pole. They got the flag loose, it slid down, and the American one went up. Tessa took out her phone to see whether she'd make it back by four, when the teacher had promised to stop by and have her knot taken down, and the screen said 3:30. A row of soldiers in blue coats raised their muskets. Tessa had time to notice that the one on the end, hardly more than a boy, had shaking elbows.

The whole hill flinched at once. Shoulders, hats, hoods, coffee slopping out of the cup of the woman in front onto her glove, gulls lifting off the railings, and white smoke crawling sideways over everyone's heads. All Tessa could hear was the rope rubbing against the flagpole.

The band raised their horns and everyone around her began to sing. She saw the open mouths, saw Lorraine singing with her hand on her heart and her eyes wet from the wind, and she heard Lorraine's petticoat rustle and the edge of the flag snap. Then a man in a top hat began reading the names of the states into the microphone in the order they had come into the Union, and after each one the line fired, and after each one the hill flinched. Tessa counted to twelve and gave up. Behind her somebody was unwrapping a piroshky.

When the hill raised its hurrah, she saw caps waving all around her and a little boy on his father's shoulders with his mouth wide open, and all she heard was Lorraine sniffling beside her. Lorraine asked if she was all right, and Tessa heard the question and said she was cold.

She didn't go to bed that night. She sat in the kitchen under the little light over the stove with the electric bill, which covered her heat too, the way it did for a lot of people in Sitka, and worked out how much would be left before the first if she switched color suppliers. At 11:41 the panes shook in the window, Tessa jumped with her whole body, and tea slopped out of her mug onto the bill.

Downstairs in the shop the bottles of color on the shelf gave a thin clink. From the direction of the hill came a band, far off and muffled, and hundreds of people singing the anthem. Then the second volley came, and the third, one after another at even intervals, and after each one the bottles downstairs answered, and Tessa counted, lost track somewhere in the thirties, got up and opened the window.

Lincoln Street was empty and wet, the streetlights stood in puddles, and a drizzle hung over the square at the end of the street. Hurrahs came rolling down from the hill, the whole hill shouting, kids shrieking, somebody whistling through two fingers. Not one window on the street lit up, and the neighbor's dog, which barked at every garbage truck, kept quiet. Last of all, when everything had died away, laughter came down from the hill, the same laughter the crowd had given the snagged flag.

Tessa shut the window and, in the margin of the bill next to the tea stain, worked it out in a column the way they taught her in school, eleven forty-one minus three-thirty. It came to eight hours and eleven minutes. She sat looking at the numbers and thought that she would have to pay the electric in full regardless, and that her mother would call on Thanksgiving and ask about Seattle again.

Monday was the state holiday, with Alaska Day moved over from Sunday, but Tessa opened at nine like any Monday. At nine-thirty Shawna came by for the scissors she'd forgotten on Saturday. The door closed behind her, Tessa waited for the bell to jingle, and only then did she say good morning.

Shawna told her they'd sat up till all hours at her aunties' yesterday, one aunt had been arguing with the TV again, and her son had gone fishing with his friends and come back without any fish and without his jacket. Then she stopped and looked at Tessa. "You've been like this three days now. I'm talking to you and you're standing there waiting for something." She said Tessa ought to go over to the hospital on Japonski and have them check her ears and her thyroid at least, and better yet take a week and finally fly down to that Seattle of hers. "I'll sit in your chairs, it's no trouble." She talked fast and looked past Tessa while she did it, at the second mirror, at the shelf of color and at the pie, and in her voice Tessa could hear the worry, and Shawna already setting out her own bottles in here.

Tessa said she had three color jobs on Wednesday.

Shawna left, and the bell jingled when she had already passed under the window. Tessa mixed 5N with developer in a little bowl, pulled on gloves, sat down in her own chair and, section by section, brushed the color along her part onto roots that weren't there. She set the timer for twenty-five minutes, and the whole time she sat without touching her phone, looking in the mirror at her dark left temple and at the wind chasing parade candy wrappers down empty Lincoln Street.

That evening after sunset she climbed Castle Hill. There was nobody up there, the wet cannons gleamed on the parapet, and across the water, over Edgecumbe, a band of light was still holding on. Low in the west, right over the mountain, hung a thin young crescent, barely a thread, exactly like the one she'd seen last Monday when she took the trash out after dark. Tessa stood there until it went down behind the mountain and then walked home along Lincoln Street.

On the hardware store calendar on her fridge, the eighteenth was marked with a half moon.