A Girls Dream

The morning Melinda turned the key in the lock of 1428 East Jefferson, her hands were shaking so bad she had to try twice.

She stood there a full minute just holding the door, looking through the glass at the pink walls she had picked out herself, the two teal chairs still wrapped in plastic, the tall oval mirrors Kimberly had talked her into buying from an estate sale on the west side. Outside, Detroit was just waking up. Buses hissed past. The liquor store across the street was rolling up its gate. A man sweeping the sidewalk in front of the lounge behind her building nodded at her like he had been waiting for somebody to finally open this place.

Everybody else called her Meme. Had since she was twelve and too shy to say her whole name loud. Meme was the girl who did everybody's hair on her mama's porch for five dollars and a plate. Meme was the one who learned to lay a silk press so smooth it moved when you walked, even in July humidity. Melinda was the name on the lease. Melinda Brooks-Hartwell. Thirty-nine years old. And for the first time in her life, the name on the lease was hers.

"Girl, if you don't open this door, I'ma open it," Kimberly said, coming up the sidewalk with two coffees and a bag of bagels balanced on her lash kit. Kim was forty-one, loud in the way that made a whole room feel awake, with a short copper cut and lashes for days because she did her own every Sunday night. She did lashes and makeup in the little station by the window, and she had been Meme's friend since they were doing kitchen beautician work and splitting tips in a shoebox.

Meme laughed and finally pushed inside. It smelled like paint and new beginnings. "It's really ours, Kim."

"Ours? Baby, this is A Girls Dream. I'm just the dream's best friend with a glue pen." Kim set the coffees down and pulled the plastic off a chair with a rip. "We really did it."

They had signed the lease three months earlier with money Meme had saved for six years doing hair out of a rented chair in somebody else's shop, plus what Cole had insisted on adding when he saw the numbers. Cole. Her husband. The thought of him made her smile automatic, the way it had for a year. Cole Hartwell was fifty-nine, successful in the way men are when their hair has gone silver and their watches are heavy and they never have to check a price. He owned commercial buildings in Troy and Birmingham, drove a black Escalade that still smelled new, and had walked into the shop where Meme used to rent a chair one rainy Thursday asking if anybody could fit in his stepdaughter before prom. He stayed in the waiting area watching her work for an hour, not creepy, just quiet, like he was studying how gentle she was with a tender-headed little girl.

He asked her to dinner the next week. He married her six months later. Her mama had whispered, "That fast, Meme?" and Meme had whispered back, "Mama, when a good man knows, he knows."

By nine-thirty that first morning, the bell over the door was ringing. Mrs. Johnson from church for her weekly roller set. Two girls from Southeastern High who had been saving for knotless braids. A young mother named Tasha who cried a little when she saw herself after Meme cut off the heat-damaged ends she had been hiding under wigs since her baby was born.

"You look like you again," Meme told her, and meant it.

That was the part nobody outside this work understood. Hair was never just hair. Not in Detroit, not for Black women who walked into a shop carrying a whole week on their shoulders. They came in tired and left taller. They came in quiet and left laughing with their head thrown back. Meme loved the hum of the dryers, the smell of oil sheen and hot combs, the way Kim would be in her corner doing a full glam while carrying on three conversations at once.

By six, her feet were throbbing in her sneakers. By eight, Kim was sweeping up a cloud of hair and singing along to the radio. This was hard work. Real work. Back-bending, wrist-aching, standing-until-your-knees-talk-to-you work. She already knew the lights on this block did not always stay on, that some nights she would hear sirens close enough to count, that running a shop in this community meant you fixed your own toilet and learned the names of every kid who cut through your parking lot so they'd look out for your windows.

She loved it already. Not the idea of it - the actual day of it.

At nine-forty, after the last client had tipped her with a hug and twenty dollars pressed into her palm like a secret, Meme stood in the middle of A Girls Dream with a broom in her hand and just looked around. The pink walls glowed under the string lights Kim had insisted on. Her name - not her name, their name, the dream's name - was painted in gold script on the window.

She did not know yet how much that door would have to hold. She just knew she had finally opened it.