While she was doing this, Hank enclosed the screened porch across the back of the house so it would be comfortable during cold weather and installed two shampoo sinks and haircutting chairs and two big wall mirrors in front of the chairs. He also wired the place for electricity so that Beulah could have the latest beauty equipment. The new Kenmore handheld hair dryer she coveted, for instance, and the electric permanent-wave machine with amazing drop-down curlers that heated the hair to create a long-lasting curl, not to mention the electric hot water heater, which meant that there’d be no more pouring hot water out of teakettles and pitchers, with the danger of scalding somebody. Beulah added the finishing touches, painting the wainscoting peppermint pink (her favorite color), wallpapering the walls with fat pink roses, and spatter-painting the pink floor with gray, blue, and yellow. Then she painted out the BLOOMING SOON on the sign and replaced it with BY APPOINTMENT & WALK-INS WELCOME and she was in business.

After a few months, the Beauty Bower was such a runaway success that Beulah advertised for a helper, which resulted in Bettina Higgens. Bettina was not what you might call pretty (her brown hair was stringy and thin and she was as skinny as a bean pole) and she had never been to beauty school. But Beulah saw an innate talent in Bettina’s nimble fingers and knew that she had what it took to make women beautiful. Within a couple of weeks, the two were wearing twin pink ruffled aprons embroidered with Beulah’s Beauty Bower and working elbow-to-elbow at the shampoo sinks.

One of the things that Beulah and Bettina liked best about their workplace was its conviviality, for each day of the week brought its regulars who looked forward to seeing their friends, saved up their tidbits of gossip to share, and even brought cookies and cupcakes to go with the hot coffee and iced tea that Beulah always kept ready, depending on the season. Beulah was careful not to schedule the day’s appointments so tightly that they couldn’t accommodate somebody with a hair emergency, though. She hated to turn away a potential customer. Why, the person might get in over at Conrad’s Curling Corner and be lost to the Bower forever!

Fridays and Saturdays were always the Bower’s busiest days, with people getting prettied up for Saturday night parties and Sunday morning church. Monday mornings were usually fairly quiet, with Myra May Mosswell and Miss Dorothy Rogers coming in at nine and Bessie Bloodworth and Leona Ruth Adcock at nine thirty.