The Salon Chair That Ended Him

The Chair On Main Street

I have rented the second chair at the salon on Main Street in Piney Bend, Idaho, for eleven years. Everybody in this town knows which chair is mine. It sits under the front window, so in the summer the afternoon light comes in low and gold across the floor, and in the winter you can watch the snowplow make its third pass of the day up the middle of the street while you wait for a color to set.

I am forty two years old. I have been married to Herschel for nineteen of those years, which means I have been his wife longer than I was ever anyone else’s daughter, longer than I lived in any house that wasn’t the one we bought together on Cutler Road, longer than anything else in my life except the work of doing hair.

Herschel runs an implement dealership on the edge of town, the kind of place that sells tractors and balers and irrigation pivots to the farms that ring Piney Bend on every side, wheat to the north, potatoes to the west, a little dairy country tucked along the river bottom. He built that business up from almost nothing with a man named Rollin, whose father used to run a smaller version of the same yard back when I was still in high school. Rollin taught my nephew to drive a tractor when the boy was fourteen years old, out behind the service bay after hours, patient in a way that Herschel has never once managed to be with anybody, including me.

For a long time I would have told you my marriage was ordinary in the way that most marriages in a town like this are ordinary. Not perfect. Not exciting. Steady. We went to the same church every Sunday that Herschel could be bothered to go, we ate supper at the same diner on Route 9 every Friday when the dealership was slow, we sat in the same bleacher seats at the high school football field every fall even after our own kids had grown and moved on. I believed, the way you believe the ground under a house, that whatever else happened, that part of my life was settled.

Four years ago something changed in him. I couldn’t have told you what, not then. He started coming home later. He started talking about the business “turning a corner” in a voice that had a little too much hope in it, the kind of hope a man uses when he is trying to convince himself of something he already knows isn’t true. He stopped asking me about my day. Small things. The kind of small things a wife notices and then talks herself out of noticing, because the alternative is too big to hold while you’re standing at the stove.

I didn’t know yet that the corner he meant wasn’t a corner in the business at all.