The Salon Chair That Ended Him
The Chair I Still Sit In
I still rent the second chair at the salon on Main Street. The light still comes in low and gold through the front window in the summer. Sheryl comes by sometimes, not as a client anymore, just to sit and talk, the way you’d visit a friend, which is a strange and unexpected thing to be able to say about a woman I first knew only as a stranger with foils in her hair and my husband’s name in her mouth.
She’s rebuilding her own life now, slower than she’d like, the way most of us do it. She tells people, when it comes up, that the best thing that ever happened to her was a hairdresser in a small Idaho town who never once raised her voice, never once did anything but keep working, and let her arrive at the truth on her own time instead of being handed it like a weapon.
I think about that a lot, actually. About what my power really was, in all of it. It was never going to be anything I did to her, not one cut, not one color, not one unkind word in a chair where she trusted me with the back of her own head every single week. It was the simple, unglamorous fact that I already knew, and I kept doing my job anyway, one Thursday at a time, until the truth had nowhere left to hide and the people who needed to hear it were finally standing close enough to listen.
Piney Bend is small enough that everybody knows most of this story by now, in the way small towns always know things, in pieces, over suppers and at the feed store counter. Nobody in this town looks at me like I’m the woman whose husband left her for someone younger. They look at me like I’m the woman who kept her chair, kept her friends, kept her own name on the front of her own life, and let the truth do the rest of the work on its own schedule.
I still do foils every other Thursday for a dairy farmer’s wife who has sat in my chair longer than Sheryl ever did. I still do sets on Saturdays for the women at the assisted living home, though these days it’s because I want to, not because I have to. My knee got fixed the spring after the divorce was final. I still keep a book behind the register, the same one, worn along the spine now, though these days the pages past December stay blank, because for the first time in longer than I can easily remember, there isn’t anything in my own life I feel the need to write down in secret.
This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.