The Salon Chair That Ended Him

Every Thursday At Two

She started coming to my chair about eight months ago. A referral, she said, from a woman two towns over. Highlights and a trim, every other Thursday at first, then every single Thursday once the color got more complicated. She was younger than me, maybe by ten years, pretty in the particular way of a woman who has decided prettiness is a job she intends to keep. She talked the whole time. Some clients do. You learn to hum along, ask the right small questions, keep the conversation moving without ever really needing to know the answers.

Her name is Sheryl.

The first time she mentioned a man named Herschel, I was mixing a color bowl at the counter behind her, and my hand did not shake. I want to say that like it’s nothing, but it took everything I had. There is more than one Herschel in a county this size, I told myself, even though I knew, within about four sentences, exactly which one she meant.

“My guy runs the implement place out on the highway,” she said, watching herself in the mirror instead of me. “Comes from a good family. Just going through a rough patch with his wife. She’s let herself go, doesn’t really do anything with herself anymore. He says she doesn’t even really see him.”

I kept combing.

I want to tell you I felt rage in that moment, the kind you’d expect, the kind that would have been easy to name and easier to act on. What I actually felt was something colder and quieter, like stepping into a creek in October and realizing the water is exactly as cold as you feared, and now you just have to decide whether you’re going to keep walking.

I kept walking.

“You’re the only person in this whole town who doesn’t judge me,” she told me that first week, like she was confiding something precious. She meant it, too. That was the strange part. Sheryl was never cruel to me. She was never cruel about me, either, not really, not in the way you’d think a woman talks about the wife she’s trying to replace. She talked about “the wife” the way you’d talk about a leaky roof. A problem. Not a person. I don’t think it ever crossed her mind that the problem had a name, and that the name was sitting behind her with a pair of shears in her hand.

She has said some version of that sentence, you’re the only one who doesn’t judge me, every single Thursday since. I have learned to say “of course, honey” in a voice so even it could level a floor.