The Salon Chair That Ended Him

Valley Ag And Implement

Rollin’s father started the yard on the edge of Piney Bend back when the highway out to it was still gravel. Rollin grew up in the service bay the way some kids grow up on a ranch, and when his father passed, Herschel bought in as a partner with the money from his own father’s estate, back before we were even married. Valley Ag and Implement has sold half the tractors and grain augers and pivots in this county at one point or another. When a farmer’s combine breaks down two weeks before harvest, it’s Rollin’s number they call at midnight, not Herschel’s, because Rollin has always been the one who answers.

Herschel handled the books. That was the split they’d settled into over twenty five years of partnership, Rollin ran the yard and the service side, Herschel ran the office, the financing arrangements, the relationships with the banks and the equipment manufacturers. It worked, or it seemed to work, because Rollin is not a suspicious man. He is the kind of man who still does business on a handshake with farmers he’s known his whole life, who will finance a hay baler for a young couple starting out with nothing but their word that they’ll make the payments, and mean it when he says he trusts them.

I have known Rollin longer than I’ve known Herschel. His wife and I sat on the same hospital committee for years, raising money for the pediatric wing over in the county seat. He is the kind of man other men in this town describe, when you ask them, as “solid,” which around here is about the highest compliment a person can receive.

Sheryl mentioned him the way you’d mention furniture. “His partner,” she called him, or sometimes “the old friend he’s outgrown,” a phrase I am certain she picked up directly from Herschel’s own mouth, because it had the particular shape of something a man says to make his own selfishness sound like growth.

I sat with that phrase for a long time after she left that Thursday. The old friend he’s outgrown. Rollin, who had built half this business with his own two hands, who had never once, in twenty five years, taken more than his fair share of anything. I understood, piece by piece, that whatever Herschel was planning didn’t only cost me. It was going to cost Rollin too, and Rollin didn’t know it yet any more than I had known it eight months ago.

The Cabin On The Reservoir

The debt was only half the story. The other half was where the money was actually going, and that part took longer to surface, because Sheryl herself didn’t seem to fully understand it either. She just knew she liked where it was landing.

“He told me the business has been drowning for two years,” she said one Thursday, watching me in the mirror instead of herself, which by then had become the way I knew something important was coming. “But listen to this. This weekend he took me out to a cabin on the reservoir. Paid in full. Handed me the key like it was nothing.”

Four hundred and sixty thousand dollars. That’s what a place like that runs, out past the dam where the pines come down close to the water and the lots don’t come up for sale more than once every few years. I know because I’d priced a smaller version of the same dream myself once, years ago, back when Herschel and I still talked about what we might do once the kids were grown and the dealership was solid enough to slow down.

While he was buying a cabin in full, in cash, I had spent that spring picking up Saturday appointments at the assisted living home on the edge of town, doing perms and sets for women in their eighties and nineties for a fraction of what I charge on Main Street, because Herschel had told me, more than once, that the dealership was tight and every dollar helped. I had put off my own knee replacement twice, telling myself it could wait another season, because the copay felt like too much to ask for when the business needed the room.