The Salon Chair That Ended Him

The Night Sheryl Came Back After Closing

She came back on a Monday night, after we’d locked the front door, because she’d seen the lights still on and known I sometimes stay late doing the books for my own chair. I let her in. I want to say I hesitated, and I didn’t, not really, because by then some part of me had been waiting for this exact knock for weeks without letting myself admit it.

She sat down in the chair, not for a color, just to sit, and she told me everything, in order this time, instead of in the scattered pieces she’d been handing me for months without knowing what she was building.

Herschel had told her the marriage was over in every way but paper. He had told her the business was failing. He had told her the cabin was money he’d saved on his own, separate from anything that belonged to his wife. And two days earlier, he had told her something new: that once the restructuring went through and Rollin signed off, the dealership’s debt would sit exactly where it already was, and the two of them, Herschel and Sheryl, would be free and clear with the cabin, a share of the equipment inventory quietly retitled to a new company, and nothing left behind but paper with somebody else’s name already on it.

“He said his wife wouldn’t fight it,” Sheryl told me, “because she doesn’t even understand what they have.”

She looked at me a long moment in the mirror, the same mirror she’d been talking to for eight months without ever once really seeing who was standing behind her.

“Maryann,” she said. “Is that you?”

I told her the truth. All of it. My name, my nineteen years, the pen with the kiss, the guarantee I’d signed in good faith, the Saturdays at the assisted living home, the knee I hadn’t fixed. I watched her face do something I hadn’t expected, and hadn’t planned for, and couldn’t have engineered if I’d tried. She didn’t get angry at me. She got angry at him, and underneath the anger, something that looked a great deal like shame, the particular shame of realizing you were never the exception you thought you were, just the next in a line.

“He told me the exact same thing about you that he’s probably telling the next one about me,” she said quietly. “Isn’t he.”

I didn’t have to answer that either. We both already knew.