The Haircuts I Gave at the Nursing Home

I went home that night and told Jean at the kitchen table.

She did not look up from her crossword. “I know,” she said. “I’ve watched you tilt your head since Easter.”

“You never said.”

“You’d have told me it wasn’t so.”

That was true, and we both let it sit there on the table between the salt and the pepper.

I thought on it for a week. I prayed on it harder than I had since Daddy.

In the end I decided that a barber who cannot see his own line has no business putting a blade near anybody’s ear, and that goes double in a building full of people who cannot get up out of the chair.

I closed out the shop first, in my head. The home I saved for last, because a promise ought to be kept all the way to the end of it.

I called Pam Hollin and asked to see her in the office. She has run Cedar Knob eleven years, and she is a woman who looks at you while you talk. I told her I would finish the first Thursday of October and that would be all.

I said I would get her the names of a couple of barbers in Berea who might take a Thursday.

She wrote nothing down. “Orin, you gave us forty years,” she said. “You don’t owe us a name.”

“I’d feel better,” I said.

“Then send me the names.”

Because I know how these places are, and how people are, I added that I wanted no party. No cake, no card, no speeches.

I wanted to cut my last head of hair, wash my comb, and go home.

“Yes, sir,” Pam said.

She said it too fast. I should have caught that. But I was a man with one good eye, and I noticed what I could see.

The pole went down on Monday, the way I told you. By Tuesday I had a dozen men in the shop who had not been in since spring, sitting along the wall with their hats on their knees and not enough hair among them to bother with.

They said they were just passing. Bobby Lutes came in for a shave he did not need and studied my ceiling for the whole twenty minutes.

They had heard I was quitting, and they had come to say goodbye the way men do, which is badly and sideways, by sitting there. It touched me.

On Wednesday Jean drove me to Lexington for the last look at the eye. The doctor said what he had said in April. Jean asked him whether I should be driving, and he said not after dark.

We ate lunch at a diner on Nicholasville Road, and I had the meatloaf and did not taste it.

We got home around five. Jean put her purse on the counter and said, “Orin, I had Bobby come by and get your daddy’s chair.”

I looked at her.