The Salon I Sold For My Son
But Tanner would have known, and I would have known, and the money would have come with that word on it.
The next morning I asked Rod to stay at his mother’s for a while.
I said it at the back door while he laced his boots, in the same flat voice he had used on me.
“For how long?” he asked.
“Until you know whose blood you are,” I said. It was not kind.
It was the only unkind thing I said to him the whole year, and I still do not know if I would take it back.
He looked at me for a long time. Then he took his thermos and his duffel bag and drove the six blocks to his mother’s apartment over the hardware store, and that was where he stayed.
Tanner asked where Rod went. I told him Rod and I had a disagreement about money and needed some room.
He was fourteen, not stupid. He looked at the floor and asked if it was about his back.
“It’s about grown-up things,” I said, and he knew I was lying, and he let me.
Morgan Fiske had rented my second chair for two years. She was twenty-four, from a farm outside Wells, quick with color and better at fades than I would ever be. The high school boys loved her.
Twice she had asked, half joking, if I would ever sell. Twice I had laughed and said they would carry me out of that shop feet first.
I had opened it at twenty-seven with a loan and a used dryer chair.
I called her that night, after Tanner was asleep. I sat in my car in the salon lot with the heater running, because I could not make myself say it in the house where he might hear.
“Morgan, were you serious about buying the shop?” I asked. There was a long quiet on the line, and then she asked me if I was sick. I said no. I told her about Tanner instead.
I did not tell her what Rod said. I told her the surgery cost what it cost and I needed to do this.
She cried on the phone. Then she said she would talk to her grandpa in the morning.
Her grandpa cosigned with her at the credit union on Main. The loan officer had been my client for eleven years.
She asked me twice if I was sure, then pushed the papers across her desk and handed me a pen.
We settled on nineteen thousand. That was the chairs, the shampoo bowls, the two dryers, the client book and the rest of my lease.
It was fair. Some days I think it was more than fair to me.
After I paid off what I still owed on my own equipment loan, I walked out with eight thousand two hundred dollars.
I put the other twenty-eight hundred on my Visa and told myself I would worry about it in the spring.
I drove to St. Neil the next Tuesday and paid the surgical group in full.
The woman at the desk gave me a receipt with a little stamp on it. I kept it folded in my wallet for months like a lottery ticket.
Telling my clients was the hard part. Some of those women had sat in my chair every Thursday for twelve years.