The Barber Chair Under the Feed Store Oak

“A boutique, she calls it. Clothes and candles and such. He wants her right there on the square, where he can keep an eye on her.”

“So he could have asked,” I said. “He could have walked in and said, Elmer, I need the building for my girl. Grandpa would have moved out in a week. You know he would have.”

“I know it,” Hubert said.

“Instead he tripled it. He picked a number he knew an eighty-seven-year-old barber could not pay, so he wouldn’t have to say the hard thing out loud.”

Hubert set his cup down. “I reckon that’s about the size of it,” he said. “Ransom never could stand to be the bad guy. He’d rather let a letter do it for him.”

I understood a father wanting to help his daughter. I have a daughter of my own, and a son, and I would do a great deal for either one.

What I could not understand was making an old man pay for it.

Over the next week, I watched Grandpa start to get ready to quit. That was the hardest part.

He did not complain once, and he did not say a word against Ransom to a single customer.

He just started taking things down. The framed photograph of the 1971 Casey County High School football team, every boy with a haircut he gave them.

The calendar from the funeral home. The little brass plaque with his barber license number on it.

On Thursday afternoon I walked over at closing time and found him sitting in his own red chair with the lights off.

The sun was coming in sideways through the front window, and he was just sitting there, looking at the empty second chair.

“You all right, Grandpa?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I was just thinking about Ancil. He’d have known what to say to Ransom. He always had a better mouth on him than me.”

I sat down on the bench under the window, where I used to sort bobby pins. Neither of us said anything for a long time.

Out on the square, a farm truck went by slow, and somebody waved at the shop out of habit.

“What will you do in September?” I asked him.

“Sit on the porch, I guess. Like Ransom says I ought to.” He rubbed the chrome on the armrest with his thumb.

“Your grandmother always said I’d die in this chair. I suppose I’ll have to find another way.”

I went home that night and could not sleep. My husband found me at the kitchen table at two in the morning with a legal pad, writing down the names of every man I could remember seeing in Grandpa’s shop.

I had filled four pages.

“What are you doing, Lace?” he asked. He was in his undershirt with his hair standing up, and he had to be at the county road garage by six.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

He did not go back to bed. He made a pot of coffee and sat down across from me and read the names upside down, and every so often he would say, “Put the sawmill crew on there,” or, “Don’t forget the mail carrier.”

By the time the window turned gray, we had five pages. Some of those men were dead, and I crossed them off with a single straight line out of respect.