“I can’t work with him squirming,” Ron said. “Take him out, Rosemary.”
He said it flat, not loud. That was the part I kept coming back to later. Ron was not shouting. He said it the way a man says the register is down.
Caleb sat in the big chair with the striped cape snapped under his chin and his hands pinned beneath his knees. He had been sitting that way for eleven minutes. For an eight-year-old who feels every hair on his neck like a crawling ant, eleven minutes is a very long time.
The left side of his head was finished, neat and short above the ear. The right side still hung down to his collar, uneven, waiting.
Nine men sat in the shop. I counted them the way I count everything when I am scared, quickly and without meaning to. Four on the green vinyl bench, three in the folding chairs, two standing by the coffee maker.
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Every one of them was a man I knew. Barney Brennan, who had kept a Saturday seat in that shop since 1971. Les Dreyer from the grain elevator. Darwin Ritter, who sold me our first tractor tire. Men who had carried casseroles to our door when Tom’s father passed.
Not one of them looked up from his cup. The clippers were still buzzing in Ron’s hand. He had not even switched them off. The sound filled the whole room, that thin electric whine, and I watched my son’s shoulders climb toward his ears.
“Buzzing is loud,” Caleb whispered. He was not talking to anyone. “Neck is itchy. Buzzing is loud.”
“I know, bud,” I said. I did know. I had known it since he was three, when he screamed through his first haircut at the mall place in Marshalltown and I swore I would never take him back.
That was how we ended up with Ron. Tom’s younger brother had cut Caleb’s hair for almost four years, always early, before the shop opened, with the lights half on and the radio off. Ron had been kind about it. Patient, even. Or I had thought so.
But Caleb had a school picture on Monday. The only Saturday slot we could make work was ten o’clock, with the regulars packed in like cattle at a sale barn, and Ron had said, “Sure, come on, it’ll be fine.”
It was not fine. Ron took a breath. “Rosemary. I’ve got a shop full of men here.”
His ears were already going red. I noticed that too. Iris stood by the front door in her yellow jacket. She was six, and she had not moved since the clippers started.
I could have said plenty. I had it ready, all of it, sitting right behind my teeth.
I could have said that Ron had known Caleb since the day he was born. That he had held him in the hospital. That a man who cuts hair for a living ought to know the difference between a boy being bad and a boy being overwhelmed.
I did not say any of it. I want to be plain about why, because people have asked me since. Why didn’t you tell him off right there? Why didn’t you call Tom, or stand up in front of the whole room?