“I never said,” he told me. His voice was rough. “Brynn can’t stand the noise. We drive her to the lake for a trim, an hour each way. I sat in that shop and watched your boy and I thought, that’s Brynn. And I kept my eyes on my coffee.”
He had been on the bench when it happened. He did not say that. He did not have to.
“Park right there, Darwin,” I said. “There’s a chair.”
And at ten minutes past noon, with the line still eight deep, I heard the muffler.
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A gray half-ton came slowly down Highway 30 from the town side. The muffler was the one Ron had been meaning to fix since spring. The truck slowed at the entrance to the lot. I could see him through the windshield, one hand on the wheel, looking at the trucks and the chairs and the cardboard sign.
At Barney Brennan on a hay bale with his flour sack. At the boy on the tailgate with a mirror held up in front of his face.
He did not turn in. He sat there with the engine idling until the grain truck behind him leaned on its horn.
I did not wave. I did not look away, either. I held the shears, and I let him see me.
The gray truck pulled out and went on down the highway, the muffler going away until it was only a sound and then not even that.
Tom, beside me, cleared his throat. He did not say a word.
We finished at a quarter to two. Nine boys and three girls and one man of eighty-three, who said he had no business wanting his neck trimmed with a pair of sewing shears and then had me do it.
Robin drove Jaxon home with his headphones around his neck. He had put them there himself, in the lot, so he could hear the clippers go off.
I swept the tailgate with my hand. Tom put the chair back in the truck bed. Arlette came out of the store with a paper sack of sandwiches from the deli counter and would not hear of any money. The cardboard sign was still taped to the side of the truck. I let it stay.
There was hair all over the gravel, brown and blond and one patch of red, the wind lifting a little of it across the lot toward the highway and the road to town.
Iris had fallen asleep in the back seat with Pepper’s head in her lap and Grandma’s mirror still held in both hands. The silver was worn off one edge. Whatever she saw in it, she held on.
Caleb sat on the tailgate with his feet swinging, watching the traffic on 30. He had the little clippers in his lap, switched off.
“Mama?”
“Yes, bud.”
“I was the boss of the buzz.”
“You were,” I said. “You were the boss of the whole lot.”
He thought that over. A grain truck went by, and then a school bus, empty on a Saturday, and a man in a seed cap lifted two fingers off his steering wheel at our line of trucks, the way people do on a country road when they have just decided to be neighbors.
“Good haircut,” my son said, to nobody, to the whole bright gravel lot.
And it was.