The Haircut I Finished on Our Tailgate

Three reasons, and none of them very noble. Ron was my husband’s only brother, and Sunday dinner at his mother’s house was not going away. Ron was also the only barber within twenty-two miles, and every one of those miles mattered when you had a child who could not go just anywhere.

And the third reason was in the chair. My son was coming apart a little more with every second I spent being right. What he needed from me was not a speech. He needed his mother, and he needed out.

So I did the quiet thing. I stepped up beside the chair and unsnapped the cape myself. I folded it over my arm, because it was Ron’s and I did not want to throw it.

“Hands out, bud,” I said softly. “You can take them from under your knees. We’re done.”

Caleb pulled his hands free and they started flapping low against his legs, fast and small. It is the way he lets the pressure out, and I have never once been ashamed of it.

“Done,” he repeated. “Done. Done.”

“We’re going to go see the dog,” I said.

Behind me, someone shifted on the vinyl bench. A spoon clinked against a cup.

“Rosemary,” Ron said again. His voice cracked in the middle. “I’m not trying to be…”

He did not finish. I looked at him then, finally, and he looked away. The clippers were still running in his hand. He seemed to notice that all at once and thumbed the switch off.

The silence was louder than the buzz had been. “Thank you for what you did get done,” I said.

I meant it, and it came out sounding like something worse. I took my son’s hand, and Iris’s, and we walked out past the barber pole into the September sun. Behind us the bell on the door rang once and settled.

Tom was on the river bottom that morning, running the combine through the last of the early soybeans. He had left before sunup. His phone was in the cab of his pickup with the rest of his junk, where it always is, and he has never once heard it ring in the field.

I did not try to call. There was nothing he could have done in that moment that I was not already doing.

I buckled Caleb into the back seat and Iris climbed in beside him. She took his hand without a word and held it in her lap. I sat behind the wheel for a long moment with both hands on it.

“Mama?” Iris said. “Are you mad?”

“I’m thinking,” I said.

“Your thinking face looks mad,” she said. That almost made me laugh. I started the truck.

Here is something about our life that I should say now. We farm one hundred and sixty acres of corn and beans, and Tom rents another two hundred from the Petersen estate. We run about thirty head of cows on the rough pasture along the creek. Most months we come out about even. Some months we do not.

The farm store sits out on Highway 30, a long tin building with a gravel lot and a smell of feed and rubber boots. I had never once walked to the back wall where they keep the grooming gear, the sheep shears and horse clippers and, on one lower shelf, a row of cheap home haircut kits.

A young woman in a green vest was restocking baling twine. Her tag said Arlette.

“Help you find something?” “Clippers,” I said. “For a person. Something quiet.”