The Haircut I Finished on Our Tailgate

Arlette looked at me, at the kids standing in the aisle, at Caleb with his lopsided head and his hands going. She did not ask a single question. She just walked to the shelf and pulled down a box.

“This one’s the quietest,” she said. “My little brother’s on the spectrum. We tried four kinds. Get the low hum, not the big motor ones. And take the cordless if you can.”

“What’s your brother’s name?” “Tyson,” she said. “He’s fifteen now. He cuts his own hair. Took us years.”

I almost cried, standing in the aisle of a farm store. A stranger in a green vest knew my whole morning in four seconds.

“How much?”

“Thirty-six ninety-nine, thirty-nine forty with the tax. Four guards, cordless, charges in a couple of hours, but it’ll run on the cord too.” She slid it into a bag. “There’s a little comb in there.”

I paid cash from my billfold, two twenties, and the sixty cents back went into the jar I keep in my purse for the kids’ ice cream.

Iris spoke up behind me. “Is Caleb getting a new haircut?” “He’s getting the rest of his old one,” I said.

The lane to our place is a quarter mile of white rock between a cornfield and the pasture fence. The house is a plain two-story farmhouse that Tom’s grandfather built, with a porch that needs painting and a red barn behind it that does not.

Pepper met the truck at the end of the lane the way she always does. She is a black-and-white border collie with soft ears that flop forward when she runs, and she runs alongside the tires like she is escorting us in.

Caleb’s whole body loosened when he saw her. It is a small thing. His shoulders came down. His hands slowed. He said, “Pepper,” in the voice he uses only for her, low and certain, like he is greeting an old friend.

I parked in the yard where the gravel is flat, near the round bales stacked against the barn wall, and dropped the tailgate. Our truck is a dark blue Ford, eleven years old, with a dent in the bed where Tom once dropped a gate panel. The tailgate was warm from the sun.

I spread an old beach towel from the mudroom across it, and I wrapped another around Caleb’s shoulders, tucked loose at the neck.

“Right here, Caleb. We go slow.” He climbed up and sat with his hands pinned beneath his knees again, the way he had in the chair. Pepper sat down against his sneakers like she had been assigned the job.

“Iris,” I said, “will you do me a favor?” She was already nodding.

“Go in and get Grandma’s little mirror. The little one with the handle, in the drawer next to the stove.”

It had belonged to Tom’s mother. She kept it there to check her lipstick before church, thirty years of Sundays, and a bit of the silver had worn off the edge. Iris came back at a run, carrying it in both hands like a pie.

I did not start with the clippers on. I opened the box and held them against my own forearm so Caleb could see me do it. Then I switched them on for just a second.

The sound was a low, steady hum, more like a refrigerator than a hornet. I switched it off.