The Haircut I Finished on Our Tailgate

“He should have known better,” I said. “He should have,” Tom agreed. “And he’s going to hear that from me. But not tonight.”

That was Tom. That was why I married him. On Sunday we did not go to his mother’s for dinner, the first time I could remember. Tom called her from the porch and said Caleb wasn’t feeling well, which was true in its way. She said she understood. I don’t believe she did, but she did not push.

Monday Caleb got his school picture taken with a haircut I had finished on a warm tailgate with a pair of little scissors. He grinned for the photographer. That photo is on the refrigerator right now, a little crooked on one side. I would not trade it for any portrait studio in Iowa.

Ron did not call. Tuesday he did not call. Wednesday he did not call.

Thursday Tom drove into town on his lunch hour and came home with very little to say. I asked at supper, and he pushed his potatoes around a while first.

“I told him he owes that boy an apology and it isn’t mine to carry,” he said. “I told him I’d be at the shop when he was ready to talk.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he knew.” Tom set his fork down. “Then he went and swept a floor that was already clean.”

That was all. No call, no truck in the lane, no card in the mailbox. I did not go looking for one. I had a boy who kept asking why the buzzing had been his fault, and a six-year-old who had started trimming her dolls with the kitchen scissors, so I had plenty to do.

The town did what towns do. It did not take sides out loud. It simply started driving to Marshalltown.

Barney told me the numbers, because Barney counts things. The Saturday after, there were four men on the bench at Ron’s. The Saturday after that, there were two, and one of them was Barney, who said a man does not change his mind about a chair in a week, only about the barber standing behind it.

Les Dreyer began getting his hair cut on his way to the grain terminal, twenty-two miles off, where the barber keeps a television going and a pot of bad coffee. Darwin Ritter rode along with him. Two others followed.

For nineteen years Ron had been the only barber in the county, and that had been a kind of crown. It had never once occurred to him that a town could do without him. Now the town was finding out how. By the end of the month he had cut the shop down to four days a week.

I took no pleasure in it. I had seen his ears go red, and I knew where the red came from. But I did not call him either, and I did not send word to ease it. Some things are not mine to carry.

The phone rang on a Thursday, three weeks after the tailgate.

“Rosemary? It’s Robin Sorensen. Jaxon’s mother.” I knew the name from church. Jaxon was nine, and he wore big padded headphones to the Methodist fellowship hall and sat on the very edge of the folding chair nearest the door.

“Mrs. Fenske gave me your number,” she said. “I hope that’s all right. Iris told the whole first grade.”