The Haircut I Finished on Our Tailgate

“It’s all right.”

“Jaxon hasn’t had a haircut since April.” She laughed, and it was not really a laugh. “He won’t go past the doormat of any shop. I’ve tried four. I’ve been trimming his bangs while he sleeps, and I’m making a mess of it.”

“Robin, I’m not a barber. It was one haircut.”

“It was one haircut he’d have let you finish.”

I held the phone for a good while. I thought about Caleb saying that the quiet buzz was a different kind of buzz, and Iris holding the mirror until her arms shook, and Arlette in her green vest, telling me her little brother took years.

“Bring him out Saturday,” I said. “Not to the house. I’ll think of somewhere.”

I did not have to think long. On Friday I drove back to the farm store on Highway 30 for another set of guards. Arlette was at the register. I told her what I had said to Robin, and that I did not yet know where to put a boy who would not walk through a door.

“Do it in our lot,” she said at once.

“Arlette.”

“It’s gravel. It’s open. Nobody has to walk into anything.” She was already pulling a sheet of cardboard from under the counter. “Tyson will come. He wants to show your boy his tools. Dad won’t care. Dad owes me for the winter I covered his shifts.”

Saturday I set up at ten o’clock, which was no accident. It was the hour Ron’s shop fills.

Tom drew the line at the lane. “I’ll bring the coffee,” he said. “I’ll hold the chair. I won’t say a word unless somebody asks me.”

We backed the truck up beside the stacked bags of feed, and I dropped the tailgate in front of Highway 30 and a hundred feet of passing grain trucks. Arlette taped her cardboard to the side of the bed. She had lettered it in green marker, two lines. The first said Quiet Cuts. The second said The Kid Is The Boss.

My knees were not steady. It is one thing to do a hard thing in your own yard where nobody is watching. It is another to do it where the whole county can drive past.

Robin’s car pulled in at five past. Jaxon sat in the back seat with his headphones on and his hands in his armpits, and he did not get out.

Caleb did. He had insisted on coming, in his red shirt, with the towel folded over one arm like a waiter.

I started to say something. Tom put a hand on my shoulder, and I stopped.

My son walked across forty feet of gravel with the little cordless clippers in both hands. He stopped a respectful distance from the car window and held them up so Jaxon could see.

“This one is quiet buzz,” Caleb said, loud enough to carry through the glass. “You’re the boss of it. You can switch it off any time. Even in the middle.”

Nothing happened for the longest time. A feed truck went by on the highway, and a meadowlark said something about it.

Then the back door opened.

Jaxon climbed out with his headphones still on and sat on the tailgate with his hands pinned under his knees. Pepper had ridden along in the truck bed, and she lay down against his sneakers like she had been assigned.