Character Reference

The federal government called my salon on a Tuesday afternoon.

I had a woman under the dryer, a bowl of lightener going off in one hand, and a phone pinned to my shoulder, which is how I conducted most business that year.

"Ma'am, I'm calling to verify some information about Sharon Kessler."

I set the bowl down.

Sharon had applied for a job that required a background investigation. Government work, out of Wichita, the kind where somebody has to go find out whether you're the sort of person who can be trusted with things. And when they'd handed her the form asking for people who had known her a long time, Sharon had written down her pastor, her sister, and me.

"In what capacity do you know Ms. Kessler?"

"I do her hair."

There was a pause on the line. I have learned to enjoy that pause.

"And how long has that been the case?"

"Nineteen years."

Another pause. Longer. I heard a pen start moving.

He had a script. I could hear him working down it. Have you ever known her to be dishonest. Has she ever been in financial difficulty. Does she use alcohol to excess. Has there been any significant change in her lifestyle or standard of living that you couldn't account for.

And here is the thing that struck me while I stood there watching my lightener sit past its window.

I could have answered every single one of those questions. In detail. With dates.

I knew about the second mortgage in 2009 and the year she brought her own coffee because the salon coffee wasn't worth the two dollars she wasn't spending on it. I knew her brother had a problem and I knew the specific Christmas it stopped being a family joke. I knew what she had said about her ex-husband in my chair, and I knew what she said about him at the grocery store, and I knew they were not the same and I knew exactly why.

Nineteen years is a long time to sit in front of the same mirror.

So I answered him. Truthfully, completely, and without one word of editorial. Because none of what I knew made Sharon Kessler dishonest. It made her a woman who has been alive since 1968.

She got the job.

She came in six weeks later, sat down, put her purse in her lap, and said, "Did somebody call you?"

"Somebody did."

"What did you tell him?"

"That you've been on time to every appointment for nineteen years and you've never once tried to talk me down on the price."

She looked at me in the mirror. "That's it?"

"Sharon," I said, "that's the whole test. That's everything there is."

The federal government spent good money and a fair amount of a nice young man's afternoon to find out something my appointment book would have told them for free.