Nobody Called Me

On a Monday, my nine o'clock told me she was so sorry to hear I was selling the shop.

I was not selling the shop.

I said as much, pleasantly, and got on with the color, and thought no more about it until my eleven o'clock settled in and asked whether I'd found a place in Arizona yet.

By two in the afternoon a woman I'd known since high school had put a hand on my arm and said, in the voice, that she'd heard about the divorce and I should know that she was praying for me.

I have never been married.

That one I did have to sit down about.

Here is what happened, as near as I have ever been able to reconstruct it. On the previous Thursday, while I was rinsing somebody, I said out loud that I was taking two weeks off in October.

That is the entire seed. That is the whole of it.

Two weeks off in October became she's cutting back. Cutting back became she's cutting back for a reason. A reason became a health thing, and then a health thing became too grim to repeat, so it got downgraded on its way across the parking lot at the co-op into a franchise buying me out, and somewhere between the co-op and the Casey's it picked up Arizona, and the divorce is the one part I've never been able to source. I think somebody just felt the story needed more.

The mistake people make is assuming a rumor is a lie. A rumor is a game of telephone where every single player is doing their honest best.

I've said before that a hairdresser knows more about a town than anybody else does. That isn't quite true and I'd like to be honest about it.

The hairdresser is second.

First place belonged, always and permanently, to whoever ran the switchboard. Every call in and out of a whole county came through one woman sitting at a board full of cords, and she could hear any of it she cared to, and there was not one thing anybody could do about that. Most of those women are gone now. The ones still living are in their eighties and they remember all of it.

Anyway.

By Friday of that week I had taken eleven phone calls and booked out solid for five weeks, because half the town had decided to get in before I closed. My October, which I had cleared on purpose, filled up. Women who hadn't been in since a funeral called for a cut. One woman booked a perm she did not want and has never mentioned since.

I want to be clear that I did nothing to encourage this.

I also did not correct it with any real urgency.

I took my two weeks. I went to my sister's, and I slept, and I read four paperbacks, and I did not think about anybody's roots. Then I came back and unlocked the door on a Tuesday and a woman walking past on the sidewalk stopped dead and said, out loud, "Welcome home."

I'd been gone fourteen days. I live nine blocks away.

I told you once that in a town this size there are no secrets, only people who haven't had their hair done yet.

Here's the rest of it, and it took me longer to learn.

You don't get to be the author of your own story either. In a town this size you're a source. And a source never gets to see the final draft.