Soft Money

Loretta paid cash, and the bills were always soft.

You handle enough money in a service business that you stop seeing it, but you don't stop feeling it. Bank money is crisp. It comes out of a machine in a stack and it has corners. Purse money is limp and warm and folded whatever way it fit.

Loretta's was neither. Loretta's twenties were soft the way cloth gets soft. They'd been folded in quarters and unfolded and folded again over a long stretch of time, and the creases had gone furry, and when she set one on my counter it didn't lie flat. It sat up a little, holding its shape.

Old money. Kept money.

She came every six weeks for a color and a trim, and she paid me out of the same soft twenties for four years, and I never once asked, because it was none of my business how a grown woman handled her finances and because I'd have bet the shop I already knew.

Her husband was pleasant. That's the word people in town used, and they used it the same way every time, which is how you can tell a word is doing a job.

One February she asked what a full color would run if we went a shade lighter. Not the price of the service. The price of the change. Then she asked whether she could do half now and half at the next visit.

I told her the number and I told her yes and I did not put a single thing in my face.

"I keep some by," she said, to the mirror, not to me.

"Mm," I said.

That was the entire conversation. Four years, and that's all either of us ever said about it.

In September she wasn't in the book. Her slot came up empty and stayed empty, and by Thursday I'd heard from three different chairs that Loretta had gone to her sister's in Nebraska, and by the following Thursday I'd heard four more versions and every one of them was wrong in a different direction.

She sent a card at Christmas. She has sent one every year since. There's never much in it. The town she's in, the weather, and one year a line about a woman up there who does a decent color but doesn't listen.

I've thought about that money more than I should.

Not about what it was for. I knew what it was for.

What I think about is that she started putting it aside a long time before she needed it, and she kept it somewhere it stayed soft, and she still spent forty dollars of it on her hair every six weeks for four years.

Because a woman planning to leave still needs her roots done.

Especially then.