“Gail, honey, I am so sorry,” I said, and the microphone squealed, and I pushed it gently back to its stand. “There are no medical bills. I have been in Tucson for three months drinking iced tea with my sister, and I have a clean bill of health and a wonderful tan.” Two hundred candles trembled in the March dusk. The crowd stared. A man at the back laughed, a startled bark, and then he clapped his hand over his mouth. Shelly stood three feet from me in her black dress, with her notes still in her fist and her face the color of candle wax.
Nobody breathed. I looked at the glass jar on the folding table, stuffed with bills and checks, and the poster of my young self in my old salon smock, grinning with a pair of shears. Someone had pinned a carnation to the corner. Gail still gripped my arm with both hands, her fingers trembling. Then, one at a time, people began to understand. A murmur started, low and rising, like water coming to a boil. A tall man in a feed store cap said, to nobody in particular, “Well, I will be.” A woman near the front began to cry, and then to laugh, and then both. “Lorraine,” she called, “you old fraud!”
I raised my hand for quiet, and it came, as it always had in my shop. “Friends,” I said, “I am so sorry to give you a fright. I am touched beyond words. I did not know a haircut could mean so much.” I smiled at the crowd. “But I cannot let you leave here thinking this was an accident. I have to tell you where this jar was headed.” I looked at my daughter. She had begun to shake. The notes in her hand fluttered like leaves. “Shelly, would you like to say it? Or shall I?” She opened her mouth, and a small sound came out. It was not a word.
A glass jar and two hundred candles on the courthouse square turned a false funeral into a barber shop with two chairs.
I had thought about this moment on the whole flight from Tucson. I had thought about it in the car with my nephew, going eighty miles an hour on the interstate. I had imagined the things I might say, all the fine, righteous, stinging things, and I had practiced them over the roar of the engine. But when the moment came, I looked at my daughter in her black dress, fifty years old, with the first gray in her hair, and none of it came. All that came was the memory of a little girl in a pink snowsuit, standing on a stool in my shop, learning to sweep the clippings into a pile.
“I will say it,” Shelly said finally, in a cracked whisper. She stepped up to the microphone, trembling, and it squealed. She flinched. The whole square waited. “I am Shelly Mitchell. I am her daughter. My mother is not dead. I told you she was.” A sigh went through the crowd like wind in tall grass. “I owe thirty one thousand dollars to people I should not owe. I thought, if she is dead, nobody will mind if I ask for help. I thought if I made it sad enough, you would give.” Her voice failed. She stood there with her mouth working, her eyes closed, and tears running down her face into the collar of her dress.
No one jeered. I want to say that. In all my years in this town, I have never been prouder of it. The crowd stood in silence, holding its candles. Then Gail stepped forward and put her arm around Shelly. Then a barber from across the street. Then a lady from the church. They gathered around my daughter, one at a time, in the flickering dark, the way you would gather around a person who has fallen. A man in a feed store cap said, in a gruff voice, “Honey, we have all been in a hole.” Someone put a hand on her back. Shelly sobbed into the shoulder of Gail.
I took the microphone again. I said, “Here is what I would like to do. The jar. I want every dollar and every check returned to the person who gave it. Anyone who would rather give it to something good can leave it with me, and I will see it goes to the food bank.” A voice shouted from the back, “Lorraine, give it to the food bank!” Another voice said, “And name it for you!” I said, “Heavens, no. Name it for my mother.” The crowd roared. Candles waved in the dark. I stood on the courthouse steps and laughed until I had to wipe my eyes.
Shelly came to the house the next morning, as I knew she would. She sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in a blanket, with her hair in a rubber band, and she told me everything. A gambling habit that had started with scratch tickets and ended with a loan shark in Indianapolis. A husband who had left. A son at college she could not afford to keep there. I listened to her for two hours. When she finished, I put a cup of tea in front of her and said, “Honey, I will pay the loan. All of it. And you will pay me back, but not in money. In time.”
I reopened my shop. It had been closed for two years. I painted the door and polished the mirror and hung my old sign, and I put a second chair in the window for my daughter. Shelly learned to cut hair that spring, at fifty. She was clumsy. She was nervous. Her first customer, an old man named Alvin who had been coming to my shop since 1978, held perfectly still for forty minutes while she snipped his gray fringe, and when she finished, he turned his head side to side in the mirror. “Shelly,” he said, “you have the hands of your mother.”
She wept. She also laughed. I stood behind her chair with a broom, and I watched her face in the glass, and I saw the little girl in the pink snowsuit looking back at me. We cut hair together for six more years. Every Saturday, a free haircut for any veteran. Every Tuesday, a free one for any man who has lost his job. And on the wall, in a small frame, a line from the newspaper account of the vigil, which Shelly cut out and hung herself. It read, Lorraine Mitchell, Beloved Bloomington Barber, Alive and Well. It is the best review I ever got.
