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“Good boy,” he replies. “And spend some money at Breaker’s for dinner. Hugo’s kid just had another kid.”
I snarl, shaking my head.
But I keep my damn mouth shut.
“Love you,” he says.
“Mm-hmm.”
And we hang up.
After showering, I pull on some jeans, a T-shirt, and a fresh hoodie, and leave the girls still cleaning our house as I head across the darkening street to Fletcher’s Barber Shop.
The sun is setting, the leaves sounding like paper as they blow across the pavement.
As soon as I walk in, Farrow starts chuckling from his chair.
“Fuck you,” I mumble.
That just makes him laugh more. Fletcher, a seventy-four-year-old Haitian who still wears the white barber’s coat from back in the day, drags a straight-edge up Farrow’s neck to his chin.
He lifts his gaze to me. “Haircut?”
“Do I ever want a haircut?”
I have things to do. I head past the guys sitting in the chairs along the windows and pull out a twenty. I drop it on the counter, in front of the mirror, and grab a pair of clippers to snip off a lock and call it a day.
But Farrow snaps at me, “Sit your ass down. This man works for a living.”
I drop the clippers.
He’ll tell Ciaran if I don’t stay. It was worth a try.
Fletcher continues to shave Farrow as some Nat King Cole song plays, because that’s all Samson Fletcher plays.
I gesture to the razor. “You’re gonna sterilize that before you use it on me?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Farrow mumbles.
“I know where you’ve been,”
“You don’t know everywhere I’ve been.”
“Is this a mom joke?” I chuckle, drifting to the wall of photos.
“I didn’t say it was a joke.”
Calvin and T.C. laugh along with him, and I stare up at old photos, some of them black and white, and some with the gradient color of the ’70s and ’80s.
The shop is filled with guys in all the pictures, some of them in uniforms for factory jobs, some of them in suits, andothers with boys, getting their first haircuts. The pictures capture men of all ages sitting in the same spots T.C., Constin, Luca, Anders, and Calvin sit in now, and I notice the same street outside; but in the photos, it’s lined with cars and pedestrians on their way home or off to work.
Mothers.
Families.
The town was busy back then.
I peer in closer, gazing at one from the ’80s, judging by the texture of the image. A man who looks like Farrow stands there with long hair.
