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“I’m not.”
“You are.”
I watched her lips pinch in the mirror. “Okay, I’ll admit that I kind of have a crush on your hair.”
“It’s a disaster.” My last trip to a barber was months ago. I looked like a mountain man. I was single, I wasn’t dating, and I tended to let these things slide. “You should probably just shave it.”
“No!” She sounded shocked. “The color is amazing. Do you know how many natural blonds exist in real life? Not as many as you’d think. There are at least a dozen different shades in here. Almost every strand reflects in different shades of light and dark. And you never style it with heat, so it’s completely healthy. You just stick it back in a man bun and forget about it, which is a sacrilege.”
I stared at her in the mirror in shock. “You had nothing to say about the rest of me, and that’s what you have to say about myhair?”
Brit sighed and turned to pick up the scissors. “Hair is my thing, okay? Just sit still.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes as she started to work. I watched her hands, the concentration on her face. She was good at this. She’d gone to school for it, done it for years, been the best in the business, and then that asshole had brought her so low that she’d quit. He’d badmouthed her out of L.A., and instead of opening her own salon in Portland, she’d been so burned that she ended up working at The Corner. For me.
She’d gone to some trouble to push us all into letting her cut our hair—which was more work for her. She’d done it because she actually wanted to cut hair, because she missed it. Because it was something that made her happy to do.
“I have a question,” Brit said.
“Go ahead.”
She kept her gaze fixed on what she was doing. “Your sister lives in San Diego. Why didn’t you see her while we were there?”
“She was busy,” I replied.
Brit frowned. “Too busy for a cup of coffee with her brother? Too busy to come and see you in concert? Come on. No one is that busy.”
Something twisted inside my chest, the memory of very old, healed-over pain. “Elle isn’t interested in my music. She never has been. She has her own life, her own career. I didn’t expect that she’d be able to get away.”
“It still doesn’t compute,” Brit insisted as she pressed her fingers into the back of my head to tilt my chin down. “My parents upset me, and my mother sometimes makes me cry, but if she was in Portland for a day, I’d at least make time to have dinner with her. You always talk about your siblings like you love them, but you never see them.”
“I do love them,” I said. “And I never see them. It’s hard to explain.” I paused, choosing my words as she trimmed the back of my neck and I stared at my lap. “We were just kids when our parents died. I’m the oldest, and I was nine. River was only five.” I thought of my little brother, blond and sweet, just starting to lose his baby fat. He’d had night terrors for months. “When something like that happens to a child, you can’t predict how it’s going to affect them. But it does. Profoundly.”
“Okay.” Brit’s voice was soft, her touch gentle in my hair. “So instead of drawing the three of you closer, it pushed you apart.”
“Because family can leave you,” I said. “In the blink of an eye, even if they don’t want to. They can’t always stay. So you have to love people, because life is short, but you have to let them go, too. That was the first lesson the three of us ever learned.”
Brit’s hands went still, and I lifted my chin, looking at her stricken expression in the mirror. “It isn’t as sad as it sounds, Brit. I worked through all of this a long time ago, you know?”
“I guess you did.” She went back to cutting, the scissors making a soft snipping sound in the quiet of the closed salon.
“I still have family, at least,” I said. “Denver has no one. He was abandoned as a kid. Neal’s parents kicked him out of the house when he joined a band, and he never went back. Stone was raised by his mom, who was married four times. We understand each other. There were a lot of years when the band was the only family any of us had.”
“That’s actually sweet,” Brit said.
“I’m glad you think so, because all four of us are assholes. Now it’s my turn to ask a question.”
Brit put down her scissors, grabbed a bottle of some kind of hair potion, and squirted some onto her palms. The haircut was finished. From what I could see, she’d cut it short, too short to tie back but long enough for the hair to curl against my neck and behind my ears, with longer strands on top. “Okay, go ahead,” she said, working the goop through my hair.
“Why don’t you get a lawyer and sue the fuck out of your dirtbag ex?” I asked. “He owes you money, probably a lot of it. You could clean him out so bad he won’t be able to afford a grilled cheese sandwich.”
Her expression said this had occurred to her already, at least once. She shook her head. “I’m not ready for that.”
“I am,” I offered. “Let me make some calls and get a lawyer on board. You don’t have to do anything. You told me not to beat him up, so I won’t. Let me kick his ass legally and help you sue him until he bleeds.”
She was still shaking her head, so I knew she wouldn’t go for it, but she said, “You’d actually enjoy that?”
“Fuck yes, I would.” I meant it. “It would make my day. We’d stomp some money out of him, and then you could use that as startup money to open a salon in Portland. Run things the way you want to run them, without his opinions wrecking everything. You get back to doing what you love to do.”
