put on my good dress, and drove into town to the empty little storefront two doors down from the old salon — the one that used to be the tailor’s. By noon I’d signed a one-year lease on it. One chair. My name in the window. I didn’t take a single client list with me when I left; I didn’t need to. Those women were never the salon’s. They were mine, and they’d been mine since before that girl was born.
I called nobody. I didn’t have to. There’s a woman I’ve done for eleven years who came to me all through her chemo — I’d open before dawn and lock the door so she could cry in private while I fixed the wig to look like her own hair. She heard what happened, and she is not a quiet woman. By the time I hung my shingle, my old Friday ladies had the news, and they simply came to the new door instead of the old one.
Two doors down, the “rebranded” salon sat sleek and empty, its young trendy stylists spinning in their chairs with no heads to fill them. The new owner had bought a building, some mirrors, and a name — everything except the thirty-five years of trust that had made the place worth buying.
She came to see me a month in. Stood in my little doorway and asked, almost in tears, if I’d consider coming back. I poured her a cup of coffee, because her mama raised her better than her business plan did, and I told her the truth, kindly: you can’t rebrand a thing you never understood.
I’m sixty now. One chair, my name on the glass, and every Friday full. The industry can go wherever it likes. My ladies stayed with me.