…and the first thing I saw, past the balloons and the DJ, was Eula Mae Pritchett standing in the middle of all that noise, crying, with a photograph clutched in her hand.
Her Harold passed in the night. Fifty-one years they were married. And the only barbershop she’d ever known was this one, so she’d come here at nine in the morning to ask somebody to make her husband look like himself for the viewing tomorrow — the way I’ve quietly done for this town’s men for forty-one years, down at the funeral home, so a family’s last look is the right one.
The young couple hadn’t known what to do with her. You could see it. “Craft cocktails and fades” has no answer for a weeping widow and a dead man who needs to look like the husband she married.
She saw me and just about fell into my arms.
I set my bag down. I told the young folks, “Excuse me — I’ve got somewhere to be,” and I walked Eula Mae out that front door and drove her to the funeral home and did for Harold what I’ve done a hundred times. Parted it on the left, where he liked it. Trimmed the eyebrows he never could keep down. Made him look, one last time, like the man half this county shook hands with.
The old-timers followed me out of that grand opening. So did a lot of folks who suddenly remembered what a barber is actually for.
I’ve got a little chair set up in the back of Dooley’s hardware now. It stays full. Some things aren’t a vibe, sweetheart. Some things are a trust.
She thought a barber was a haircut and a younger energy — never once knowing that for forty-one years I’d been the man who made sure this town looked like itself at its weddings and, gentler still, in its caskets.