I drove down to that shop before it opened, and I let myself in with the key I still had, and I went straight to the shelf above the mirror where the little camera sits, the one I put up myself years back after a break-in.
Because that boy who bought the shop to flip it, who does not know a razor from a rake, never once thought to ask about a camera. He did not even know it was there.
It looks right down on the register, and when I pulled the recording from that Saturday the drawer came up short, there was the kid he keeps on the broom, helping himself to the till when he thought the shop was empty, the very boy the new owner never bothered to check.
I made a copy and slipped it in my pocket, and I put on a clean shirt, and I waited for Friday.
The little to-do was a good one. Folks I have cut for a lifetime, some of them since they were babies in the booster chair, all come to see me off. When the new owner stood up, oily as ever, to say a few words, I stood up too and asked if the room would care to see something.
I played it. The kid. The till. The date on the screen.
The whole shop saw it. The new owner turned red and then white. He had run a thirty-year barber off in front of the town over a drawer his own broom boy emptied.
Here is the part that still makes me smile. One of the men in that chair for thirty years, a fellow I gave free cuts to when he was out of work, had done well for himself since. He bought the building out from under that boy the very next week, and he leased it back to me for a dollar a year, and he told me to cut hair in it till I drop.
So I will. My smock is back on its hook by the mirror where it hung three decades. The boy is gone. The kid paid back what he took.
The young folks coming up watched the whole thing, and I hope they learned what I learned the hard way. Keep your own records. Trust your own hands. And when someone with a title tries to make you carry the blame for what they will not even look into, do not sign a thing until the truth has had its say. The truth is slow sometimes. But it keeps.
Thirty years I cut the hair of this town, and a stranger tried to take my name over a short drawer. The town would not have it. I am still here, seven every morning, and I always will be.