Part 3 — The Second Owner
Brandi did not pick up the gold scissors. She stood very still with her hands at her sides while the whole room waited, and when she finally spoke it was in the small voice she used at nine years old, the day she broke my good hand mirror. “Read it again,” she whispered.
The man from City Hall read it again, slowly, so the photographer could hear every word. “The second owner of Klepper Quick Cash is Brandi, daughter of the named owner. The manager who ran the store day to day gave his name as Cole. Every loan agreement carries the signature of Joanne Klepper, and every one of those signatures was written by the same hand.” He looked at me over the folder. “Mrs. Klepper, I believe that hand is not yours.”
I looked at my daughter, and then at Cole, who was edging toward the front door with his phone in his hand. “The week after the funeral of your father, you brought me a binder,” I said. “You asked me to sign permit forms, and you copied my license and my Social Security card at the library. You told me it was for the salon.” Brandi did not deny one word of it. The tears on her face were real, but they were the tears of a person who has run out of room.
Cole tried the door anyway. A uniformed officer of the city, who had been standing behind the pimento cheese table the whole time, stepped into the doorway and held out one hand. Nobody shouted. The wife of the mayor quietly moved her purse to the other arm, and the photographer, to his credit, lowered his camera and let the moment be what it was.
The man from City Hall explained everything in plain language, the way a good clerk does. A business license is a public record, he said, and a license obtained with a stolen identity is void from the first day. The state could freeze the bank account of the storefront in Muscle Shoals, review each of the eighteen complaints, and order that every dollar charged above the lawful rate be returned to the people who had paid it. The woman who lost her house would be first in line.
“And the salon?” Brandi asked, barely above a whisper. He turned a page. “The salon is a different matter. Every charge on it was paid by Mrs. Klepper, and a receipt in the name of the payer is the best proof of an owner there is. I will recommend that the license be reissued in her name, with her receipts attached.” He handed back the box of perm rods. “Keep these, Mrs. Klepper. A good record is the best tool a person can own.”
Cole left in the back of a patrol car, and the lifted Ram with the pawn shop sticker on the bumper was towed from Court Street that same afternoon. It turned out the truck had been bought with the interest of the first six months. The state would sell it, and the money would go back to the customers of the title loan shop, one envelope at a time.
Brandi sat down in one of the Belvedere chairs I had paid for and put her face in her hands. “Mama, I did not think it would hurt anybody.” “Eighteen people,” I said. “One of them lost her house.” She cried then in a way she had never cried for a photographer. “I will say it to every one of them,” she said. “I will pay it back, every dollar, even if it takes the rest of my life.”
In the end she kept that promise better than I expected. The judge heard the case in the spring. Brandi pleaded guilty to a lesser count, and the court ordered probation, full repayment to the eighteen customers, and a year of public service. Because I asked for it, part of that service was served at my shop on Court Street, where my daughter would be an employee with a paycheck, a lunch break and a name tag, and no gold scissors at all.
The sign over the window changed on a Saturday in July. It said Klepper Hair Studio in plain white letters, and under it, smaller, Since 1981. Half the brides from my church came to watch the painter work, and Mrs. Eleanor Pruitt, who had her pin curls from me the week of her wedding, cried into a pimento cheese sandwich and said it was about time.
A receipt kept in order is a quiet thing, but it carries more weight in a room than a gold pair of scissors. I thought about that on the first Monday, when I hung my own smock on the hook by the first chair instead of the shampoo bowl.
Brandi worked the bowl that morning in the old smock, and she rinsed a blue rinse for a lady who has been coming to me for thirty years. “Joanne, you still have the touch,” the lady said, and my daughter smiled at the floor. I picked up my comb. The sun came through the front window onto the chairs I had bought, and for the first time in a year, nobody asked where else I was going to go.