I put on a clean shirt and 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 little camera on the shelf above the mirror, the one I put up years ago after a break-in.
Because that new owner who bought the place to flip it, who does not know a razor from a rake, never once thought to ask whether there was 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 light, there was the kid he keeps on the broom, the one who works the till while I am at lunch, helping himself when he thought the shop was empty.
I made a copy and slipped it in my pocket, and I waited for the little gathering on Friday, because folks I have cut for a lifetime were coming, and it was the right place to set things straight.
When the new owner stood up, oily as ever, to say a few words, I stood too and asked if the room would care to see something.
I played it. The kid. The till. The date on the screen. And the whole shop watched the man understand what he had done.
He turned red, then white. He had run a twenty-seven-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. A man I gave free cuts to when he was out of work, years back, had done well for himself since. He bought the building out from under that owner the next week and leased it back to me for a dollar a year, and 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 has hung most of my life. The boy paid back what he took.
I thought a long while, that first dark night, about just signing the paper and going quiet. That is what a man like that counts on, that an old worker is too tired or too proud or too afraid to fight, and will slink off and let the lie stand. I nearly did. I am glad I did not. A name is the one thing you carry your whole life, and I was not going to hand mine to a stranger over a thing I never did.
Twenty-seven years I cut this town hair through three recessions, and a stranger tried to take my name over a short drawer. The town would not have it. I am still there, on that corner, and I always will be.