At a quarter to five on a Tuesday in October, the light came through the front window of Carter’s Chair the way it always did at that hour and in that season, low and copper-colored and thick with drifting specks of hair, so that every man on the waiting bench looked gilded, like somebody in a church window who had not yet been told what he was the saint of.
Leon Carter had a fade under his clippers and three more heads waiting. He was sixty-three years old, with a gray beard he kept trimmed close and square as a boxwood hedge, and he wore the same dark apron he had worn for most of the last thirty years, or one so exactly like it that nobody could have told the difference, the canvas gone soft at the chest pocket where his combs lived. His hands were steady. His hands had been steady for twenty-eight years, which was a thing he never said out loud but knew the way he knew the weight of his own clippers, the way he knew which floorboard behind his chair would complain if he shifted his weight to the left.
The shop was loud in the comfortable way. The television bolted high in the corner was showing the Orioles pregame, and nobody was watching it, because Odell Pettiford, eighty-one years old and holding court from the second chair as he had every Tuesday since the Carter administration, was explaining for the third time that week how Eddie Murray had once tipped him twenty dollars at a gas station on Liberty Heights Avenue for washing a windshield that did not need washing. Quentin, the young barber with his locs tied up in a knot and a gold tooth he swore on his grandmother was real, was lining up a teenager and arguing with him about whether a sneaker could be called vintage if it had been made after the boy was born. Big Ray was asleep on the bench under the brim of his own hat. The hot lather machine ticked as it warmed. The Barbicide jar glowed blue on the counter like a little captured piece of the sea. Somebody’s phone was playing gospel, and somebody else’s was playing something that was very much not gospel, and the two songs had worked out an uneasy truce somewhere over the middle of the room.
Tucked into the lower corner of Leon’s mirror, where it had been for four years, was a photograph of a woman in a white choir robe laughing at something outside the frame. Her name had been Loretta Mae Carter. She had been his wife for thirty-five years. The photograph had been taken on an Easter morning the spring before the diagnosis, and Leon looked at it maybe a hundred times a day without ever appearing to look at it at all.
He was tilting the boy’s head to take the line behind the left ear when the bell over the door did not so much ring as scream.
The door hit the rubber stop and bounced back. A small figure in a red hoodie came through it at a speed no one in Carter’s Chair had witnessed since Odell’s knees were young, sneakers slapping the black-and-white tile, hood fallen back off his head, chest going like a bellows. It was Jayden, Leon’s grandson, ten years old and mostly elbows, and around his neck, on a length of white kitchen string, something small and gold swung and flashed in the window light.
“Grandpa! Mom said if Dad came home early, I had to bring you this!”