“Why are you here?” he said. “Really. Tell me the truth. If it was my son—if somebody did to Jayden’s boy what I—” He couldn’t finish. “I’d want to kill him.”
“I wanted to,” Leon said simply. “Two Tuesdays ago I’d have driven up here and done something we’d both be sorry for. My wife wrote me a letter. She said don’t come after you with my hands. She said come after you the way Zeke came after me.” He stood up and opened the clipper case on the table. Inside, in their fitted slots, lay his good clippers and his trimmers and his combs and his brushes and a folded black cape. “Zeke Booker came to my door with his hat on. I came with these. I’m a barber, son. This is what I’ve got.”
Andre stared at the clippers.
“You look like somebody slept in your head,” Leon said. “A man ought to look like somebody when he’s starting over. Turn your chair around.”
The staff let him use the outlet by the patio door. Leon shook out the black cape and snapped it around Andre’s neck and fastened it. He ran a comb through the overgrown hair once, to see what he was working with. Then he switched on the clippers, and the sound of them, that familiar steady hum, rose up over the patio, and the woman at the next table stopped crying to watch, and the young man in the gray sweatshirt watched, and the running child stopped running and came closer.
Leon cut slowly. He did not talk. He took the sides down and blended them up into the top with the patience of a man who had done ten thousand fades and had never once stopped caring whether the next one was right. He felt the younger man’s shoulders, rigid under the cape at first, begin very gradually to come down. Halfway through, Andre began to cry—silently, his head bowed so Leon could get the back, tears falling onto the black cape and beading there—and Leon kept cutting, because that was the job, because a barber’s chair is the one place in the world where a man can cry with his head down and another man will just keep working around it and never say a word.