*
She did not answer him there. She looked around the shop—at Odell, who had known her since she was in pigtails and had once let her win at checkers eleven times in a row; at Big Ray, at Quentin, at the half-faded boy in her father’s chair, at all those men who loved her father and who would, she knew, carry whatever she said out onto Pennsylvania Avenue before the streetlights came on—and Leon watched her decide that she would not say it in front of them. He watched her decide the way he had watched her mother decide things, a small hardening at the corners of the mouth, a lift of the chin.
He understood. He nodded once to Quentin, who nodded back and stepped over to Leon’s chair without a word, picking up Leon’s clippers as if they were his own, and said something low and easy to the boy in the chair that made him laugh. Leon put a hand on Jayden’s head. The boy’s hair needed cutting. It always needed cutting; Leon cut it every other Saturday and it grew like it had somewhere to be.
“Sit with Mr. Odell,” he said—the first words he had spoken that were not a question or an accusation—and Jayden, who was afraid of almost nothing but was a little afraid of Mr. Odell, went and sat on the bench beside the old man, who reached into his jacket and produced, as he had for three generations of children in that shop, a butterscotch candy in yellow cellophane.
Then Leon walked through the curtain into the back room, and Tasha followed.
The back room of Carter’s Chair was nine feet by twelve and held everything the front room was too proud to show. A deep porcelain sink with a rust stain shaped like the state of Ohio. A coffee maker that had outlived two presidents. Stacked white towels, a case of talc, a mop in a yellow bucket. A calendar from Haddad’s Hardware that still said March 2019, because nobody had wanted to be the one to throw away the picture of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at sunrise. On the wall above the sink hung a framed photograph of Ezekiel Booker, who had owned the shop before Leon, standing in front of it in 1972 in a white barber’s smock and a hat cocked like he knew a secret. A single bulb on a pull chain. One folding chair.
Leon did not sit. Tasha did not either. She set her shoe down on the counter beside the coffee maker as if she’d forgotten she was holding it, and then she pushed her hands into the pockets of the camel coat, and Leon saw that the right one was closed around something.