Chapter 11: A Favor for Vivian
"She asked for you by name," Regina said, and she made it sound like an accusation.
Tessa looked up from the towels she was folding. "Who did?"
"Mrs. Castellano." Regina held the appointment book against her chest like a shield. "Vivian Castellano has been a client of this salon since before you were born, and she has never once requested a junior stylist. She requested Blair. Blair is with a color client. So now I am in the position of explaining to one of our most valuable guests why she must wait, or why she must settle."
"I can take her," Tessa said.
"That is precisely what terrifies me."
The bell over the door chimed before Tessa could answer, and Vivian Castellano swept in on a cloud of good wool and better perfume. She was seventy-two, silver-haired, straight-backed, with eyes that missed nothing.
"There you are," Vivian said, pointing her glove at Tessa. "The girl from the window chair. I watched you work last week while Blair was ruining a perfectly good blowout two stations down. You have your mother's hands, whoever your mother is."
"She was a hairdresser in Cleveland," Tessa said. "Thirty years."
"Then she taught you properly. Sit me down, dear. Regina, stop hovering. Hovering is for helicopters and mothers of teenagers."
Regina's smile tightened. "Blair will be free in forty minutes, Mrs. Castellano."
"In forty minutes I will be at lunch with my grandson, telling him about the salon that kept me waiting. Chair One, Tessa. I want the window. I like to watch the street pretend it is Paris."
Tessa settled her in Chair One and draped the cape, and Vivian studied the room in the mirror with open judgment.
"This place used to breathe," Vivian said. "Now it holds its breath. When Evelyn Alden ran this floor, there was coffee for the waiting clients and music you could hum. And the founder himself swept the sidewalk out front every morning. Every morning, Tessa. A man who owned ninety salons, sweeping his own step."
"He sounds unusual," Tessa said carefully.
"He was impossible. He charged the mayor and the mayor's driver the same price and tipped his own staff at Christmas. Then the corporation came, and the coffee went, and the music went, and men in suits started using the word synergy in a room built for scissors." She met Tessa's eyes in the mirror. "Something happened here last week. The whole street is talking about it. An old man, and a dollar, and a girl who said yes."
Tessa's hands slowed. "Word travels."
"Kindness travels. Cruelty just echoes." Vivian lifted her chin. "Wash first, dear. And do not be stingy with the massage. I am too old to pretend I come here for the haircut."
At the shampoo bowl, Vivian closed her eyes and sighed.
"Your hands are honest," she said. "Regina hates that. Regina can only sell what can be photographed."
"She runs a tight floor," Tessa said, because loyalty was a habit even when it cost her.
"She runs a frightened floor. There is a difference, and the clients can smell it." Vivian opened one eye. "Whatever they are doing to you, dear, and I can see they are doing something, do not let it make you small. This salon was built by people who believed a chair could change a person's day. Hold on to that longer than they hold on to you."
When the cut was done and the blowout gleamed, Vivian turned her head left and right like a queen testing a crown.
"Superb," she declared. At the desk, in full view of Regina, she pressed a folded bill into Tessa's hand and closed her fingers over it. "That is not a tip. That is an investment in the only honest hands in this building. Do not argue with an old woman. It is bad for your posture."
Outside, her car was brought round, and the night porter came down the Beacon Grand steps to carry her bags. He was old, with a tremor in his hands and a fresh, careful haircut, and he lifted her suitcase as gently as if it were glass.
Vivian stopped on the sidewalk.
She looked at him once, the way you look at a face in a photograph on a stranger's wall.
Then, as he set her bags down and stepped back with a small, courteous nod, she looked at him again, longer, and her gloved hand rose halfway to her mouth before she mastered it.
"Thank you," she said, in a voice suddenly and strangely gentle. "You carry them as if they mattered."
"They are yours, ma'am," the porter said. "That is reason enough."
Vivian got into her car and did not look away from him until the car pulled out into Newbury Street.