Chapter 4: What the Mirror Showed
Tessa settled the cape around George's shoulders and tucked the tissue neat against his collar.
"You run a tight ship for a woman they tried to throw out of her own chair," George said.
"I was not thrown out yet," Tessa said. "Regina is still working on the paperwork."
Tessa sectioned his hair with two clean clips. It was silver and soft, thinner at the crown, and under the surgical light she could see every place a careless cut would show. "How short, Mr. Alden?"
"George," he said. "Mr. Alden makes me look over my shoulder for my father. Short enough to look employable, please. Long enough not to look desperate."
"Employable but not desperate," she said. She lifted her shears. "Head down just a touch for me?"
He tipped his chin. Beneath the cape, his hands trembled faintly on his knees.
"You are nervous," she said quietly.
"I have an interview at four," he said. "I practiced my answers this morning like a schoolboy. Can I stay awake all night?"
"Can you?"
"I have had fourteen months of practice not sleeping," he said, and then, as if he had said more than he meant to, he added, "Grief keeps irregular hours, Miss Boyd."
"Tessa," she said. "And I am sorry for your loss."
"You did not know her," he said gently. "But thank you. She would have liked your hands. Who taught you?"
"My mother, in Cleveland. She cut hair at our kitchen table for thirty years and charged what people could pay."
Tessa worked around his right ear, combing down, cutting small. "She used to say a haircut is the one thing a poor person can still hold up in public. You can lose the job and the apartment, but if your hair is right, you walk out holding something."
"Every head held high," George murmured.
She paused. "What was that?"
"Something my wife used to say." His eyes met hers in the mirror. "You cut left handed for the detail work. I noticed."
"Guilty. Does it bother you?"
"Not a bit. I cut hair a lifetime ago, in another version of this city. I was told to switch mine, too."
"Wait," she said. "You were a barber?"
"A stylist, if my wife was asked. A barber, if the landlord was asking and rent was due." He chuckled, a low, real sound. "We had a little shop, two chairs, a bell over the door. She was the talent. I swept and learned."
"And now you want a porter job," Tessa said. "That is a long road from two chairs."
"All roads are long at seventy nine, Tessa."
She moved to the left side and frowned. The hair above his ear lay stubborn, growing against the grain, and her angle kept fighting it. She adjusted once, twice.
"May I?" George asked.
"May you what?"
He lifted one hand from beneath the cape, slowly. "Your shears want to come from underneath there. Like this. Small turn of the wrist, nothing grand."
He did not touch her hand. He turned his own in the air beside her elbow, a small, precise rotation, and the certainty in fingers that trembled at rest settled her.
She tried it. The section fell clean.
"Oh," she said. "That is, okay, that is annoying. How long have you been sitting on that?"
"Fifty odd years," he said mildly. "You would have found it yourself. I only saved you the frown."
"You really did do this," she said.
"I really did. And you really do. Do not let anyone in this beautiful, cold room tell you otherwise."
Something loosened in her chest then. She worked the way her mother had taught her, unhurried inside the hurry, shaping the back, softening the line at his neck, checking the balance in the mirror. The floor went quiet around them, or she stopped hearing it.
When she brushed the loose hair from his collar, her hands were completely steady.
"Well," she said, and turned the chair so he faced the mirror full on. "George. Meet the man they are going to hire at three o'clock."
He did not answer right away. He leaned forward a fraction, his clear gray eyes moving over the reflection the way a man reads a letter from a house he used to live in. He simply looked, at the clean line, at the silver combed back neat, at himself, put together again in Chair One.
"She always said the mirror does not show you the haircut," he said at last, very quietly. "It shows you whether you were treated like a person while you got it."
"And?" Tessa asked.
He smiled then, and it reached all the way up. "Tessa Boyd, this is the finest work anyone has done on this head in a very long time."