Six Weeks Out

2Six Weeks Out

Tell me about the mistake.

It wasn’t a big one.

You’ve said that twice now.

Because it wasn’t. I used the wrong material. I had the right one nine feet away and I used what was already in the truck because I was running behind. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

And nobody else would know the difference.

No.

Has anyone said anything? A client, the girl who works for you —

Nobody’s said anything. Nobody’s going to say anything. That isn’t what this is.

And it’s still with you.

It’s Thursday.

Then we’ll leave it there. Four weeks?

Four weeks.

There was thirty feet of it still in the truck.

The tarp had come loose at the corner overnight, the way it does, so I stood in my own driveway at twenty of eight squaring a tarp over thirty feet of coated chain, and then I hooked it down and put my bag in and drove to work.

Saturday is the only day I open at eight, and I open at eight because of a woman named Lorna Pacheco, who in 2016 asked me if I could ever do earlier, and I said sure.

That’s how everything at the shop got decided. Somebody asked once.

The blue chairs, the second shampoo bowl, the fact that we close at two on the last Friday of the month — all of it is one person asking one time and nobody ever revisiting it. If you came in tomorrow and asked me why we don’t take cards under fifteen dollars I could not tell you. There was a reason. It was 2014.

Lorna was on the sidewalk at ten of, which she always is, holding her own coffee, which she always does, because she does not like the coffee from the place next to us and has told me so approximately four hundred times without ever once suggesting I do anything about it. Lorna does not want the world fixed. Lorna wants the world noted.

“Your sign’s crooked.”

“It’s been crooked.”

“I know it has.”

She retired out of the school district four years ago, twenty-eight years in the front office at an elementary school on the windward side. Three decades of being the person who knows which kid is lying and which parent is going to be a problem, and then one day they gave her a cake and she went home.

Her sister moved in with her in May.

I got about ninety seconds of weather before it came out — the drive, the rain over the pali, a thing about her neighbor’s dog — and then a pause with a shape to it, and then:

“She’s rearranged the spice cabinet.”

“Uh oh.”

“Alphabetical.”

“That’s not a system,” I said. “That’s a hostage situation.”

“Thank you.”

Ninety minutes. Root touch-up, level five, a hair warmer than her natural because at sixty-three she has decided she is done being ashy, and she is correct. I have had this same conversation with maybe thirty women. Nobody wants to hear that they are going warmer. Everybody wants to go warmer.

By nine-fifteen I knew the sister’s whole marriage, the terms of the arrangement, what the arrangement was actually about, and the exact sentence Lorna had rehearsed in the car and not said. I said mm. I said she’s not going to hear that. I said it twice, because she needed to hear it twice, and the second time she said “I know” in a way that meant she had just decided something.

“Six weeks?” Bree said, from the desk.

“Six weeks,” Lorna said, like she was being sentenced to it.

Six weeks isn’t a number I picked. Six weeks is when the line at the part gets to a place you can see from four feet away in bad light. Under five and you’re spending money for no reason. Over eight and you’re not maintaining anything, you’re doing it again.

There are heads it isn’t true for. I book those closer and don’t make a thing out of it.

Bree says it maybe forty times on a Saturday. Six weeks for Jonathan. She has said it so many times that she has started saying it to people at parties, to her landlord, once — she swears — in her sleep.

Nine forty-five was Rochelle Kaneshiro, who is doing her bathroom.

Rochelle has been doing her bathroom since February. I know the tile. I know the two tiles it came down to and I know which one her husband wanted and I know, because she told me in April and has not brought it up since, that she is going to resent the winning tile for the rest of her life.

“We finally got somebody,” she said.

“Good.”

“Third guy. First guy ghosted, second guy quoted us a number I’m not going to say out loud in public.”

“Say it quiet.”

She said it quiet. It was a good number to be angry about.

That is the fourth time I have heard that number this year, and it has gone up every time.

“And we almost went with Dane Kalauli, because everybody says he’s fast —“

“Mm.”

“— and then Momma Fumiko goes, no. No. And I go what, and she goes, you don’t know? And I go know what. And she tells me the whole thing with the ex-wife.” She turned her head. I let her, because you can’t stop them and it’s better to just re-square them after. “It went to court and it went away. It didn’t go away because nothing happened. It went away.”

“Huh.”

“So.” She squared herself back up without being asked. “Third guy.”

“What’s the third guy’s name?”

“Sonny something. Portuguese. He’s slow but he shows up.”

“Slow and shows up is the whole thing,” I said. “Anybody can be fast. Fast is easy. Show me the tile again.”

She showed me the tile again. It was the husband’s tile. It’s a good tile, and it will be a good tile in her house for twenty years, and she is never going to forgive it.

At a quarter of eleven I went out to the lot for a box of foil and put my hand flat on the tarp on the way back in. It did nothing whatsoever for the tarp.

Eleven was a trim and gloss on Val Okamura, who teaches fourth grade in Wahiawā and has the settled calm of a woman who has run a great many fire drills.

Her daughter’s in nursing school, sharing a two-bedroom off Kam with another girl and a cat nobody will admit to owning.

“So my weekend is boxes,” she said. “Probably. Half that building’s picking up, and nobody’s even raised the rent.”

“Why’s everybody leaving?”

“Landlord died.” She said it to the mirror, evenly. “You maybe heard. The one they found out by Mokulēʻia — that was him. Sabado. It was his building.”

“Huh.”

“Thirty years he had it.” She watched my hands for a second. “My daughter isn’t sad. I’ll say that much and that’s all I’m going to say.”

She said the rest of it at the dryer, forty minutes later, quieter, the way the second half always comes — the keys, and a kitchen cabinet, and a list the girls kept taped inside the cabinet door, going back years. Her daughter thought it was a joke her first week in the building. It wasn’t a joke. It was a list, and it was kept current.

“Anyway,” Val said, at the desk. “She graduates in May.”

“She’ll be a good nurse.”

“She’ll be a great nurse.”

Eleven-fifteen was Sandra Wicklund and she wanted to tell me about a return.

She’d bought a comforter. It was the wrong size, or it was the size on the tag and not the size in the bag, she wasn’t sure which and neither was I by the end. She’d gone back to the store on a Thursday and the girl at the counter said she needed the card she’d paid with, and she had the card, but it was a different card from the same bank, and the girl called somebody, and the somebody said one thing, and then a second somebody came over and said a different thing, and in the end they gave her store credit. She does not want store credit. What is she going to buy there.

That’s it. That’s the story. It took nineteen minutes and there was no point in it and she was not building to anything.

Some people are funny. Most people aren’t. Sandra comes every eight weeks and has for six years and she is a decent woman who tips exactly eighteen percent and asks after nobody, and about a third of my week is Sandra.

So I said that’s frustrating, and I said it when she needed it and not before, and I did her layers, and they are good layers, and I took my time on the perimeter because her hair is fine at the back and it will show a bad line for two months.

You give her the same hour. Not out of charity. Because there isn’t a different hour to give.

Twelve-thirty was a woman named Amber who came in with her phone already out.

They come in with the phone already out, and nine times out of ten it’s an actress, and you can price an actress in about two seconds.

This one wasn’t an actress.

“That’s you,” I said.

“That’s me.”

“When?”

“Twenty-one. My cousin’s wedding.” She turned the phone back around and looked at it herself. They don’t usually do that. “It was August. It was so humid. I remember being mad about it the whole day.”

I can match a color off a photograph in bad light at a reception four years ago. That part’s just work — it’s warmer than she thinks and there’s a lot of gold sitting in it that came from a summer and not from a bottle, and I could get within a shade of it by Thursday.

What I can’t do is the thing she’s actually holding out to me, which is that she was twenty-one, and it was August, and she was mad about her hair all day and did not know that was the good part.

“I can get the color,” I said. “That’s not hard. I’d have to lift you first and I don’t love lifting you, because what’s on you now is doing you a favor at the front.”

“But you could.”

“I could.”

She kept looking at it.

“What can we do today?”

There it is.

We did face-framing and about an inch and a half off the bottom, which is what she came in for and did not know she came in for. Halfway through she told me she’d broken up with someone in June. Around the blow-dry she told me it had actually been more like March, and June was the second time, and the second time was the real one.

The picture is never the picture. The picture is a woman telling you she wants to be a different person by a specific date.

I did not say that. You’d never say that. You say let’s get some movement around your face and you mean the same thing and it works better.

She paid at the desk and asked Bree whether we validate parking. We don’t and never have, and Bree explained the lot on Kilani for the fourth time that week.

We ran a little long, so Bree took my two o’clock’s shampoo, and I ate half a plate lunch standing at the back counter in twelve minutes. That is either a bad habit or the reason I’ve never been late in thirteen years, depending on which of us you ask. Bree has opinions about the twelve minutes.

“You didn’t sit down.”

“I sat down.”

“You leaned.”

“Leaning’s sitting.”

“It’s really not.”

She’s going to be very good. She’s already better at some things than I am — she’s got a better hand with fine hair than I had at twenty-four, and she’s faster on a men’s cut, and I’ve told her both of those out loud, because you tell people that. What she hasn’t got is the other part, and you can’t teach the other part, and I don’t try.

Two o’clock was Michi Fernandez, who sells cars in Waipahu and is the best natural closer I’ve ever met in my life. Michi could sell you a car right now. You’d be happy about it.

She wanted three-quarters of an inch and she wanted to talk about her sales manager.

He calls her sweetheart in front of customers. He does a thing where he stands behind her chair at the desk. In March he came to the holiday party — they do it in March, because dealership — and he did something at the holiday party that took her four minutes to describe and that she described the way you describe something you’ve already told six people, which is to say smoothly, with the funny parts sanded onto it.

“So he’s got the tie off by then, right, and he’s got the tie in his hand.” She was watching herself in the mirror and not me. “And I’m over by the sandwiches, which is a corner, because they always put the food in the corner. And he goes, Michi. Michi. Like I’d called him over.”

“Mm.”

“And I’m laughing.” She said that part evenly, the way you read a number off a page. “That’s the bit I think about. I’m standing in the corner laughing for about a minute and a half, because what else is there, and then somebody came over about the raffle and he was gone, and it was fine, and I did the raffle.”

“Anybody else in that corner?”

“No. Nobody.” She thought about it for a second, which she had not done in the previous four minutes. “One of the finance girls was at the bar. She’d have been looking the other way.”

I asked her who she’d told.

“HR. Which is Gary. Gary’s known him since high school.”

“Right.”

“Gary told him I came in.”

“And?”

“And he was very nice to me for a week.”

“So.”

“So.”

“He’s got two more years and then he’s out and then it’s my floor,” she said. “Two years.”

“Two years is a long time to be in a bad room.”

“It’s a great room. It’s a bad guy.”

She’s not wrong about the two years. She’ll get the floor. She’s the best one there and everybody including him knows it, which is most of the problem.

I took three-quarters of an inch and I gave her a little more shape through the back than she asked for, because she has a Monday. She looked at herself and said “oh, that’s mean,” which is the highest compliment in this building, and she tipped like a person who is going to run the place in two years.

She stood outside the window for a while afterward with her back to us, on the phone, doing the thing where you hold your free hand out flat and move it while you talk, and whoever it was, they were getting the version she uses on people who are wasting her time.

Four more after her and then the four-thirty, and then it was ten of six and the light was gone and Bree was doing the mirrors with the blue stuff and singing along to a song she doesn’t know the words to, confidently.

I did the shears. Apart, alcohol, dry, oil, back together.

The transfer station takes metal. Free, any condition, and a man in a vest who has never once looked at what anybody was carrying.

They close at three on Saturday and they’re shut Sunday, and Monday I’ve got a ten, an eleven-thirty and a one, and the round trip is fifty minutes.

I sat in the truck outside the shop and worked it through twice and got the same answer both times. There’s no good morning this week and you do it anyway and lose the fifty.

I’ve had that answer since Wednesday.

I turned the key and went home.

The note was on the counter under the bowl where the mail goes.

happy anniversary. 11. i already told your mother so don’t act surprised when she calls

lānai guy tuesday 8 to 12

don’t move the hose, he’ll move the hose

there’s rice

There was rice.