Once upon a time, James had harbored aspirations.

He’d barely been able to form his own cohesive thoughts when his father introduced him to his first love; his barbershop. Back then, she’d been prettier. Many of his days were spent bouncing on the vinyl seats that at one point were shiny red but were now cracked, its stuffing shaped guts seeping out through tears in the fabric. He couldn’t bear to have them replaced, though he’d long since gotten rid of the chair his father used to cut his hair. He wouldn’t admit it, but even that was only in part to a broken spring that prevented it from rising off of the floor. 

He’d poured countless hours into revitalizing the luster he knew the shop still had, though both his mother and Shanice were sure that he was just beating a dead horse. It wasn’t as simple as just letting it go, putting down the clippers and selling it off; a lifetime and a half was spent raising the place into something worthy. Too many hours learning and perfecting the tricks of the trade, too many nights spent balancing books that would never come out even, too many hours spent away from home to build up something that he wanted his own kids to be able to fall back on, just in case. His father had done it for him, and now it was his turn; he couldn’t simply let it go to waste.

It was only as he sat hunched over in his own styling chair, pouring over options for florists in the Yellow Pages for his only daughter’s funeral that he considered that maybe something had been wasted after all.

There was a crick in his neck and his eyes were beginning to blur the lines of black print together. When the tiny bell above the front door rang to signal the entry of a customer, he all but jumped up to greet them.

It was a young face, one that he hadn’t seen since Patience’s highschool days. Their eyes met for a split second, and in the same moment Darius nearly turned on his heel and walked right back out, but James had already recognized him and waved him over to his newly empty chair. Had he not been in such a sour mood, he might’ve laughed; he had never been outright rude to Darius, but he had never been too kind either. Just how Shanice’s daddy had been towards him when they met.

Jerking his chin towards the chair, James whipped the barber cape off the back. “What’s goin’ on, son? I ain’t seen you in here before.”

He hummed, hoisting his pants up by the belt loops before taking a seat.

James found himself wondering if kids wore belts anymore; his mama would’ve whooped him with the phone cord, then made him use it to tie his pants up around his waist afterwards had she seen him walking around the house like that. Let alone in public for anyone, including her church friends, to see.

“Yeah, I usually go to the one around the corner but they ain’t open so I thought I could try here. I ain’t know you worked here.”

James snorted, looping a white strip underneath Darius’s chin before tying it around his neck. “I do more than just work here, son, I own it. Whatchu come in for today?”

He watched Darius’s gaze sweep the floor, eyeing the fallen clumps of coarse hair from the previous client. He could feel him hesitating, the bounce in his leg indicating that he was about to get up and leave. James all but snorted. Men were more loyal to their barbers than they were to their wives. His hand was on his shoulder before he even realized he’d moved, holding the young man in place.  

“Relax, brotha’ man, don’t nobody give a cut like me. I gotchu.” He couldn’t let him leave before he had the chance to ask him about Patience, but in order to do that he had to figure out exactly what it was that he wanted to ask. He listened attentively as he would with any other customer as Darius explained to him, still quite unsure, the design that he wanted shaved into the side of his head and how low was too low for the fade. Before he got started, he assured his daughter’s murderer once more that he delivered the best cuts in Saint Louis. Darius settled back into the cracked leather seat with a nod, his thumb worrying at the hem of his jeans.

As he switched the guard on his clippers, her father couldn’t help but examine the young man in the mirror. He wondered how he was able to do something as mundane as a haircut when James was almost sure that news of her death had reached him. As far as he knew, their relationship ended on cordial terms. Then again, Patience had never volunteered up much information about the boy, and James never expected her to – he was, after all, her father; talking about boys was something she should’ve been doing with Shanice.

Still, it didn’t sit right with him how he hadn’t seen Darius once during the three-month period that Patience had been lost. He knew that more often than not, little boys took the shape of their fathers, the first hero that was known to them. His own father himself was living proof of that. The problem arose when that father wasn’t something that should’ve been modeled.

James could see it in the cut of his jaw, in the crooked set of his flat nose. It was as if it had been broken more than a few times, but he knew that to young women who were looking for a man with rougher edges, that was probably a calling card. His eyes were the darkest shade of brown that they could be before they would need to be relabeled as black, and as they stared back at him in the mirror, James felt a rising sense of concern.

Boy look just like his daddy, her father thought as the clippers ate away at the excess of dry hair, brushing away the clumps unconsciously. It was a phrase that Darius had no doubt been hearing since he was old enough to look like anything. He considered that maybe she hadn’t spoken of him for a reason. Darius’s similarities to his father could’ve gone much deeper than the skin for all he knew. James had only met the man once, but that had been enough.

That evening, they were the only two customers at Blue’s Corner, which somehow made the entirety of the situation more surreal to him.

. James had awoken in the middle of the night with the notion that someone had taken a hammer to his temples, and after five minutes that felt like hours, he rolled out of bed with all the grace of a drunken kitten. His feet shuffled against the carpet until they found his slides tucked underneath the bed, fumbling for longer than he would ever admit. His wife remained still on the other side of the bed save for the gentle rising and falling of her chest, her lips slightly parted. His brain felt as if it flipped within his skull when he leaned over to kiss her, and he tried his best to rise from the bed without unsettling the entire mattress.

The night air was no cooler than it had been during the day and was somehow thicker with humidity, so all his concentration was on breathing steadily. Although it was well past midnight, it was also summer and he was in no way the only one out; his neighbors sat on their porches, raising their beers and cups full to the rim with soda at him when he passed. He hurried along after offering the shortest greeting he could without appearing rude.

The little bell above the entrance announced his entry, and just a few feet away, the tiny woman behind the security glass looked up, squinting at him through a curtain of fine, obsidian hair.

“How you doin’, Frida,” He greeted, giving her a small nod. She returned it and then he might as well have not been there at all, her gaze sinking back to the book that rested in her lap.

It had taken him nearly three years of living in the same house, coming at the same time almost every night for an Arizona Sweet Tea and a bag of cheese puffs to convince the older Asian woman that although he came under the cover of night, it wasn’t to steal. He enjoyed the fruit of his efforts when he didn’t feel her eyes glued to the back of his head as he moved further into the cramped store, his feet carrying him towards the cold medicine aisle. His hand was closed around a bottle of Tylenol, his eyes narrowed into slits to protect himself from the harsh fluorescent lights when he heard a fleshy thwack. Content to mind his own business, James hadn’t even bothered with coming up with his own explanation for the noise. All he wanted was to get home.

The moment he saw Langston’s broad form taking up the entirety of the security glass, he knew it wouldn’t be that simple. He didn’t have to know what the commotion was about; all he knew was that Frida had backed away from the glass as if she expected him to break it, which wasn’t far out of the realm of possibilities.

“Ay man, will you knock all that shit off? Just pay for your shit and get out, I’m tryna get out of here,” The words were out of his mouth, offering himself up for a fight that he had no wherewithal to follow through on before he could stop himself.

Langston Pipa was the type of man that the police looked for when they turned onto any of the dirtier, pothole riddled streets that marked the transition from the cleaner, tourist friendly side of Saint Louis into the decaying, graffitied inner city; his umber skin, decorated with knotted scar tissue was what attracted their attention, and his nasty attitude regardless of what he was doing was what kept it.

“And whatchu gon’ do if I don’t, bitch?”

James bristled, his fist tightening around the bottle of painkillers. It felt as if ice picks were being deliberately stabbed over and over into the most sensitive parts of his brain. “Stop acting like a fuckin’ child and leave. You think she ain’t called the police already? You don’t wanna be here when they get here. They probably got yo’ information at the ready at the police department, won’t take long to throw yo’ ass in a cell again.”

It was an empty threat – even if she had, the police wouldn’t arrive until well after Langston after had done whatever damage he planned to do and was long gone. They didn’t care what happened within the city unless someone was killed, and even then, it was a gamble. Even so, the man had sneered and stalked out of the front door, throwing it open so roughly James was surprised it didn’t shatter.

Once in person up close had been enough for James, but he would continue to hear more about the man over the years through his wife, none of it good.

He couldn’t decide if the same aggression rested beneath Darius’s skin, if he had infected his daughter the way Langston infected his wife.

“All done,” James said without hearing himself, handing Darius a mirror before sweeping the clipped hairs from his shoulders.

He watched the usual sequence play out. First, there was the skeptical twist and turn of the mirror to view the cut from every angle. The over examination was designed to locate even a single line of blood or patch of hair that was thinner the rest around it. Then, the nod. The slow, satisfied look that always crossed his clients’ faces.

“What I say? Didn’t I say I gotchu?”

Darius allowed himself a laugh, rubbing a hand over the back of his freshly shaved head. “Aight aight, you might’a did something here. How much I owe you?”

Freeing Darius of the cape, James gave his shoulders one more good sweep and tore the white strip from around his throat.

“Don’t worry about that, it’s on the house in exchange for some information. ” It suddenly became hard to swallow, so he busied himself with cleaning up his station. Crying in private was enough; to have another man see him break was too much, even if it was a boy who was barely a man. “I don’t even really know how to say it, so imma just come out with it. I know ya’ll broke up last year, but you talked to Patience anytime recently? Did you know why she was in Chicago?”

It was in the way that he was suddenly in a hurry to go. It was in the way that he seemed to have to compose himself before speaking, the practiced nature of it rubbing against her father’s skin like sandpaper.

“Nah man, after we broke up, she ain’t want nothing to do with me. But I am sorry for your loss.” He fished a roll of bills out of his pocket, thrusting a twenty-dollar bill into James’ hand before making some excuse to leave that went through one ear and out the other. He barely had the time to extend an offer to attend her funeral before he had one foot out of the propped open door, and the irresolute nature of his answer only left him more conflicted. The only other barber in the building ribbed him about it as they cleaned the shop at the end of the day, jokingly asking if he had said something to scare the boy.

James shrugged it off and laughed right along with him, but the feeling of unease he had before had only intensified. It hovered around the edges of his consciousness, darting just out of sight when he tried to look directly at it.

Next Chapter: 25