I have been doing hair since I was nineteen years old.
Not because I fell into it.
Because I chose it.
People assume hair is something you do when you could not do something else, and I have spent twenty-seven years gently correcting this assumption with every haircut, every color, every consultation where I look at a person’s face and understand something about what they need before they have the words for it.
Hair is not what it appears to be.
Hair is trust.
When someone sits in your chair, they give you something.
They give you their reflection.
They give you the back of their head, which is the part of themselves they cannot see, the part they must trust entirely to someone else.
They give you their time and their proximity and the strange intimacy of hands in their hair.
And they give you their words.
Because there is something about the chair, about the angle of it, about looking at yourself in the mirror while someone works around you, that loosens people.
They say things to their stylist they would not say to their therapist.
They say things they have not said to anyone.
I have heard confessions in that chair that would stop your breathing.
I have heard grief and joy and the specific working-through that people do when they are trying to understand their own lives and they need to say it out loud to someone who is not going to repeat it.
I keep what I hear.
I always have.
I have kept it for twenty-seven years.
Until Ashley.
Ashley I had to write down.
My name is Carol Ann Reese, and for twenty-six years I have also been Carol Ann Eckert, which is the name I took when I married Dale Eckert in the summer between my twenty-second and twenty-third years, in a small church in Warner Robins, Georgia, with forty-three people present and a cake my aunt made and shoes that hurt my feet from the second hour forward.
I married Dale because I loved him.
I want to say that first.
I loved him.
I loved the specific version of him that existed before the business expanded and the money started coming in and the version of Dale that the money produced.
The early Dale.
The Dale who used to come into the salon before I had my own chair, when I was still working for someone else, and bring me coffee at eleven in the morning because he knew I had been on my feet since eight.
The Dale who drove three hours to my mother’s house every month because she was alone and he thought it was important.
The Dale who once held me in the parking lot of a grocery store for twenty minutes because I had gotten news about a friend that made me unable to stand right.
