9781618857569GettingitAllStorm Read Free Page B

the smooth, silky
fibers.
    Matt glanced out the
dusty front window of the shop office, almost completely obscured with whatever
posters of local events he had been talked into displaying. He looked closer.
Some of them were years out of date.
    Cleaning a circle of
the glass with a grungy rag, he noticed what a great looking day it was
outside. He hadn’t noticed when he came to work. He hardly ever noticed the
scenery or the weather much anymore. But today suddenly
looked great.
    Maybe he could afford
to take a little break. Get outside for a while and take a little walk, maybe a
drive. Check in with Leo at his barber shop. Hell, he hadn’t had a decent
barbershop shave in a coon’s age.
    Yeah, that was what he
needed.
    A
decent shave.
     
    * * * *
     
    “Leo,
do you think my hair’s getting thin?”
    Matt
stared at his reflection in the wall-sized mirror of the barbershop as the
proprietor, Elias “Leo” Brubaker, clipped away at his customer’s full crown of
chestnut waves. He had just had Leo’s special—a close straightedge razor shave
that made his jaw feel like a baby’s butt…encased in silky microfiber. Like his
ass. Then he had moved on to his regular twice-monthly trim.
    “Buddy’s
been messing with your head again, huh?” came the droll reply.
    “No.
Well, maybe he did mention I might be starting to get a little thin on top.”
    “Huh.
Buddy’s the one that’s always been a little thin on top,” Leo chuckled. “If
that’s the best he can do, no wonder you’re still not dating.”
    “Jeez,
Leo, is that the only thing people in this town have to gossip about? ‘When is
that poor, sad widower going to get his life back together and start going
out?’ You’d think we’d have more important things to concern ourselves with. As
a matter of fact, the town does have more important things to think about.”
    “Yeah, heard about that speech of yours. Seems like you took everybody in
town to task for not paying enough attention to our kids’ sex education.”
    “I’m
thinking about resigning from the board. It appears the poor ole widower with
no kids is the dumbest one of all as far as keeping up with what’s happening on
high school hayrides these days.”
    “Yeah. Heard you might be quitting.”
    “What?
How could—”
    “Buddy
told that kid, Archie, that hangs around your shop, who told his brother-in-law
who’s got a kid in high school who knows that kid that works in the library who
runs the town blog—”
    “But
I just mentioned it to Buddy this morning…”
    “Used
to have to at least go through a buncha wires,” Leo
mused. “Now just shoots through the air.” He nodded toward his smart phone,
lying on the counter. “Still can’t quite figure how all that works. That’s sure
changed, for sure, but the hayride thing, that’s pretty much the same as it’s
always been.” The older man took a moment to adjust his glasses and make an
assessment of how the haircut was progressing. “We just don’t put the fear of
God into the kids like my old man used to do with me and my brothers. We might
not have had all our facts straight, but we sure knew the consequences if
something went wrong. Mess up and we’d pay dearly right in front of the whole
town. In those days it sure wasn’t a one-way street.”
    He
mused for a moment. “’Course that was before we started
getting so fancy, so up-scale. Or at least the housing
part of this town.” He glanced outside the barbershop’s large front
window, taking in the still-to-recover Main Street business district. “Scale
the economics up and sometimes it seems like you scale the values down.”
    Matt
checked the back of his head in the hand mirror Leo held behind him. “Oh, I
don’t know. The more you think you’ve got to lose, sometimes the more you find
yourself focused on the wrong things.” Or not focused at all, he thought to
himself. Sometimes you just start to let things slide.
    Leo
began buzzing the electric clipper