**Part 2**
After the sound of their trucks faded down the avenue, the shop went completely quiet.
The floor was covered in dark clippings, brown curls, and thick tufts of hair. My lower back was burning from standing in one spot for three straight hours without sitting down once.
I picked up the hundred-dollar bill off the glass counter and opened the drawer of my old steel cash register to put it away. As I turned back toward my station to start sweeping, I saw that the black rubber mat beside my sink was sitting at an odd angle.
Usually, my heavy clippers rest right in the center of that rubber pad, plugged into the wall outlet.
Someone had moved them. They were pushed all the way back against the backsplash, sitting on top of a thick, heavy white envelope.
The envelope was unsealed. Across the front, someone had written my name in thick black marker: *FRANK.*
I picked it up. It felt heavy, like a deck of cards or a small brick of wood. When I pulled back the flap, I did not find a greeting card.
Inside was a stack of clean, banded hundred-dollar bills, so thick I could barely wrap my fingers around it. And tucked between the banded stacks was a folded piece of yellow lined notebook paper, torn right out of a spiral binder.
My hands started trembling, worse than they had all morning. I sat down in my own barber chair, the leather creaking beneath my weight, and unfolded the paper with thumb and forefinger.
The handwriting belonged to Marcus. It was the same left-handed slant I used to see on his homework sheets when he would sit in the waiting chairs waiting for the school bus to round the corner.
The note read:
“Frank,
Between 2004 and the year my little brother graduated, we counted up the school years. Twenty-two years of opening before the sun came up. Roughly fifty kids a season.
That is at least 1,100 haircuts you never let our parents pay for.
One dollar for every haircut, multiplied by ten.
Eleven thousand dollars.
Every boy who wore a suit into your shop today pitched in what he could, and a few folks whose kids you trimmed years ago put in the rest when they heard what we were doing.
You gave us our dignity when our families did not have two nickels to rub together. You made sure we did not get made fun of on the bus. It is time to retire, Frank. Let somebody else sweep the floor.”
I counted the bills right there in the chair, one by one, because my mind refused to accept what my eyes were looking at. Exactly one hundred and ten crisp, clean hundred-dollar bills. Eleven thousand dollars in cash.
I sat in that chair for forty-five minutes without moving. The wind picked up outside, rattling the loose storm glass in the front door, while the clock on the wall ticked off the minutes. My shop rent was three hundred and fifty dollars a month, and my furnace at home had been rattling like a bucket of bolts since last winter.
I had spent the last three years wondering how I was going to pay to replace that heating unit without taking out a second mortgage on a house I had lived in for forty years.
They did not give it to me as charity. They gave it to me like a debt they had been carrying around in their pockets until they were strong enough to pay it back.
I did not go to the wedding reception that afternoon. A man my age does not belong at a party full of twenty-somethings drinking beer and dancing to loud radio music.
But on Monday morning, I walked down to the First National Bank on the corner, deposited ten thousand dollars directly into my savings account, and used the other thousand to order a brand-new heating furnace for my house.
On Tuesday, I went down to the local frame shop next to the post office. I had the girl behind the counter take that piece of yellow lined paper and set it under museum glass inside a simple, dark walnut frame.
It hangs right now on the wall directly beside my main mirror, between my state barber license from 1974 and the wooden clock that still loses three minutes every week.
Every customer who sits in my chair reads it while I tuck the paper strip into their collar.
A lot of folks around town thought that money meant I was going to put a “Closed for Good” sign in the window, pack up my clippers, and go sit on my porch in an easy chair until my joints gave out completely.
My sister called me from Ohio and told me I was out of my mind for still keeping the lights on. She said a man seventy-one years old with bad knees ought to know when to quit.
Maybe she is right about the knees.
But this morning was the third Monday in October, the day the middle school does their make-up pictures for the fall yearbook.
When the wind-up clock on my nightstand went off at four o’clock in the morning, the bedroom was cold, but my back did not hurt nearly as bad as it used to. I pulled on my brown work trousers, put on a clean short-sleeved shirt, and walked down the hill in the dark.
By ten minutes to five, the shop was warm, the hot lather machine was humming on the counter, and the yellow light was shining through the front glass onto Maple Street.
At 5:12, the back screen door clicked open. A nine-year-old boy with uncombed cowlicks and his coat zipped up to his chin peeked his head inside, looking scared that he might be trespassing.
“Come on in, son,” I told him, picking up the blue cape from the counter. “Hop up on the booster seat. We have forty minutes before the bus gets here.”
