Meeting: A New Year’s Day Story (Fiction)

Sally was fed up with the mockery about how she cut her own hair. Her friends thought she was cheap or crazy or both, but she shrugged them off. Why give all that money to somebody to do what you could do yourself with a sharp pair of scissors and a good mirror. Layering was hard, she’d admit that, and a mistake could mean weeks of wearing a hat, but the savings were amazing.

It was mostly Sally’s pals at the senior center who gave her a hard time. Her two best friends, Debbie and Esmeralda, tried to take her to an actual salon once, but Sally got right up out of the chair when the cute young ‘stylist’ looked at her slyly in the mirror and said, “And what are we thinking today?”

“Who’s we?” Sally answered and then undid the velcro on her smock, muttering about how using the royal ‘we’ really didn’t sit well with her. It was the excuse to scram that she’d been hoping for.

Still, there was that one guy at the meal program. He always wore a red flannel shirt with Levis, suspenders even though he was pretty skinny – she always though suspenders were for big round guys who could thread a belt through the loops. Anyway, Sally thought to herself, if I had better hair would he maybe talk to me?

Her mother had told her if you want a boy to talk to you, don’t sit in the middle of a bunch of girls. So Sally had taken to working the lunchroom, volunteering to pour coffee and bring people milk if they asked. She figured if she was on the move, maybe he’d see an opportunity. But he just sat by himself by the door reading a paperback book, the kind you used to get at the drugstore, small but very thick.

He had great hair. Thick wavy gray hair, a mass of it, he had to have been a knockout when he was younger. Sally hypothesized about all this. Why he had such great hair and what was he reading? And was she even cute enough for a guy to put down his book? After all, everybody in the place was really old including her and the bookworm. She wondered who cut his hair.

She decided to take affirmative action. Grabbing the coffee pot, she headed for Mr. Great Hair. She nudged him gently on the shoulder. “More coffee?”

“You don’t remember me, do you?” He folded down the page of his book and put it on the table. Sally froze, holding the coffee pot like a bouquet of flowers in her hand. She shook her head no. No, she didn’t remember him.

He rubbed his forehead like he was just coming out of a bad migraine. “Well, I wish you knew who I was but it’s okay that you don’t. I’m your brother. Glen. My name is Glen.

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Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash