“Where do you want to do this?”
“In here is fine,” I replied. “The lighting is good, but you’ll have to sit on one of those short chairs. I can’t see the top of your head if you’re on a stool.”
He slid off the edge of the stool. He gave me a once-over. “How tall are you?”
“Five-two.”
His visual inspection continued. He paused when he reached my hair. “Is that your natural hair color?”’
“It is.”
He sauntered to the dining table and pulled out a chair. He glanced at the table before sitting down. “Restaurants are closed until who knows when. What have you two been doing for food?”
“I’ve been cooking,” I replied. “I’d rather cook than go out, anyway.”
“No guard on the sides,” he said. “Fade into a number one, and scissor cut on top, just long enough to make me look mean.”
I grinned. “One haircut with mean intentions, coming right up.”
I fitted the cape around his neck. Clutching to the hope that I didn’t make a haircut ‘with a bunch of fucking holes in it’, I began shaving off his thick silver locks.
“Ever been arrested?” he asked.
The question came from nowhere. It took me by complete surprise. Luckily, I wasn’t cutting his hair at the moment.
I turned off the clippers. “Yes, once.”
“What for?”
“Resisting arrest.”
“What were they arresting you for in the first place?”
“That’s the exact same question I asked the judge. I wasn’t really resisting arrest. It was more just me being resistant to an overbearing cop’s attitude.”
“Let’s hear the story,” he said.
I grinned at the thought of it. “I got pulled over for speeding out in the middle of nowhere. I was test driving a customer’s car before taking it in on trade. I wanted to see if it had any drivability issues. On an open stretch of road outside of Tulsa, I got up to 160 miles an hour. Just as I was getting ready to slow down, I whooshed past this cornfield. There was a cop backed into the farmer’s entrance, eating a barbeque sandwich and clocking—”
“If you were going 160, how do you know what he was eating?”
“Because it was all over his shirt when he pulled me over five minutes later.”
“Proceed with the story, my dear.”
I liked it that he called me my dear. My father did it regularly, and I missed it.
I smiled. “I slowed down to a crawl, and he pulled me over five or six miles down the road. He came walking up the car with his hand on his gun and barbeque sauce from one end of him to the other. The first thing he said—even before ‘do you know how fast you were going’ or ‘can I see your driver’s license?’ was, ‘I’ll be taking this purty blue sum bitch to the impound yard.’ I threw a fit. He told me to settle down. I didn’t. It really wasn’t a big deal.”
“Had you hit the brakes before you blew past him?”
“No, I was still on the gas.”
“How fast did he clock you?”
“168.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” he said with a laugh. “What were you driving?”
“A Lamborghini Aventador. Someone was trading it in on a Ferrari.”
“Do you always drive customer’s cars like that?”
“Supercars?” I asked. “Sure. I need to make sure they don’t problems. If I took one on trade, giving a customer $200,000 for it, and then when the next customer took possession he brought it in and said, ‘hey this thing wobbles and makes weird noises at 160, I’d might be spending 20 grand for a suspension overhaul.”
“Sounds reasonable,” he said. “So, when the cop said he was going to tow it, you threw a fit?”
“Pretty much. After he made his comment about the impound yard, I said, ‘hold on a minute.’ He said he had the right to tow it. I said, ‘You might have the right, but you don’t have my permission.’ He said, ‘You’re not in charge, Missy.’ I said, ‘My name is Anna.’ He smirked a shitty little smile, showing me the bits of pulled pork that were still stuck in his teeth, and said, ‘Well, Anna, I’ll be taking this shiny blue sum bitch to the impound yard, like it or not.’”
“He sounds like a horse’s ass.”
“He was,” I said. “I explained that I could have someone there to get it in five minutes. It only had about two inches of ground clearance, and I didn’t want them to damage it when they tried to load it on a truck. He called for a tow truck, anyway. That’s when I called him a fat sloppy piece of shit.”
He coughed out a laugh. “Calling a cop a fat sloppy piece of shit is like calling the first base umpire a cocksucker. It’s a surefire way to expose their bad side.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Did they tow the car?”
“They did. It had $4,000 worth of damage when I got it back.”
“You’re not afraid of standing up for yourself,” he said. “That’s a quality not often found in a woman.”
“If anything, I have a problem keeping my opinions to myself.”
“How much was the speeding ticket?”
“$4,000 damage to the car, I lost my driver’s license for a year, paid a $2,500 fine, and did 160 hours of community service.”
“Holy hell,” he exclaimed. “Out here people drive that fast on their way to work.”
“I know. In bumper-to-bumper traffic, too.”
He patted the side of his head. “Get back to work, Missy.”
Hap was a hard man to read. I hoped the battery of questions meant that he liked me. I doubted he’d admit it, even if he did. After a few swipes with the clippers, the next question came.
“You’re successful, pretty, and you’ve got spunk. Why aren’t you married?”
“I was at one point,” I replied, gliding the clippers up the back of his head as I spoke. “I divorced him.”
“Just get tired of him, or what?”
“He couldn’t keep his prick in his pants,” I replied. “I swore off men and sex after that. When I came here, I was on a two-year hiatus.”
“From relationships or sex?”
“Both.”
He digested my response for a few moments.
He was a much different person than my father, but he reminded me of him. It may have been that he had hit me with a barrage of questions. Every time I visited my parents, it seemed my father had random things to ask about my life. I wondered if asking random questions was an age-related thing, or a more of a fatherly trait.
While I mulled it over, he continued.
“Is your business profitable, or is it more for fun?”
“It’s profitable,” I replied proudly. “Very, actually.”
“Lot of high-end cars around here,” he said. “Dumb bastards trade ‘em in every six months. Seems most of these rich pricks have more money than sense.”
“I’m sure there’s quite a few,” I replied. “I haven’t got out much, so I haven’t noticed.”
“Can’t swing a dead cat in LA County without smacking a new Rolls, Bentley, or Lambo. Dip-shits drive ‘em like they’re pickup trucks. See them at the store all the time with shopping carts laying against them.”