Jake made a sort of noncommittal grunt. So maybe he wasn’t part wolf so much as part pig? Aquapig? She smiled. That sounded like it could be a spinoff of the British show about the pig family that her youngest nephew was obsessed with.
Carol Senior excused herself, saying she needed to make a phone call, and CJ ran a brush through Jake’s hair. “I’m trying to learn more about updos and braids. There never used to be that much demand for them, but Moonflower Bay has gotten popular with tourists in recent years. I’m finding myself doing more weddings.” She patted Jake on the shoulder. “Jake is nice enough to let me practice on him in exchange for a weekly wash and the odd trim.”
He shrugged. “They do some kind of thing to it that gets the tangles out.”
“Deep condition.” CJ chuckled as she fastened a smock around Nora’s neck and handed her a magazine. “Let me just wash Jake’s hair real quick and get the conditioner in, and I’ll start on you. Sound good?”
Nora nodded, suddenly not trusting herself to speak. Because the view in the mirror was all wrong. She had been going to the same salon in Toronto for years. Sitting in the same stylist’s chair. Because her hair was so short, she’d logged a lot of hours in that particular chair, looking at that particular view. It had been nothing special—the busy, big-city salon had featured two rows of chairs parallel to each other, deep inside the space, so all she’d ever seen in the mirror was other people’s cuts and colors in progress. Here she could see a slice of Main Street through the large plate-glass window at the front of the salon. The graceful, historic redbrick buildings contrasted sharply with the deep-blue sky.
This view was, objectively, nicer. But it was different.
She was ambushed by the notion that this was it. This was the view from the salon chair for the next two years.
She had actually done it. She was here. It was day one of the life reset.
The past month had been filled with logistics: quitting her job, doing the banking stuff required to get out from under shared bills, disentangling herself from the man she’d thought she was going to spend the rest of her life with.
There hadn’t been time to stop and think. To feel.
But now that she was here, she realized how totally alone she was. Not just boyfriendless but colleagueless. Friendless. One hundred percent on her own.
But that was okay, she reminded herself. That was the point. She had let herself grow way too dependent on—and deferential to—Rufus. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost herself.
She was jarred from her maudlin thoughts when the door opened and two women came rushing in.
“That was fast,” Carol Senior said.
Both the women were older, and in a flurry of introductions, she learned that they were Pearl Brunetta, who owned a bakery, and Eiko Anzai, the editor of the town newspaper. Pearl, who had blue hair—and not old-lady blue but screaming electric blue—wanted to know when Nora was going to open the clinic. Eiko wanted to know if she’d do an interview with the paper.
They peppered her with questions about her plans until CJ elbowed her way in. “Ladies. Don’t overwhelm her. She just got here. And I gotta do her hair now, so skedaddle.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Pearl said. “You come by my shop for some pie real soon, Dr. Walsh. On the house.”
“And you let me know about that interview, okay, hon?” Eiko said.
Nora agreed to both demands and smiled as she listened to them bicker on their way out.
“You shouldn’t call her hon,” Pearl admonished.
“I call everyone hon.”
“Yeah, but she’s a doctor. You should be showing respect. We want her to stay, Eiko!”
“Okay, I’ll start calling her Dr. Hon.”
CJ winked at Nora in the mirror. “All right, Dr. Hon, let’s get started.”
As Jake sat under one of the dryers with his conditioner-slathered, plastic-wrapped hair piled on his head, he listened to the women talking about the new doctor’s hair. It was, apparently, a “pixie cut.”
That seemed appropriate given that Dr. Nora Walsh could pass for a pixie herself. She was short, but not just that—she was small all over. She had small features—a wee, slightly upturned nose, a bow mouth, and small hands. Her grayish-blue eyes and almost-white hair added a kind of cool, supernatural icing on what otherwise would have been cuteness.
She was really something.
“You getting settled in okay?” CJ asked.
“Yeah. I traveled light, so…yeah.”
It sounded like there was a story there.
“Where are you living, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m renting a house in Southbank Pines. I wanted to get something closer to downtown so I could walk to work, but to be honest with you, this whole move was kind of a last-minute thing, so I took what I could get on short notice.”
“Oh, that must be Harold Burgess’s place.” CJ met Jake’s eyes in the mirror.
“Yes. Harold is my landlord. I haven’t met him in person, though.”
Harold Burgess owned a few buildings in town, and they were, to put it frankly, shitholes. But maybe his own house would be okay. After twenty years of wintering in Florida, he’d recently moved there full-time.
CJ and Dr. Walsh started conferring over the hair-color plan. Dr. Walsh rattled off some kind of code, and soon CJ was shaping little squares of tinfoil around chunks of her hair. He chuckled to himself. He had plastic wrap; she had tinfoil.
After working in silence for a few minutes, CJ asked, “Your place seem okay?”
The doctor’s brow furrowed slightly. “Should it not?”
“No, no!” CJ said—a touch too quickly, probably, because the furrow deepened.
“It’s a bit musty, but I put that down to it being closed up for so long—I gather it’s been empty for six months. Anyway, I’m sure it will be fine. I just need to get some furniture in there. And dishes. And everything.” She laughed in a way that struck Jake as false.
“You didn’t come with anything?”
Dr. Walsh huffed a sigh that seemed partly self-deprecating. “Nope.”
“Why, if you don’t mind my asking?” If you don’t mind my asking was kind of CJ’s signature phrase.
Dr. Walsh paused for a long moment before answering. “Have you ever looked around and suddenly thought, ‘What am I doing? What is all this crap? This is not how I thought my life was going to turn out’?”
Yep.
CJ paused with one of the foil doodads in her hand, her head tilted. Jake could pretty much guarantee that CJ had never asked herself those questions. When you were Carol Dyson Junior and you loved doing hair, which CJ legitimately did, and your mom, Carol Dyson Senior, owned the town salon, life unfolded pretty much according to plan, he suspected.
CJ laid a hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “Honestly, Dr. Hon, I can’t say I know what that’s like.”
Jake did, though. Did he ever.
Chapter Two
Nora left the salon feeling lighter than she had in a long time. New hair always did that. And CJ had done a bang-up job. Nora had been a little apprehensive, but CJ had had the same brands of bleach and dye her much pricier Toronto stylist used.