Chapter 10 Pinehurst Knows
I tell Cheryl on a Friday morning before we open.
The salon is empty. Chairs are clean. Mirrors are polished.
The appointment book shows a full day starting at nine.
I get there at eight-fifteen and Cheryl is already at her station organizing her tools the way she does every morning, placing each pair of scissors and every comb in the exact same arrangement she's used for thirty years.
"Cheryl, do you have a minute?"
She looks up. She reads my face the way she reads everyone's face and she puts down the scissors she's holding.
"I've been waiting for you to tell me," she says.
"You knew?"
"I knew something was wrong six weeks ago. I've been cutting hair long enough to recognize when someone is holding something together with both hands." She pulls a chair away from the station next to hers and sits down and waves me toward the matching chair. "Talk."
I tell her. All of it. Blake. Hailey. The messages, the motel rooms, the receipts, the months of lies.
The plan with Raina. The move-out. The confrontation.
The friend group being told. All of it comes out in about ten minutes while the salon sits empty and the morning light comes through the front windows.
Cheryl listens without interrupting. When I finish she's quiet for a long time.
"Hailey Simpson," she says.
"Yes."
"The tall blonde who comes in for highlights every eight weeks."
"That's her."
Cheryl shakes her head slowly. She picks up a comb from her station and turns it over in her hands and puts it back down. This is what Cheryl does when she's thinking. She touches her tools.
"I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm surprised that a man cheated," she says.
"I've been in this business too long. I've heard it a thousand times.
What surprises me is Hailey. That girl sat in my chair last month and asked me about your schedule.
She wanted to know when you'd be in so she could stop by and bring you lunch. "
"She probably wanted to make sure Blake wasn't coming to pick me up."
Cheryl looks at me sharply. Then she nods.
"You're probably right. God. That's calculated."
"The whole thing was calculated. Both of them planned every step. When to meet. What to tell me. Who to blame. They had a system."
Cheryl reaches over and puts her hand on my arm. It's a brief touch and then she pulls back because Cheryl isn't overly physical. But the contact means something. It means she's on my side.
"What do you need?" she asks.
"I need to keep working. I need to be here every day and do my job and not fall apart in front of clients."
"You can do that."
"And I need people to know the truth. Blake is telling everyone that I left him out of nowhere. He's playing the victim."
"Well. Then it's fortunate that you told me." Cheryl's mouth does something that isn't quite a smile but is in the same neighborhood. "Because I talk to forty people a week in this chair. And every single one of them loves a story."
I don't ask Cheryl to spread the news. I don't have to.
Cheryl doesn't gossip for entertainment.
She doesn't trade in rumors or speculation.
But she also doesn't keep secrets when keeping them would protect the wrong person.
Over the next few days I can tell she's talking to her clients about it.
Not dramatically. Not with embellishment.
In Cheryl's measured, matter-of-fact way.
She tells them what happened. She tells them what Blake did.
She tells them that Lara has proof. And then she goes back to cutting hair and lets them draw their own conclusions.
The conclusions are unanimous.
I notice it first in the tips. My tips go up about twenty percent that week.
Not because I'm doing better work. Because people are expressing sympathy the way small-town people express sympathy: with money and with presence.
My appointment book fills up. Clients who usually come in monthly are calling to reschedule earlier.
Women I've never seen before are booking first-time appointments.
They want to sit in my chair. They want to hear the story from me.
Some of them want to share their own stories.
It turns out that in a town the size of Pinehurst, a significant number of women have been through something similar.
They come in and they sit down and they tell me about their husbands or their exes or their friends' exes and for the first time in weeks I feel less alone.
It takes less than a week.
By Monday afternoon I can already feel the first tremors.
A client I've never spoken to about anything personal asks me, mid-cut, how I'm doing.
Not in the standard small-talk way. In the way that implies she already knows something.
I tell her I'm doing fine and she nods with a knowing sympathy that confirms my suspicion.
By Tuesday two more clients bring it up, both of them gently, both of them clearly trying to express support without overstepping.
One of them tells me she went through something similar eight years ago and that it gets better.
The other tells me she's known Blake's family for years and she never would have expected this from him, which I think is supposed to be comforting but isn't.
By Wednesday the shift is unmistakable. Clients come in and they look at me differently.
Not with pity exactly, though some of them lean that way.
More with the curious sympathy of people who know a version of the story and want to hear mine but are too polite to ask directly.
A woman named Patricia who comes in every three weeks for a bob trim tells me, unprompted, that she ran into Blake's mother at the post office and Linda Winston looked embarrassed.
"She didn't say much," Patricia tells me. "But she looked like she'd been crying. I felt terrible for her. She's a sweet woman."
I feel a pang for Linda. She's a good woman.
She always treated me warmly. She included me at holidays and called me on my birthday and made a point of telling me how happy she was that Blake had found someone steady.
Whatever Blake did, his mother didn't deserve the embarrassment of having her son's infidelity become public knowledge in a town where she's lived her entire life.
But that's Blake's fault. Not mine.
By Thursday the gossip chain has done its work.
Mrs. Gallagher, who has sat in Cheryl's chair every Tuesday for fifteen years, has a social network that spans three generations of Pinehurst families.
She has a daughter who is in a book club with seven other women.
She has a sister who volunteers at the community center.
She has friends at church and at the library and at the post office and at the grocery store.
When Mrs. Gallagher learns something, everybody learns it.
From Mrs. Gallagher the information spread to her daughter, who told her book club, who told the woman who runs the flower shop on Main Street, who mentioned it to the owner of the hardware store, whose wife goes to Bible study with three women who all have daughters in Hailey's age range.
Those daughters told their friends. Those friends told their coworkers.
Coworkers told families. Families told neighbors.
The information moved through Pinehurst with the speed and thoroughness of a flash flood. It touched everything. Nobody was spared.
On Friday Hailey shows up at the salon.
I'm between appointments. My one o'clock just left and my two o'clock hasn't arrived yet. Cheryl is finishing a blowout on a regular client. The waiting area has two women in it, both reading magazines. The salon is calm and ordinary and then the door opens and Hailey walks in.
She looks like she hasn't slept in days.
Her hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail.
No makeup, which is unusual for Hailey because Hailey always wears makeup in public.
She's wearing a sweatshirt that's too big for her, probably a man's sweatshirt though I don't want to think about whose, and jeans and she looks smaller than I've ever seen her look.
Diminished. Like the last week has taken physical pieces out of her.
She stands just inside the door and she stares at me and the entire salon goes still.
"Can we talk?" she says. Her voice is thin and rough.
Cheryl's head turns. The client in Cheryl's chair cranes her neck to look. The two women in the waiting area lower their magazines. Every person in the salon registers what is happening. They know the story. They know who Hailey is. And they are watching.
"Not here," I say.
"Then where? You won't answer my calls. You won't respond to my texts. I've been trying to reach you for a week and you keep shutting me out. I have sat in my apartment for five days straight and I haven't been able to leave the house because everywhere I go people are looking at me."
"That's not my problem, Hailey."
"You made it my problem. You told everyone. You told the whole town."
"I told the truth."
"There's nothing to talk about, Hailey."
"Yes there is. You told all our friends and now you've told the whole town and everyone hates me and I deserve a chance to explain what happened."
I put down the brush I'm holding. I turn and face her fully. My heart is pounding but my voice is steady when I speak.
"What happened is that you slept with my fiancé for months.
You booked motel rooms. You planned alibis.
You sat across from me at dinners and parties and asked about my wedding dress while knowing you were sleeping with the man I was marrying.
That's what happened. There's no version of that story where you come out looking good. "
Hailey's eyes fill with tears. "It wasn't like that. It wasn't planned. It just happened and then it kept happening and I wanted to stop but I couldn't and I felt terrible about it the entire time."