Chapter 14 #3
He could feel all of the eyes in the salon tracking the trio as he followed behind his girls.
He knew technically they both weren’t, but that’s what he thought when he saw them walking together, my girls.
When they got to her station, in the back left corner of the salon, Robbie had a chair waiting for Deacon beside the vanity, and there was already a pink booster seat for Tabby in Jenna’s sleek black salon chair.
Once Tabby climbed in, Jenna used the hydraulic foot lever to lift her up.
“Okay, Miss Tabitha, let’s see what you are working with.” Jenna chit-chatted with Tabby about her favorite TV shows, songs, and friends as she carefully unwound her space buns, letting her thick light brown hair spill over her hands and cascade down Tabby’s back.
“Whoa,” she said, catching Tabby’s gaze in the mirror. “Your hair is even longer than I thought. You’ll be able to donate a whole bunch.”
“Really?” Tabby’s face lit up, and she reached back to run her fingers through her hair, as if seeing it for the first time. “Really?”
“Really, really,” Jenna nodded as she ran her fingers from Tabby’s scalp down the length of her hair. “Wow, Dad, you have taken really good care of these curls.”
“Thanks.” He could tell that she wasn’t just saying that. Jenna looked impressed by the condition of Tabby’s hair. Her hair was not easy, and it had taken him a while to get a handle on it.
“He used an ouchy brush once!” Tabby eagerly relayed.
She was never gonna let that go.
“He did?!” Jenna smiled, and he could tell she wanted to laugh. “Yeah, I’ve done that, too. Sometimes you can’t tell what brushes are gonna be ouchy. Did you tell him it hurt?”
Tabby nodded her head up and down.
“Did he stop?”
“No! He said, ‘let me try from the bottom of your hair, not the top.’”
Okay, maybe she wasn’t the best wingman.
“He did?” Jenna scrunched her face.
Tabby nodded. “But then it still hurt!”
“Oh no!” Jenna shook her head.
“But then he stopped.”
“Well, that’s good. That’s how you know he's a good dad. He’s a fast learner.
” She stared at the reflection of his daughter in the mirror, then her eyes flicked to him.
For a second, it seemed to him, she forgot anyone else was in the salon, her focus was just narrowed to the three of them.
But then a chair moved behind her and popped whatever bubble she’d been floating in.
The walls went back up, and she reached into a tiny drawer and was still grinning as she pulled out a thin measuring tape and ran it down Tabby’s back along the side of her hair.
She spoke to her, looking at her reflection in the mirror.
“Okay, little lady, you have plenty to donate, but are you absolutely, positively,
supercalifragilisticexpialidociously sure you want to donate it?”
Tabby giggled at the word.
“Because once you cut it, it takes a long time to grow back.”
“I know.” Tabby was just short of rolling her eyes. Deacon knew that fun, defiant gesture was coming any day. “Daddy tells me all the time. That’s the costakisses to my actions.”
She didn’t quite know how to pronounce consequence, but she had the gist.
Jenna appeared amused at his daughter’s mispronunciation. She looked over at Deacon. “Okay, and are you sure, Dad?”
“It’s her hair. She’s been growing it out for two years.”
The chime above the salon door punctuated his statement and drew his attention.
He glanced over and saw a cut-and-paste, clone of Jenna.
The young woman was the spitting image of her mom, her features as unmistakable as an artist’s signature on an original work.
The same heart-shaped face, the same huge blue eyes, the same easy smile, and the same thick, shiny golden-blonde hair.
Her confidence was palpable, as if the room owed her its attention by virtue of her existence alone.
Deacon had the fleeting, surreal sense of watching a mirror reflection of two generations simultaneously. The resemblance was uncanny, not just in appearance but in the expressive animation, the way the girl’s entire body seemed to predict her words before she’d even spoken them.
“Oh my gosh, Mom, thank you so much. You are the be—” The teen’s voice, bright and unfiltered, rang out as she pushed the door open with her hip.
But as her gaze swept the salon and landed on the scene at Jenna’s station—Jenna, Deacon, and Tabby in the chair—her words cut off mid-beat.
Her jaw dropped, lips frozen in a perfect ‘O’, and her hands, previously animated in the process of dramatic appreciation, stopped mid-air, like she’d been paused by a remote control.
Jenna’s daughter, Blake, did a sweeping visual survey of the salon in three seconds.
She took in everyone, as if mentally cataloging not just the people but the undercurrents, the alliances and tensions, the unsaid things hanging in the air.
She landed back on Tabby in the chair and then on him, and a huge, delighted grin spread across her face, and she began walking towards them.
He became acutely aware of the rest of the salon, the subtle shifting of bodies and the way the conversation in the waiting area had settled into a charged hush.
It felt like every person in the room was waiting for the next act in a very public play, and Deacon realized he was both an observer and a character—only he hadn’t been handed a script for this scene.
“Hey Blake,” Robbie from the front desk called out in a casual, friendly tone, but Deacon caught the faint edge, like maybe he too was bracing for whatever this girl would bring.
“Hey Robbie, how’s Layla feeling?”
“Better, thanks.”
Blake made a beeline past the waiting area, treating the whole salon like her own personal runway.
Deacon noted the way she navigated the space, polite but not deferential, as if she was born to move through rooms and make them hers.
She reached Jenna’s station and, with the buoyant energy only teens seemed to have, spoke in a voice that made the Muzak sound like mute background static.
“Moooom, sorry to interrupt. I was just coming by to say thank you so much for dropping off my sweats. You saved my life, you are my queen.”
“No problem, you gonna head home to get homework done?” Jenna asked, her tone light but with an undercurrent of don’t-mess-with-me.
“I was gonna hang out here with you. I miss you.”
Jenna, who looked like she was calculating how far Blake would take this, and also tired, he noticed.
He hadn’t gotten a chance to stare at her when he knew she wouldn’t catch him.
With her attention diverted, he saw dark circles under her eyes.
He wanted to send everyone home, pick her up, carry her to his house, put her to bed, and make her stay there for a week.
Not even for fun stuff, just so she could sleep.
He would feed her and then she could sleep. That was it.
He had to actively stop himself from doing that.
“I can hang out at the front with Robbie if you need me out of the way.”
Deacon watched as Blake’s gaze dropped to Tabby in the big black salon chair. Her eyes widened and she bent down to eye level with his little girl, something genuine in her posture that reminded him how good some teens could be with kids.
“Hi, I’m Blake,” she said, and her voice lost all sarcasm, pretense, or show. “I love your hair, it’s so pretty.”
“Hi, I’m Tabby, thank you, I’m giving it to sick kids,” Tabby answered in the direct, proud manner of a child with a mission.
“Stop!” Blake’s eyes got huge, and she clutched her chest in a way that was so over-dramatic it looped all the way around to sincere. “Really?”
Tabby nodded enthusiastically.
“Seriously?” Blake repeated, as though she could not possibly believe someone so small could do something so selfless. “Oh my god, that’s the sweetest thing ever!” She pivoted instantly to Deacon. “Can I interview her for my school newspaper?”
The request caught him off guard, he’d expected maybe a wave, a polite hello, but not a full-court press request. “Um…”
“Blake!” Jenna’s voice sliced through the moment, and the warning was unmistakable.
“Sorry.” Blake backed off with an apologetic cringe that, Deacon noted, looked exactly like one he’d seen Jenna make at the Trivia Night when she’d gotten an answer wrong.
Blake then composed herself and extended a hand to Deacon, like a greeting in an old 1940s film.
“I’m Blake Ford. I’m Jenna’s daughter, and I’m a freshman in—”
“Blake, I wasn’t telling you to introduce yourself,” Jenna clarified, her voice more clipped now. She shot her daughter a look that Deacon recognized. Cillian’s dad gave that look that said: “Don’t make me come over there.”
Blake appeared confused. “Well then what—”
Deacon realized they were in a conversational standoff where a third party intervention was required. “What would the article be about, exactly?”
Blake brightened immediately, happy to be back on solid ground. “So, I think it’s super dope that Tabby would do something so selfless at—wait, how old are you?” She turned to Tabby.
Tabby held up her hand. “Five.”
“Right, at five!” Blake continued, as if Tabby’s answer had confirmed all of her best suspicions about the world.
“Anyway, I think that teenagers can be really self-involved—no offense to me, but we totally can—and after I started volunteering for We-C-U, it’s this app where you help people do random things, it can be anything from tutoring someone for a math quiz or helping getting someone ready for a cheer try out, or like, the other day I helped this woman who was visually impaired find her earring that she dropped.
She was eighty and said that was the longest anyone had talked to her in months, which made me so sad cause the lady, Barbara, she is dope.
So I thought about doing an article about serving others, and how if everyone does something that’s not about them, then how much better the world would be. ”
Deacon blinked. Those were his thoughts exactly. That was the entire idea that started his app. He’d originally wanted to call it Help me, Help you after the line in Jerry Maguire, but he’d decided against it. He wanted people to feel seen instead.
“People don’t always make the connection that little things matter.”
Blake’s eyes sparked with excitement. “Right? I mean, it’s not like donating blood or volunteering for a soup kitchen is going to change the whole world overnight, but every time someone does something nice, it adds up.
Like, a million little dominoes. I wrote this thing for English about the ripple effect, and Mrs. Stevens said it was—” she made air quotes, “—‘philosophical and unexpectedly poignant for a narrative essay.’”
“Nice.” He agreed, both with Blake’s take on the world and to let her interview his daughter. “Okay. Sure, if Tabby wants to, you can interview her.”
Tabby raised her hand. “Tabby wants to.”
Deacon was pretty sure his daughter had no clue what she was agreeing to but was just excited for the attention.
“Thank you!” Blake’s entire face lit up, and he wasn’t sure how Jenna ever said no to her.
He wasn’t sure what Jenna’s opinion was on him agreeing to let her daughter interview his. He couldn’t read how she felt about it. She looked…blank.
“Are there any products in her hair, like detangler, or leave-in conditioner?” Jenna changed the subject, her voice held no inflection whatsoever.
“No.” Deacon shook his head. “I braided it right after her bath, and then she wanted space buns today, so I didn’t put anything in it.”
“Perfect. Okay, I’m going to braid it and then I’ll cut it so it will be this short.” Jenna showed Blake how short her hair would end up being by tucking it.
His little girl’s face looked somehow even littler with her hair shorter. She looked like a little pixie.
Tabby cheered. “Yay!”
“Oh!” Blake dug into her bag. “Can I take pictures? For the article?”
“Is it online?” Deacon didn’t want any photos of his daughter online. He’d had enough of that in his lifetime.
“It’s both online and print, but I won’t put any photos online. I’ll only use the photos for the print edition.” Blake negotiated with the confidence of a seasoned lawyer.
He considered, then nodded. “Deal.”
Blake nodded with a satisfied smile, and in that moment, Deacon felt like he’d just done something right, even if he wasn’t sure what.
Over the next fifteen minutes he and Blake both took about three hundred photos of the entire process: Jenna brushing, braiding, cutting, then bagging Tabby’s hair for Locks of Love. The entire experience could not have gone better if Deacon had planned it himself.
Jenna didn’t speak to him directly, but she laughed with Blake and Tabby and at jokes he made with the girls.
He felt the four of them had a very fun dynamic.
But he could have just been projecting. Blake was also told about the ‘ouchy brush.’ She was appropriately outraged on Tabby’s behalf and told her own horror story of styling products, including one particularly bad curling iron accident.
By the time they left, Blake had an appointment to interview Tabby in three days’ time about what inspired her to donate her hair, Jenna was fifty percent more relaxed than when they arrived but still had more walls up than an Ikea showroom, Tabby was officially obsessed with Blake, and he had a sneaking suspicion the feeling was mutual, and Deacon was even more in trouble than he’d been before.
He’d thought he had it bad, but after seeing Jenna with her daughter, with his daughter, and in her workplace, he knew that there was no coming back.
His first instinct was right…that smile…it could ruin his life. Because now he knew what his life could be, and if it didn’t work out, if Jenna really didn’t want anything to do with him, now he knew what he was losing before he ever had it.