He Slept with My Friend, I Ruined Them

Chapter 1 The Future Were Building

Mrs. Gallagher has been coming to New Image Salon every six weeks for as long as I've worked here.

She gets the same cut and the same color and she tells me the same stories about her daughter's kids in Burlington.

I like her. She tips well and she doesn't try to show me pictures on her phone while I'm holding scissors near her head.

Today she's watching me in the mirror while I section off the back of her hair. Her eyes keep drifting down to my left hand.

"So when are you and that boy of yours finally going to set a date?" she asks.

I smile because I've answered this question a hundred times. "We're saving for a house first. We want to get settled before we start planning anything big."

"That's smart," she says. "My husband and I did it the other way around and spent our first anniversary eating ramen noodles on a mattress on the floor."

Cheryl snorts from the station next to mine.

She's working on a blowout for Donna Fisk and has clearly been listening.

Cheryl always listens. She's been cutting hair in Pinehurst for almost twenty years and she treats every conversation within earshot as information she might need later.

She's not mean about it. She's just tuned in.

"Girl, every couple in Pinehurst eats ramen on a mattress on the floor," Cheryl says. "That's just called being twenty-four."

Mrs. Gallagher laughs. Donna Fisk laughs.

I laugh too because Cheryl isn't wrong. Pinehurst isn't the kind of town where people start out with money.

You work for it. You save for it. And if you're lucky you eventually get a little house with a yard and a kitchen that doesn't smell like the apartment below yours.

That's what Blake and I are working toward. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

"Blake's a good one," Mrs. Gallagher says while I blend her layers with the thinning shears. "My daughter went to school with him. She always said he was charming."

"He is charming," I say. That part is true. Blake can talk his way into or out of almost anything.

"Charming is nice," Cheryl says without looking up from Donna's hair. "Reliable is better."

I don't say anything to that. Cheryl doesn't know about the house fund. She doesn't know about the sports betting or the short deposits or the arguments that always end with Blake promising to do better. But sometimes Cheryl says things that land closer to the truth than she realizes.

I finish Mrs. Gallagher's layers and blow her out while she talks about her grandson's baseball team.

The kid apparently struck out three times last Saturday and Mrs. Gallagher is convinced the coach has him batting in the wrong position in the lineup.

I nod and agree because that's part of the job.

Half of being a hairstylist is cutting hair.

The other half is listening and saying the right thing at the right time.

When she leaves she folds a ten into my hand and tells me to put it toward the house fund.

I thank her and tuck it into my apron pocket.

The salon stays busy through lunch. A regular named Patty Bowers comes in for her roots.

She sits down in my chair and immediately starts telling me about her neighbor's divorce.

The husband supposedly got caught sending messages to a woman he met online.

Patty knows every detail. Who found the messages.

What time of day it happened. What the wife said when she confronted him.

Whether the online woman knew he was married.

I listen and nod and keep my hands steady because Patty's roots need my full attention even if her mouth doesn't.

"Can you imagine?" Patty says. "Twelve years of marriage and he's out there texting some stranger."

"That's awful," I say.

"Men," Patty says, which is apparently her complete analysis of the situation.

After Patty I take two walk-ins. Then I get a color correction that takes me nearly two hours because the client tried to go platinum at home with a box kit from the drugstore.

Her hair feels like straw when I finally get it to a manageable shade of warm blonde.

She cries a little from relief and I tell her it's going to be fine.

It will be. She just needs to stop buying box color.

Cheryl waits until the client leaves before she turns to me and shakes her head.

"One day someone is going to come in here actually bald from that stuff and I'm going to lose my mind."

"She wasn't that bad," I say.

"Lara, her hair was the color of a traffic cone."

"Okay. She was a little bad."

That's how most days go at New Image. Clients come in.

They sit down. They talk about their lives while I work.

I cut, or color, or style, and by the time they leave they feel better about themselves.

I'm good at my job. I'm not famous for it.

I'm not trying to move to Boston or New York and work in some high-end place where people pay three hundred dollars for a trim.

I like Pinehurst. I like knowing my clients by name and hearing about their kids and remembering what color they got last time.

The thing about working in a salon in a small town is that you hear everything.

Information doesn't stay private in Pinehurst. It moves from person to person through grocery stores and gas stations and restaurants and salon chairs.

I've heard about divorces and pregnancies and arrests all from this room.

I've heard who got fired and who got caught shoplifting from the hardware store on Route 9.

People sit in my chair and tell me things they probably shouldn't and I keep those things to myself because that's what a good stylist does.

I don't consider myself a gossip. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't pay attention.

The thing I'm not paying attention to is the one thing happening right behind my own back. But I don't know that yet.

After my last client I clean my station and count out my tips.

It's a decent day. Not great. I make enough to cover my share of expenses and put some away each month.

Blake and I have a savings account specifically for the house.

Every month we each contribute a set amount.

Four hundred dollars each. That's the deal.

That's what we agreed on when we first started planning.

Four hundred from me and four hundred from him and within a couple of years we'd have enough for a down payment on something small.

I pull up the account on my phone while I'm sitting in my car in the salon parking lot.

Blake's deposit is short again.

He was supposed to put in four hundred this month. He put in two hundred and twenty.

I stare at the number and I can feel the frustration building in my chest. This is the third month in a row he's come up short.

Last month it was fifty dollars less than he promised.

The month before that it was almost a hundred less.

I let both of those slide because he told me work had been slow and he'd make it up.

Now he's nearly two hundred dollars under and the excuses are going to have to be a lot better than work being slow.

Blake works construction for Premiere Builders.

He makes decent money. Not great money but decent.

Enough that four hundred dollars a month should be completely doable if he'd stop spending it on other things.

The problem isn't his paycheck. The problem is what happens to his paycheck between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.

I drive home to our apartment. It's a two-bedroom on the second floor of a building that used to be nice about fifteen years ago.

The carpet in the hallway has a permanent smell that I've stopped trying to identify.

Our place is fine. I've done what I can with it.

But it's not ours and it never will be and every month I spend here is another month I'm not spending in a house with my name on the deed.

That's why the fund matters. That's why every dollar counts.

Blake is on the couch when I walk in. He's got a beer open and his phone in his hand and he's watching something on TV that he doesn't seem particularly interested in.

He looks up and smiles at me and for a second I almost don't bring it up because he looks relaxed and comfortable and I don't want to be the person who ruins a quiet evening.

But I am that person tonight.

"You're short on the house fund again," I say.

His face changes. The smile doesn't go away completely but something behind his eyes shifts. He knows he's caught.

"Yeah, I know. I was going to talk to you about that. Some stuff came up this month."

"What stuff?"

"Truck needed new brakes. And I had to cover some things."

I put my bag down on the kitchen counter. "What things, Blake?"

He takes a long drink of his beer. "Just things. Life stuff. It adds up."

"It's the third month in a row. We had a number. We both agreed on it."

"I know."

"So what happened to it?"

He sighs and puts the beer on the coffee table and rubs his face with both hands. "Some of it went to the brakes. And I went out with the guys a few times. And I put a little bit on the Celtics game last week."

"How much?"

"It was sixty bucks, Lara. It's not a big deal."

"Sixty on betting. Plus however much on drinks. Plus the brakes. And somehow four hundred turned into two-twenty."

"I'll make it up next month. I'll double up."

He won't. I already know he won't because he said the same thing last month and the month before.

But the argument we're about to have is one we've had before and it always reaches the same ending.

He gets defensive. I get upset. Then he comes over and puts his arms around me and tells me he's sorry and that he wants the house just as much as I do.

He promises to do better. I want to believe him because the alternative means admitting that the man I've been with since high school doesn't take our future as seriously as I do.