They say things to their stylist they would not say to their therapist.
They say things they have not said to anyone.
I have heard confessions in that chair that would stop your breathing.
I have heard grief and joy and the specific working-through that people do when they are trying to understand their own lives and they need to say it out loud to someone who is not going to repeat it.
I keep what I hear.
I always have.
I have kept it for twenty-seven years.
Until Ashley.
Ashley I had to write down.
My name is Carol Ann Reese, and for twenty-six years I have also been Carol Ann Eckert, which is the name I took when I married Dale Eckert in the summer between my twenty-second and twenty-third years, in a small church in Warner Robins, Georgia, with forty-three people present and a cake my aunt made and shoes that hurt my feet from the second hour forward.
I married Dale because I loved him.
I want to say that first.
I loved him.
I loved the specific version of him that existed before the business expanded and the money started coming in and the version of Dale that the money produced.
The early Dale.
The Dale who used to come into the salon before I had my own chair, when I was still working for someone else, and bring me coffee at eleven in the morning because he knew I had been on my feet since eight.
The Dale who drove three hours to my mother’s house every month because she was alone and he thought it was important.
The Dale who once held me in the parking lot of a grocery store for twenty minutes because I had gotten news about a friend that made me unable to stand right.
That Dale I loved completely.
I am not sure what happened to that Dale.
I think money happened to him.
Not immediately.
Gradually.
Dale had been in roofing since he was twenty.
He started as a laborer.
He worked his way to foreman.
He started his own operation when we were thirty, which required everything we had in savings and a loan from my father that my father pretended was a gift and that Dale paid back anyway with interest.
For the first five years of the business we were not comfortable.
We were managing.
I was doing hair and Dale was working and we were raising our son Marcus and paying the mortgage and doing what people do when they are building something and the building has not yet become a thing.
Then it became a thing.
The commercial contracts came.
The school buildings.
The warehouse complexes.
The hotels.
Dale hired crews.
Dale hired a bookkeeper.
Dale hired an operations manager.
The business grew the way businesses grow when the person running them has the specific quality Dale had, which was the ability to make people trust him.
Dale could walk into a room and within twelve minutes he was the person everyone in the room wanted to say yes to.
I had found this quality attractive when I married him.
I found it instructive later.
A man who can make anyone trust him has choices about who he uses that quality on.
Dale used it on clients.
He used it on his crews.
He used it on me.
He used it on Ashley.
I do not blame Ashley.
I want to say that now before I tell you the rest.
I do not blame Ashley.
She believed what she was told.
She was told she was the one he chose.
She was told the marriage was over in everything but paperwork.
She was told the wife understood.