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He smiled his lopsided smile. “A kit. For writing your college application essays.” He held it out to me.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “What do you mean, a kit?”

“You know, cards with essay starters, a questionnaire to isolate your best shot personal topic to sell yourself to the college of your dreams, inspirational stories from kids who’ve lived through it and are now happily ensconced at their first-choice college, a note to parents about backing off, some caf-feine product samples, a cattle prod. An old friend of mine who’s a high school guidance counselor came up with the idea.

I helped him put it together, and now I’m test marketing it for him.”

I looked up at him. “A cattle prod?” He held out the box again. “Go ahead, look. I wouldn’t joke around about something like that.”

“Right,” I said. “Nice box,” I added. It was kind of abstract and hip. Instead of a picture of some kiss-up straight-A student on the cover, it had a skull and crossbones and college application survival kit printed in bright red letters.

“Thanks,” he said. “It’s getting a great response.” I could just see Mario working his way back over. I dragged myself up to a standing position. “Well, good luck with it,” I said.

Sean Ryan reached into his jacket pocket. He held one of his cards out to me. “You know, I was thinking. Maybe you should put together a makeup kit.”

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C L A I R E C O O K

“Oh, boy,” I said. “Now I get it. Is this like a pyramid scheme or something?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, you only make money on your kit if you bring in enough other kit makers?”

He shook his head and started putting the card back in his pocket. “Never mind,” he said. He looked up. “What is your problem anyway?”

“How much time do you have?”

Mario came back and started folding the tables. I took a step in his direction. “Listen,” I said. “Maybe you should find someone else to try your kit line on. Nothing personal, but I’m completely over men.”

He nodded his head calmly, as if nothing I could ever say to him would shock him. “Since when?” he asked.

“Since. My. Half. Sister. Started. Dating. My. Husband.” That got him. He opened his eyes wide, despite himself.

“Ouch. That’d do it. Whew.”

“Yeah, well.”

He held out the card again. “Here, take this anyway. Just in case you change your mind.”

I looked at him. He looked at me. He tilted his head. I tilted mine. I had a sudden stupid urge to toss my hair, run my tongue along my lower lip to make it shine, say something flirty. Instead I straightened my head back out and took a step away.

“About the kit,” he said. He leaned over and put the card in my case.

I blew out a puff of air. “You’d probably turn out to be a homicidal maniac.”

He smiled. “Maybe. But, who knows, I might be a really nice guy.”

• 4 •

I WAS JUST FINISHING UP ESTHER WILLIAMS. HER

name was really Esther Williamson, but she’d shortened it to sound more glamorous after she “dumped that last clown I married.” She had broad shoulders and narrow hips, and she liked to tell people she was the famous swimmer from the movies. She said she got a lot of dates that way.

This Esther Williams was well into her eighties. She came into Salon de Lucio at least once a week for a wash and set, something we didn’t even have a price for anymore. We gave her a special deal because she was a regular, and also because she had a manicure every week, a pedicure every other week, and a full makeup complete with false eyelashes every time she came in. At least one of those clowns must have left her some serious money.

She also paid less because Salon de Lucio was our flagship salon. It was separated from the house my father lived in by only a breezeway, so it had the cheapest prices of any of my father’s salons. The way he looked at it, the greater the distance he had to travel to get there, the more he should charge. Even Mario couldn’t talk him out of that one.

Today, Esther Williams was getting her monthly color done, too. She liked to sit with her Clairol Professional 37D

Iced Brown on for a full four hours, something I’d never put up with from any other client. She brought her portable DVD

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C L A I R E C O O K

player and yoga mat with her, and after I applied her color, she’d go off to the kiddie area.

The kiddie area was in the back corner of the room, and my siblings and I had all practically grown up there. It was really just a slightly raised platform, partitioned off by a short Tuscan-style fake stone wall and a wrought iron baby gate. My avocado green Easy-Bake oven was still in there.

Esther Williams would unroll her mat on the matching avocado green shag rug and plop the DVD player down on the wall. She’d exercise along with a DVD—sometimes yoga, sometimes tai chi, sometimes
Solo Salsa with Sizzle
. Then she’d watch an Esther Williams movie, maybe
Million Dollar
Mermaid
or
Dangerous When Wet
. After that, she’d flip through a magazine or take a nap. If any kids showed up, they’d just play around her. It wasn’t like she got in anyone’s way.

Four hours was a long time for a hair color. In fact it was eight times longer than the Clairol professional directions recommended. But about three or four years ago, I’d just finished brushing on Esther Williams’s color. I covered her hair in a clear plastic cap to build up the heat and accelerate the color. I tucked cotton under the elastic to absorb any drips.

She made a funny sound.

“I don’t feel so good,” she said. She had one hand up by her shoulder, like she was pledging allegiance.

She didn’t look so good either. She was having a hard time catching her breath, and she was all fluttery and anxious. I called 911 and went back to hold her hand until the ambulance came.

While we waited, I thought hard about rinsing off her color.

On the one hand, I didn’t want to be responsible for killing her.

On the other hand, Esther Williams was a tough cookie. If she made it, I knew she’d be the one to kill me if her hair fell out.

Summer Blowout

23

In the end, I was afraid to risk a rinse. I followed her out to the ambulance, then got back to work. Four hours later, a cruiser pulled up and a cop walked Esther back into the shop.

He waited while I rinsed off her color and styled her hair, then drove her home. She said it was the best damn dye job she ever had. And so now she always sat for exactly four hours.

I took the last pink plastic roller out of Esther Williams’s hair and started teasing it with a rattail comb. After I got her the volume she liked, I gave her enough aerosol spray to last her for at least a week.

“You’re gorgeous,” I said when I finished.

“What else is new?” she said. “Okay, now give me some eyes.”

I gave her some eyes, smoky eyes at that. Almay color cream eye shadow in Mocha Shimmer, Bobbi Brown long-wear gel eyeliner in Black Ink, and NYC eyelashes. They were self-adhesive, but I added some extra glue anyway, just to make sure she didn’t lose one before I saw her again. Next came lots of Maybelline Great Lash mascara in Very Black. Then I gave her some lips with Max Factor Lipfinity in Passionate.

“Now go get Lucky,” Esther Williams said.

My father had been trying to get people to call him Lucio since he’d opened this salon thirty-five years ago. But he was still Lucky Larry Shaughnessy to almost everyone in Marshbury, Massachusetts.

“Sorry,” I said the way he always told me to. “He’s off getting ready for the staff meeting.” The truth was he was tiptoeing around, hiding from Esther Williams.

“Handsome hunka burning man, that dad of yours. Don’t let anyone tell you different. What’s he need meetings for? He could sell this place for a million bucks and retire until his next life started up.”

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The parking lot alone was probably worth a million bucks.

My father’s raised ranch, with the Italianate columns, two-tiered fountain, and attached salon he’d added, overlooked Marshbury harbor. It was just about the only waterfront property on the street that hadn’t been ripped down for midrise condos with street-level shops. Even though the house and salon had been there the longest, they looked more like in-truders with every passing year.

“Yeah,” I said. “But then who would he boss around?”

“Me.” Esther Williams put her glasses back on and leaned into the mirror for a closer look. “I keep telling him. He should try an older woman once before he dies.”
THE FRIDAY STAFF MEETING
was our family’s version of Sunday dinner. As soon as we closed the salon and everybody got there, my father called in the pizza order. That gave us about twenty minutes to tend to business before the food arrived.

Even if you weren’t related, you stayed for at least a slice of pizza. And sometimes the stylists who weren’t working arrived early, so they could experiment. Two of the newest stylists had been there for about an hour already today, practicing updos on each other. Now they both looked like they needed to find a prom fast.

“
Woilà
,” one of them said, pinning down the other’s final curl with a bobby pin.

Mario and I looked at each other. “
Woilà
?” we both mouthed.

My father came in through the breezeway door, wearing a long white tunic over bell-bottom jeans. This is a challenging Summer Blowout

25

look for a man to pull off, especially one over seventy, but he managed. He was flipping through the day’s mail, separating the letters from Realtors and developers from the pack. “Barracudas,” he said. “They’re all a bunch of barracudas.” He crumpled up the unopened letters and threw them into the wastebasket behind the reception counter.

He put the rest of the mail down on the counter and started snapping his fingers, alternating hands the way beatniks did when they heard a good poem in the ’60s. “Hear ye, hear ye,” my father said. “The court’s in session and here comes da judge.”

This was our signal to arrange our chairs in a semicircle around him. I put mine down as far away from Sophia’s as I could get. My father stopped snapping so he could finger the
cornicello
that hung from a thick gold chain around his neck.

It was made out of bright red coral capped in a gold crown, and it was shaped like a horn. Maybe if we were really Italian I’d know whether
cornicello
was actually even the word for horn.

I knew there were pedophiles and bibliophiles, even Fran-cophiles. But my father was the only Italiophile I’d ever met. I thought it might be partly the businessman in him: an Italian hair salon just sounded way more glamorous than an Irish one would. I mean, how much money could you really charge at Salon de Seamus, especially if you lived in the part of Massachusetts everybody called the Irish Riviera? But he’d also spent his very first honeymoon with his very first wife in a borrowed house in Tuscany. The Lucky Larry Shaughnessy and Mary Margaret O’Neill Italy Experience had had an irrev-ocable impact on him, not to mention the first names of all his future children.

“Any more wedding news?” Angela asked Mario.

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Mario turned to Todd. Todd was Mario’s husband, our accountant-slash-business manager, and along with Mario, one of the two fathers of Andrew, my nephew and the groom-to-be. Ours was not an uncomplicated family.

They both shook their heads. “Just that Amy’s parents are driving them crazy,” Mario said. “They wanted a simple wedding, but things are getting more out of control every day. Apparently they like to do it up big in Atlanta. I still can’t believe they’re having it at the Margaret Mitchell House.”

“Will you get to watch
Gone With the Wind
?” one of the stylists asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think it’s right before the vows.”

“Tell me again,” my father said. “Are the bride’s parents queer, too?”

“Of course they are,” Mario said, even though they were really just Southern. “By the way, Dad, Donald Trump called. He said he wants his hair back.”

There were lots of unusual things about our family, not the least of which was our father’s hair. It was actually darker than The Donald’s and painstakingly styled by my father. Every morning he started with a handful of thickening mousse.