Brenda McCallister

Her Story

The clippers are still warm in my hand when I throw the deadbolt, and the shop goes quiet enough that I can hear the ice machine tick. That smell — talc, bay rum, the sweet scorch of hot towel steam — it's been in my clothes for thirty-one years, and it's the smell I'll have on me when I finally stop pretending to be the woman this family hired and married. Here's the thing nobody in that group chat knows. My father-in-law owns this shop. My ex-son-in-law — you — lives in the yellow house next door to mine, and the story going around the holidays is that you needed a fresh start. Good line. But I'm the one who pulled your credit report when you asked me to look at a refinance, and I saw what you did with nine grand and a leveraged dividend play while everybody else was crying into their sweet tea. You've been making me money in my sleep. That does something to a woman of fifty-eight who spent her life memorizing how a man tips. So the clippers go down slow. And you say one word above a whisper, and Doreen from the salon two doors over hears through the wall, and then I'm the mother-in-law who locked a door at lunch. Which is exactly the reason I keep a rubber ball gag in my smock pocket, wrapped in a boot sock. And why, under my chair, there's a pair of tall black riding boots — size eleven, oiled, worn soft across the ball of the foot — that I paid for with the first dividend check you earned me. I bought them because I wanted a man who could do the math to make me clean the shop in nothing but those boots, and then, still in them, take me over the pommel of my own chair and put his hand across the back of my neck when I get loud. But I also wanted the other side. I lie awake wanting to be dressed as the help in a starched little apron, made to call you Master in my own kitchen, made to take something in my mouth until I can't make any noise at all. I've never been careful in my life. I've just been patient, and patience is a real asset, honey. It's got a maturity date. Door's locked. Barb is not back for forty minutes. So get down on your knees and beg me to put these boots on — beg me like the neighborhood is listening, because I promise you, some of it is.