“When are you going to fix it?” His voice was right next to her ear. He had the good grace not to mention her mental tirade on his sloppiness. Instead he asked about the medicine cabinet mirror. The cracked mirror. The crack had been there the day she moved in six weeks after Cameron died. It bisected her face. One of her eyes appeared to be an inch above the other. One side of her short, dark hair was an inch longer. Chopped in half, her image looked at least five years older than her thirty-two years.
The phone rang. She jumped. No one ever called. Well, almost no one. Sometimes Sunny Wright from the temp agency had to get hold of her. But never before seven a.m.
Max let it ring. Twice. Three times. On the fourth, the old-fashioned message machine picked up. She’d bought it at a thrift store so that Sunny could leave messages. Money and work were limiting factors in her life. She’d rather have remained unreachable.
She listened to her own terse message, then waited.
“Hi, Max, you there?” Pause. A woman’s voice. “It’s Sutter.”
Of course, she knew it was Sutter.
“Sutter Cahill.” She said it like Max would have forgotten her best friend’s name. Then Sutter sighed. “Guess you’re not there. Just checking on you. Louis says meow. He misses you. Call me sometime.” Click.
Max’s heart stopped for a full minute. Okay, a slight exaggeration. Finally, it kicked in, beating as if she’d had a shot of adrenaline.
“Why didn’t you pick up?” Cameron whispered.
Why? Because she hadn’t spoken to Sutter in almost two years. Her best friend since college. Her only close friend besides Cameron. Because she missed Louis, too, and had from the day she’d dropped the cat off on Sutter’s front porch with a note begging her to take care of him. “I wasn’t good company then.”
“That was then, this is now.”
“You’re so profound.” Better a little anger than the tears that pounded just behind her eyes. Max wasn’t a crier.
“You stopped talking to her because you were afraid she’d see me in my ghostly form.”
Sutter’s special gift was seeing ghosts. “I was afraid she wouldn’t see you, then I’d know I was crazy.”
“You were afraid she’d find out what my murderers did to you the night I died.”
A numbing cold spread through her chest. She hated this discussion, but rather than fight, she ignored it.
“Why is she still calling after all this time?” Sutter called every couple of weeks. Max did a quick calc in her head. “That’s forty-nine calls without an answer. You’d think she’d give up.”
“Sutter was never a quitter.” The unspoken accusation was evident in Cameron’s flat tone.
“I’m not a quitter, either.” Most of the time.
Cameron didn’t say anything at all. He didn’t have to. They both knew that the night Cameron left her, she’d quit on her job, her best friend, her cat, and her life.
She looked at her disjointed image in the mirror. “I’ll get that crack fixed today,” she told herself.
*
Max found Tiffany’s salon on Grand Avenue five blocks from the Round Up. A Cut Above. Catchy name on a semi-posh street. No ten-dollar-a-generic-cut establishment, the place was definitely a cut above her price range. In the middle of the block, it was nestled between a dress boutique and a Christian reading room. Max wondered what the Christians thought of the sexy styles and exposed flesh adorning the salon’s windows.
The “Help Wanted” sign in the front window, advertising for a receptionist, was the karmic break Max had been looking for.
Witt had said Tiffany worked as a hairdresser. But when Max entered the modest-from-the-outside shop, she knew Tiffany had not merely worked here. She had become a stylist in A Cut Above. Her occupation had defined her. Max felt it in the white marble floors, the gold-flecked, mirrored tiles on the walls, and the rows of expensive cosmetics in the discreetly lighted counter display. And in the noise. Deafening. Wonderful. Tiffany would have thrived in the bedlam. Blow dryers, phones, high-pitched female voices, laughter, running water, new age background music. Four of the stations were occupied, the stylists dressed in tiger-striped smocks and the patrons draped in leopard cover-ups. The spacious digs would give clients a sense of privacy. Nothing over-crowded in this atmosphere.
Max’s nostrils smarted with the scent of bleach and perm solution, and her eyes crossed from the animal print attire.
“May I help you?” asked the sole male in this feminine world. He appeared to be mid-sixties, both in age and dress. He wore a black frock-coat with a raised cleric collar. The style, if Max remembered correctly, was called Nehru. Gold chains covered his chest and ripe belly. Gold spectacles perched on his nose. Besides the mass of his belly and his retro dress, his outstanding features were his shiny bald head and his lobeless ears.
Max had dropped in for a quick cut and a chance to check the layout. The ad in the window had changed her mind. “I’d like to apply for the receptionist job.”