“He meant the greatest student he didn’t teach, Marco,” Ethan said, cleaning off his blades. “Didn’t you, Giovanni?”
Giovanni groaned. “I forgot you were a smartass. I might have guided your hands, but you still learned from watching me, didn’t you? Hmh…speaking like you just woke up a barber one morning.” He caused both Marco and Ethan to snicker.
“Good to you have back, Ethan, now help us get rich too.” Marco laughed, nodding to the line of people waiting.
“How rich we talkin’?” Ethan turned his chair.
“Very,” both Marco and Giovanni said at the same time.
“Greedy bastards,” Ethan muttered, though I could tell he was enjoying it.
“So be it,” Giovanni said, walking back to his chair and his very, very patient client apparently. “Gabby, bring out a stool for Mrs. Callahan! And say hello to your godfather!”
He shouted, and a young girl, no older than eight or nine, with curly blond hair, stuck her head out from behind the door of the shop. Her hazel eyes stared at me and then she turned to Ethan. A huge grin spread across her face as she burst out of the doors fully and hugged him.
“Uncle Ethan!”
“She’s still a hugger, I see,” Ethan said to Marco.
Marco frowned. “Only to you, it seems. No loyalty, that one.”
“I haven’t seen Uncle Ethan in forever!” She squeezed tighter, and Ethan raised his arms, staring down at her.
“Is that why your Christmas list gets so bloody long every year?” he asked her.
She flashed her teeth at him, one of them missing on the bottom. “Yep!”
“So now that you’ve seen and hugged me near death, you won’t need anything this year.”
Her hands dropped along with her smile and all the men within the barbershop laughed as she looked heartbroken.
“Uncle, you’re mean.” She pouted.
“So I’ve been told.” He put his hand on her and turned her until she was facing me. “Luckily my wife is much nicer. Send her your lists from now on and she’ll handle it.”
“REALLY?” She brushed Ethan’s hands off and walked over to me. “Hold on, Aunty, let me get you a chair.” She rushed behind the curtains.
“You’re right. No loyalty at all.” Ethan shook his head, staring at where she had disappeared behind the doors.
“Here, Aunty.” Gabby put the black padded stool just off to the side of Ethan as he called up a boy who looked about twelve. He took off his baseball hat when he sat on the chair.
“Thanks, Gabby,” I said to her, sitting down.
“You’re welcome—”
“Oh no, you don’t.” Marco pointed at her. “No gift-getting, or wish-making until I see that C-morph into an A.”
Gabby pulled out a piece of paper, lifted it up, and showed how if you turned a ‘C’ onto its side and put the ‘-’ inside it made an A.
I laughed so hard my sides hurt.
“Did you just forge your grades in front of me?” Marco asked her.
“No.” She hid the paper behind her back. “You didn’t say that a C-needed to be an A for me to make wishes.”
“She’s right,” Ethan replied, placing a white strip around the boy’s neck.
Marco sighed. “Just go.”
“We’ll talk later,” Gabby mouthed to me, and I nodded to her.
“Go!”
“I’m going!” She groaned, making a show of having to go back.
“So you all are family,” I replied when she was gone. That made more sense. I doubted Ethan would be so comfortable with people if they weren’t family.
“Very distant relatives of my mother,” Ethan said, not looking up at me as he concentrated.
“Very distant or not,” Marco said to me, “we’re still the only relatives Bloody Melody ever acknowledged.”
“Bloody Melody?” It sounded like a bad horror movie.
Ethan snickered. “My mother’s nickname. Apparently the Irish gave it to her after she married my father. And it stuck on the count of the fact that my mother was, well…not slow to use her fists.”
“Ha!” Giovanni scoffed. “Or gun. How many times did she shoot your father? Twice, correct?”
“Your mother shot your dad?” My jaw opened as I looked at him.
Ethan made a face. “I was hoping no one would ever tell her that. She is already temperamental as it is, and my mother left her the gun.”
“Hey!” I frowned, turning back to the guys. “She sounds like a hell raiser.”
“She was. May she rest in peace,” Giovanni said seriously as did almost everyone else in the shop, everyone but the kids, far too young to know her. And I remembered the letter she’d left me, where she said, You are now the head woman of this family. Act like it and make them talk about you as they talked about me.
I realized why Ethan had asked me if I could do it. The more I found out about his mother the bigger her heels became.
“So your mom was Bloody Melody. Did your dad have a nickname too?” I didn’t ask that. Instead, Gabby stuck her head back out.
We all just looked at her for a moment before looking back at Marco, who took a deep breath.
“His name was the Mad-Hatter,” Marco spoke through his teeth. “And I used to think it was because the man thought of the most insane ways to harm people, but now I’m thinking it must have been the stress of parenting.”
“Can’t be,” Gabby said back smugly. “If it were, you’d have a nickname too, right, Dad?”
Ethan paused from cutting the boy’s hair to laugh, actually out loud, in public.
“Get back in there and do your science homework!” Marco pointed his clippers at her.
“Science is boring!”
“GASP!” I put my hand over my heart, and she turned to me. “Science is amazing. What are you talking about? You can create almost anything through science. When I was nine, I won the science fair by creating an incalescent voltaic receptacle to hasten the growth cycles of potatoes.”
“A what?” her father asked before she could. And not just him. Everyone else was confused too. Even Ethan looked at me for a quick second.
“It was like an umm…” I tried to think. “It was a greenhouse that made potatoes or any other vegetable grow faster.”
“Oh…” They all said like a light bulb clicked in their minds.
“See? Look at that. At your age people were already creating incalescent voltaic receptacles,” Marco said to her, making her pout.
“I can’t gift to people who hate science,” I told her, crossing my arms.
I heard her gasp. “Uncle Ethan…”
“What the wife says goes,” he said, snipping the back of the boy’s hair with two different scissors.
She hung her head and turned around, marching back to her homework, but before she got there she turned to him.
“Do you have a nickname, Uncle?” she asked.
The whole room seemed to have frozen, everyone a little stiff, everyone a little wary, glancing at each other. Ethan, on the other hand, simply spun the boy in his chair, wiping him down before taking the cape and neck tape off.
“I do,” he said to her when the boy got up, checking his hair. “It’s Mani di forbice.”
“Cause you cut hair?” she asked him even though I didn’t understand.
“Sure.” He nodded at her.
She thought about it for a little bit. “It’s kinda long but cool, I guess. Dad, I’m going upstairs to call Mom!”