Clips.com had sued my grandfather in federal court, and its whole case came down to one word: continuous. Sal had to prove he had used the name Clips, every year, without a break, since 1979.
He had no phone, no website, no ads, and seven years of tax returns in a shoebox. What he had, it turned out, was a closet.
I am Gina Deluca, thirty-three, first-year lawyer. Until that evening I had believed I knew every inch of my grandfather's barbershop. I had swept its floor every summer through college and law school.
I did not know about the closet.
It was behind the hot-towel cabinet. Sal moved the cabinet by himself, which I asked him not to do, and which he did anyway. Behind it was a narrow door painted the same pale green as the wall.
"I didn't know that was there," I said.
"That's why it's painted green."
He opened it. Inside were shelves, floor to ceiling.
On the shelves were ledgers. Green clothbound ledgers, the same kind that sat on the counter by the cash drawer. They were lined up by year, with the dates written on the spines in black marker.
I counted them. I count everything.
There were forty-six. The forty-seventh was on the counter.
"Every customer," Sal said. "Since the first one."
I called Harriet from the shop on Rafi's phone. Rafi had come back when I texted him the word closet. He had not asked any questions. He had simply arrived, out of breath, holding the broom he had taken home by mistake.
"How many ledgers?" Harriet asked.
"Forty-seven."
"Dated?"
"Every entry. Name, haircut, price."
I heard a seed crack on the other end of the line. Then a long silence.
"I'm coming over," she said.
Harriet Pruitt had not left the office during business hours in the eleven weeks I had worked for her. She arrived at Clips in nineteen minutes. She was wearing reading glasses and carrying the jar of sunflower seeds under her arm like a football.
"Sit," said Sal. "We'll talk."
She sat in the emergency chair, on top of the obituaries. She did not even notice. I handed her Volume One.
The first page was dated Tuesday, April 3, 1979. The handwriting was neater than it is now, and the pencil was darker. There was one entry.
Benny S. The Number Four. $3.50.
Benny was in the corner. It was a Saturday, and Benny does not come on Saturdays, but he had heard the word closet from Rafi's cousin. He leaned over Harriet's shoulder and read it.
He did not say anything for a moment.
"First customer," Sal said. "You didn't know?"
"I thought I was the second," Benny said. His voice was a little thick. "There was a guy in a brown jacket ahead of me."
"He didn't stay. He wanted something different."
"What did he want?"
"Doesn't matter." Sal shrugged. "He didn't get it."
Harriet turned the pages. She turned them slowly, one at a time, the way she ate seeds.
Week after week, the entries went on. Names, haircuts, prices. Every haircut, every single one, was the Number Four.
"Is it in writing?" she said quietly, to nobody in particular.
Then she answered herself.
"It's in writing."
We spent the whole weekend in the shop with the door locked and a sign Rafi taped to the glass. It read CLOSED FOR LEGAL REASONS. Then he crossed it out and wrote CLOSED FOR FAMILY REASONS, because Sal said legal reasons sounded like we'd done something.
The job was to prove there were no gaps. Clips.com's lawyers would look for one missing season, one month with no entries, one moment when Sal stopped using the name. We had to find it before they did.
Harriet assigned the decades. She took the 1980s, and I took the 1990s. Rafi took 2000 to 2015 because, he said, he had been alive for some of it. Benny took the most recent years, which he read aloud.
"October 2023," he announced. "Benny S. The Number Four. Twelve dollars."
He turned the page. "Benny S. Benny S. Benny S."
"You come every week," Rafi said.
"I'm aware."
"You're on every page."
"Not me," Benny said. "Not yet." Then he frowned. "Wait, that's the wrong one."
The price went up four times in forty-seven years. The handwriting grew larger as Sal's eyes got worse. The haircut never changed.
On Saturday night, at about ten, Harriet found the 1987 blizzard. There were nine entries for that week instead of the usual sixty. All nine were the same name.
"Benny S.," she read. "Nine times in one week."
"The roads were closed," Benny said. "I lived on the corner. He was lonely."
"I was not lonely," said Sal. "I was open."
On Sunday morning I found my own name, from August 2015.
Gina D., 22. Trim. Free. First day teaching tomorrow.
It was the only entry in forty-seven years that was not the Number Four.
"You made an exception for me," I said.
"You were nervous," Sal said. "You wanted to look like a teacher. I cut one inch and called it a trim."
"I did look like a teacher."
"You looked like Gina with one inch less," he said. "That's the best anyone can do."
The gap was in 2011.
Rafi found it Sunday afternoon. He went very quiet, the way he does before admitting he has posted something.
"March 2011," he said. "There's three weeks where it's a different handwriting."
I looked. He was right. The entries were round and loopy, in blue ink instead of pencil. Every one said the same thing after the name.
The Number Four (Rosa's version).
Sal took the ledger from Rafi's hands. He held it the way he had held the clips.com letter on the first day, at arm's length, reading glasses on.
"That's your grandmother," he said to me. "I had my gallbladder out. She kept the shop open for three weeks."
"Did she know how to cut hair?"
"She'd watched me for thirty-two years." He touched the page once.
"She said her Number Four was better. She was wrong. But it was close."
My grandmother died in 2016. I had not seen her handwriting in ten years. I looked at it for a long time.
Harriet cleared her throat, which is as close as she comes to crying.
"Clips.com registered its mark in 2011," she said gently. "If those three weeks had been empty, they'd have had their gap. Your grandmother just won a federal case."
"She'd like that," Sal said. "She liked winning things."
It was nearly midnight on Sunday when Rafi found the other thing.
We were packing the volumes into boxes for court.
Rafi was flipping through Volume Twenty-Six, from 2004 and 2005, checking the page numbers. He stopped. He flipped back. He flipped forward three weeks and stopped again.
"Grandpa Sal," he said. "Who's Owen T.?"
Sal was wiping down the scissors. He did not look up.
"Kid from Corwin," he said. "Film student. He used to come in with a camera."
"A camera?"
"He'd film the customers telling stories in the chair. Little short ones."
Sal shrugged. "He said he was making a show. I said fine, as long as he swept up."
Rafi held the ledger out to me. His finger was on an entry from March 2005. The pencil was faded but readable.
Owen T., 23. The Number Four. Filmed again, calls them his "clips." Owes $6, says he'll pay me back when he's famous.
I read it twice. Then I looked at Rafi. He already had his phone out. He turned the screen toward me.
It was the "About" page of clips.com. There was a photograph of a man in his forties, smiling, in a gray hooded sweatshirt under a blazer. The caption gave his name and his title. It also gave his hometown.
Owen Thackery, founder and CEO. Born and raised in Corwin.
Up next: Forty-Seven Volumes
Continue to Part 5 →