Paid in Full

The founder of clips.com arrived at my grandfather's barbershop at 6:52 on a Tuesday morning. The shop opens at eight. He did not know that, because there is no way to find out except by walking past.

I am Gina Deluca, thirty-three, a first-year lawyer. The day before, a federal judge had refused to make Sal Deluca stop calling his shop Clips. Clips.com was still technically suing him. Its founder was standing on the sidewalk, holding an envelope.

I was there because Desmond Achterberg had texted me at five in the morning. The text said only: He's coming straight from the airport. I could not stop him. I did not try.

---

Owen Thackery was forty-four. He wore a gray hooded sweatshirt under a navy blazer. I gather founders wear that to show they could have worn a suit. He looked like his photograph on the clips.com About page, but more tired, and less sure of where to stand.

Desmond was beside him, messenger bag and all. Behind them, Rafi was trying very hard not to film anything. He had both hands in his pockets, as if his phone might escape on its own.

Sal unlocked the door at 6:58. He looked at Owen for a long time. He did not say anything about the twenty-one years.

"Sit," he said. "We'll talk."

Owen sat down in the chair immediately. He did not even look at the emergency chair. I glanced at Desmond. Desmond was still standing by the coat rack, exactly where he had stood the first time.

"You remember me," Owen said.

"You owe me six dollars," said Sal.

---

Owen held out the envelope. Inside were a five-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill. The five was old. It was the older design, the kind nobody has seen in a cash drawer for years.

"I kept it," Owen said. "In my wallet, since 2005. I kept meaning to come back."

"But you didn't," said Sal.

"Then the company happened, and then it was ten years, and then it was too long to come back without a reason."

"You needed a reason for a haircut?"

"I needed a reason to say I was sorry I never paid." He looked at his hands. "And then my company sued you. So now I have two reasons."

Sal took the envelope. He put the six dollars in the cash drawer. Then he opened Volume Forty-Seven on the counter and picked up his pencil.

"Did you know?" I asked Owen. "About the letter?"

"No." He said it so fast that I believed him.

"We have a program. It sends letters to anybody named Clips. I approved it eight years ago in a meeting about forty other things. I never thought about what it would find."

He turned in the chair to look at the window. The sign read backward from inside. CLIPS — EST. 1979.

"It found the original," he said.

---

Then he told us the story. Benny arrived halfway through it. It was Tuesday, so that was allowed.

In 2004, Owen was a twenty-two-year-old film student at the community college in Corwin. He had no money and a borrowed camera. He needed footage for a class. A friend told him about a barber in Harwick Falls who let people sit and talk.

"I asked if I could film the customers," Owen said. "Just telling stories. Thirty seconds each. And Sal said yes, as long as I swept up."

"You were a bad sweeper," Sal said.

"I was a terrible sweeper." Owen laughed. "Every week I'd come in with the camera. And every week you'd look up and say, More of your little clips?"

The shop went quiet.

"That's where the name came from," Owen said. "Not from the shop, from you."

He looked at Sal in the mirror. "You called them clips. I thought it was the best word I'd ever heard."

I looked at the ledger entry in my head. Calls them his "clips." My grandfather had put the word in quotation marks. I had assumed he was quoting Owen.

He had been quoting himself.

"I don't remember saying that," Sal said.

"You wrote it down," I said.

He considered this for a moment. "Then I said it."

---

Owen got the Number Four. He did not ask for anything else. Halfway through, he closed his eyes. I think it was the first time in years someone had told him what to do and he had been relieved.

While Sal worked, Owen and Desmond and I settled the case. It took about twenty minutes. Harriet joined by phone, on speaker, from her office. I could hear her eating sunflower seeds the whole time.

Clips.com would drop the lawsuit. It would put in writing that Sal's shop had used the name Clips since 1979, and could use it forever. The brand-protection program would be switched off by the end of the week. Every one of the eleven hundred businesses it had written to would get a letter of apology.

"Signed by a person," Desmond said. "I'll sign them myself."

"All eleven hundred?" I asked.

"I'll sign them the boring way," he said, and I liked him very much.

"What about the video?" Rafi asked from the doorway. "The one that got taken down?"

Owen opened one eye. "It's back up. I restored it myself at the airport."

"How many views?"

"I don't know." He closed the eye again. "For once, I didn't check."

Rafi looked at Sal, then at the window, then at the sign. "Can I check?"

"Outside," said Sal.

Owen offered money, a lot of it. Sal refused every number.

Owen offered to rename the studio in Corwin. Sal said he didn't care what it was called, as long as nobody there called the haircuts the Number Four.

"There is one thing," Sal said, lowering the scissors.

"Anything."

"The name Clips was my word first." He tapped the green ledger.

"You can borrow it. One dollar a year."

Owen opened his eyes in the mirror. "That's a license."

"I don't know what that is. It's a dollar a year."

"I'll pay," Owen said. "How do I pay?"

"In person," said Sal.

---

On the speakerphone, Harriet stopped chewing.

"Is it in writing?" she asked.

Sal picked up his pencil. He wrote in Volume Forty-Seven while we all watched. I read it over his shoulder.

Owen T., 44. The Number Four. Paid $6. Borrowing the name, $1 a year, square.

"It's in writing," I said.

"That's binding," said Harriet. "I'll draft the formal version anyway. Gina, you're doing the footnotes."

Benny unfolded his newspaper. For the first time in forty-seven years, he did not open it to the obituaries. He opened it to the local section. There was a photograph of Sal in front of the courthouse, buttoning his funeral suit.

"Look at that," Benny said. "Harwick Falls barber wins."

He folded it carefully. "Not dead. Front page."

---

Owen left at nine. Rafi was allowed to film him leaving, with permission, on the sidewalk.

Owen made a short clip for clips.com. In it, he said one sentence to the camera. The best thing on this site was filmed in a barbershop in 2004. Then he paid Rafi a dollar for the camera work. Rafi framed it.

Desmond stayed behind. He stood by the coat rack while Sal swept, which Sal only does when he is thinking.

Finally Sal leaned the broom against the wall. He went to the counter. He took a sheet of paper and an envelope from the drawer and wrote something by hand. He sealed it and held it out to Desmond.

"For Owen," he said.

Desmond took it. He read the front. Then he showed it to me. It was addressed in pencil, in my grandfather's careful capitals.

CEASE AND DESIST.

"May I?" Desmond asked. Sal nodded. Desmond opened it and read it aloud, slowly, the way he reads everything.

"Mr. Thackery. You are hereby ordered to cease and desist staying away. Every six weeks, no appointment, the Number Four. S. Deluca, Clips, Est. 1979."

He folded it in thirds and put it into the messenger bag, very carefully, the way you put away a gift someone wanted.

"I'll deliver it personally," he said. "I'm just the messenger."

"Then sit," said Sal. "We'll talk."

Desmond Achterberg looked at the chair for a long moment. Then he took off his gray jacket, hung it on the coat rack, and sat down.

Sal wrote him in the Book. Desmond A., 48. The Number Four. Finally.