Six days before clips.com expired, my sister covered our father's refrigerator in theories.
Each one was a strip from her label maker. She'd started after the call with Sloane Achterberg, the broker who'd offered two point six million for a blank web page. Teddy doesn't sleep when she's upset. She labels.
THEORY 1: SPY.
THEORY 2: SECRET SECOND FAMILY. (Gunnar's.)
THEORY 3: HE FORGOT TO CANCEL. (Also Gunnar's.)
THEORY 4: IT ISN'T HIS TO SELL — SO WHOSE?
"You can't forget to cancel for twenty-seven years," I said. "He filed every invoice in a sleeve."
"I didn't say it was a good theory," Gunnar said. "I said it was realistic."
He'd stayed. That surprised all of us, including Gunnar. He'd moved his flight to Sunday and was sleeping in his old room. There was a poster over the bed of a band that broke up in 1997.
Every morning he came down looking like a man who had spent the night being watched by a drummer.
Dad had said clips.com wasn't his to sell. So I did what I do at work. I made a timeline.
October 26, 1998: clips.com registered. Thirty-five dollars, paid by check.
That winter: Mom diagnosed.
August 1999: Mom died.
October 1999: first renewal, two months after the funeral.
"He renewed it two months after," Teddy said. "Who renews a website two months after his wife dies?"
"Somebody for whom it wasn't a website," I said.
Gunnar was quiet. He was looking at the kitchen chair by the window. The one with the wobble, the one nobody sat in.
"Clips," he said.
"What?"
"That's what she called it. First Sunday of every month. She cut our hair right there."
He pointed at the wobbly chair. "Towel around your neck. Newspaper on the floor. She'd put a sign on the fridge that said CLIPS IS OPEN."
I remembered it the second he said it. The smell of the spray bottle. The radio on low.
Mom snipping above my ear and asking if I wanted it the same as always. Me saying yes, because I always did.
Teddy didn't say anything.
"You remember, Teddy," Gunnar said. "You were there."
"I was seven." She peeled a label off its backing and didn't stick it anywhere.
"I don't remember her," she said. "Not really. I remember a green coat and that she sang the wrong words. Everyone else has a mom. I have a label maker."
It was the most honest thing anyone had said in that kitchen in a week. Nobody knew what to do with it. Gunnar got up and refilled a coffee he hadn't drunk.
We found the notebook in the basement that afternoon.
It was in a box marked INGRID in Dad's capitals, under a sewing machine and a bag of curlers. A blue spiral notebook, college-ruled. On the cover, in Mom's loopy handwriting, it said CLIPS — A REAL ONE.
It was a business plan.
She'd worked at a chain salon out by the highway for fifteen years. She wanted her own. Two chairs, maybe three. A storefront on Main Street, two doors down from the hardware store.
She'd priced everything. Chairs, mirrors, a sink that tilted. A neon sign she would never be able to afford.
"She priced things," Teddy said, looking at me.
"Everybody prices things."
"No. Not everybody. You and Dad price things." She turned the page. "And Mom, apparently."
There was a line on page six that stopped all of us.
Walter got us the website name today! clips.com. He says the internet is a fad. He says nobody will ever buy a haircut through a computer. He paid the $35 anyway.
The plan kept going for a few more pages. Lease numbers. A logo with scissors. Then the pages simply stopped, halfway through a list of shampoo suppliers, in February.
Nobody spoke for a while. Somewhere upstairs, the furnace clicked on.
"Well," Gunnar said finally. His voice had gone strange. "That answers it. It was hers."
"It isn't his to sell," Teddy said. "It's Mom's."
"Mom's been gone twenty-seven years," Gunnar said. "Let's be—"
"If you say 'realistic,'" Teddy said, "I'm going to label you."
We walked down Main Street before dinner. None of us said why. We just put on our coats at the same time.
That's how families decide things. Somewhere below speech, before anyone votes.
Brekke Hardware had a handwritten sign in the window. CLOSED FOR FAMILY. THANK YOU FOR FORTY-ONE YEARS. —W.
He had written it himself, in August. Otis had only taped it up.
Two doors down was the storefront from the notebook. It had been a video rental place, then a tax preparer, then nothing. The window was papered over. A FOR LEASE sign had faded to the color of weak tea.
"That's it," Gunnar said. "That's the one she wanted."
"How do you know?"
"Because she walked us past it every Sunday after Clips. She'd stop and look in. I thought she was checking her hair in the glass."
I did the appraisal before I could stop myself. Fourteen hundred square feet.
Old tin ceiling. Water stain in the back corner, probably the roof drain. Maybe nine hundred a month, in Asker Lake.
"Don't," Teddy said, without looking at me.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were pricing the ceiling."
I was. It was a good ceiling.
Gunnar put his hand flat on the papered glass, the way you'd test a door for heat. He kept it there for a while.
"She'd have hated the name," he said. "Clips. She'd have changed it six times and kept it anyway."
"That's what Dad did with everything," Teddy said. "Changed nothing and kept it anyway."
The fight started over dinner, which was Lindgren tuna casserole. It was the only dish nobody had claimed.
Gunnar wanted to sell. He'd wanted to sell from the start. But now, with Mom's notebook on the table, he finally said why.
"My partner left the practice in March," he said. "Took half the patients. I'm carrying a lease on a building I can't fill."
He stabbed a noodle. "I'm fine. I'll be fine. But I won't pretend a million dollars wouldn't help."
"Why didn't you tell Dad?" I asked.
"Because Dad would have offered me the store's savings. And I'd have had to say no. And then we'd both have been polite about it for a year."
"So you just didn't call," Teddy said.
"I called."
"Twice a year. Christmas and his birthday."
She set her fork down. "I set a reminder for you once, on your phone, when you visited. You deleted it."
"I didn't need a reminder."
"You left," Teddy said. "Two weeks after Mom's funeral. Maren was thirteen. She made my lunches."
Her voice was shaking now. "She signed my permission slips in Dad's handwriting, because he was at the store until eight."
Gunnar put his fork down. "I was eighteen. I'd already been accepted. Dad told me to go."
"Dad tells everybody to go. That's what Dad says."
"Said," Gunnar said quietly.
It landed on the table like a dropped plate. Teddy got up and went out the back door without her coat. Gunnar sat very still, looking at the wobbly chair.
I didn't follow either of them. I did what I always do when people are upset. I went back to the paperwork.
The binder was still in the den. I sat in Dad's chair and went through the clips.com invoices again.
Slowly this time, the way I read a roof report. Not the totals. The line items.
1998: Domain registration, one year. $35.00. Mail service, 1 mailbox. $0.00, introductory.
1999: Domain renewal, one year. Mail service, 4 mailboxes. $12.00.
I checked 2000. Four mailboxes. 2001. Four.
Every year after, all the way to last October. Four mailboxes, renewed, paid for, never cancelled.
I sat back in the chair. The pipe smell came up out of the upholstery like a ghost clearing its throat.
Dad hadn't been keeping a website. Nobody had ever put anything on clips.com.
He'd been keeping mail.
Four mailboxes. Four people. And twenty-seven years of somebody using them.
Up next: The Usual
Continue to Part 4 →