Snow Day: a Novella Read Online Free Page B

with kind eyes, at least when he turned them on his customers, and he always wore a mustard yellow barber’s smock with red piping and short sleeves. He had slick, shiny hair combed straight back. His wire-framed glasses were set above a small nose and a tiny patch of facial hair above his upper lip, what Frank called a “Hitler mustache”, and a smile that showed off rows of perfectly straight teeth, or maybe they were dentures, I can’t say for sure. We never knew his real name; we just called him Luigi because he spoke with a thick Italian accent that most of us kids couldn’t make out. Looking back, he wasn’t even that old, not compared to my Pop-Pop, but I guess he was old to us so the name stuck – ol’ Luigi. So much for being politically correct; it was the ‘70s after all.
    Mr. Schneider was one of ol’ Luigi’s regulars, though most people couldn’t see why, because Mr. Schneider didn’t have much on his head. He had little more than a halo of wispy hair around a bald crown. It reminded me of the San Diego Padres team logo at the time, the one with the balding Friar swinging a Louisville Slugger from his toes. But Mr. Schneider came in like clockwork, every few weeks. Sometimes, and this started happening more often, he just came in for a hot shave. But he wasn’t really there for the grooming. After a while, I came to understand it was something else, something about the place, the atmosphere maybe.
    When Mr. Schneider came to visit, there was always a game on the radio and several customers in the long row of waiting chairs; they’d be reading the paper, or listening to Phil Rizzuto call a Yankee game. Often, men would come to Luigi’s place, but not for a shave or a cut. They would just look at Luigi who would nod to a door at the back of the shop. It led to a narrow hallway, a little office next to a tiny john, and a fire exit that led to a parking lot on the other side of the building. A nod from Luigi and those customers were through the back door never to re-emerge, presumably having left through the fire exit. I didn’t go back there much, except to get the broom, or the mop and bucket, or to wash the aprons and towels in the old second-hand washer and dryer units that sat just inside the fire exit. Mostly I just sat in the front of the shop and swept and cleaned the blades, or ran errands, especially at lunch time. An Italian hoagie from Al John’s around the corner was Luigi’s usual, with extra onions, hot peppers, oil and vinegar. Sometimes, I forgot the onions on purpose and blamed it on the kid at Al John’s.
    In the front of the shop, the muffled sound of ringing phones could be heard coming from the office. They rang often. Sometimes an old woman would come out from the back office, where she was tending those ringing phones. Sometimes she had slips of paper in her hand. When she did, Luigi would pause from cutting a customer’s hair and the kindness in his eyes would be gone. They would talk, often argue, always in Italian, which no one but they understood, until he finally chased her back into the office with a combination of emphatic words and gestures. I thought they might have been curse words, but I was never sure. Then Luigi would turn back to the mirror in front of his raised barber chair, where his customer sat patiently. He would nod and shrug at the customer and the smiling eyes would return as his shears resumed their work. Don’t mind the old woman in the back, his expression would say, she’s nothing .
    I never got to know the old woman, not her name nor who she was. For the most part, she just stayed back there answering the ringing phones. Whenever I’d go in the back to get something she would close the office door so I couldn’t see or hear what she was doing. The few times I saw her step out of the office she would always carefully lock the door behind her.
    From what I could tell, Mr. Schneider enjoyed his visits to the shop. He was always smiling and