Allison met his eyes and nodded. “I’ll tell him,” she promised.
Eleven
The day before Easter was always a busy time at Get Nailed. A lot of their clients attended church and wanted to look their best. She knew it was an important religious feast day, but Teri wasn’t much interested in church. It wasn’t how she’d been raised. Her mama was a single mother with three kids, struggling to make ends meet. She could barely keep them fed and clothed, let alone teach them about church. Teri, the eldest, had dropped out of high school at sixteen to attend beauty school and had her license the day she turned eighteen.
She was good at her job, but it wasn’t the career she really wanted. Teri would’ve liked to spend her time around books. Be a librarian or even work in a bookstore or something like that. She was constantly reading. Her house had stacks of paperbacks in every room—romances and mysteries and biographies. Any title that caught her eye. Most of her extra cash went to books. With her lack of a social life outside the salon, they were great company.
Being a stylist suited her well enough, and it paid the bills. Fortunately, she was talented and kept up with current styles; she also had a decent clientele. Her first customer of the day was Justine Gunderson, who came in for a trim.
“I heard about what you did,” Justine teased her as she sat in Teri’s chair. Word had spread throughout the community. People talked, of course, and she’d been questioned again and again about meeting Bobby Polgar.
Teri studied Justine’s thick, straight hair, which hung down her back—the kind of hair they had in shampoo advertisements, healthy and shiny. Teri’s own had been dyed, cut and permed so often she’d forgotten the original color. Dishwater blond, she guessed. At the moment it was dyed brown with red highlights, and she wore it ultra-short and spiked with gel. She was thinking of dyeing it black next week when there was a lull in the schedule. She’d see if she could get Jane to do it for her.
“I’m impressed,” Justine said. “You cut Bobby Polgar’s hair.”
People still talked about how she’d appeared at the televised chess match and bullied her way in to see the world-famous chess player. For pride’s sake, she’d made it seem easy; in truth it’d taken a lot of effort.
Her arrival had caused a scene with those unpleasant security people. When they found her scissors, the guards acted as though she was some dangerous lunatic. She’d made such a fuss that Bobby himself had come out to see what she wanted, which was the only reason she’d even had a chance. He’d listened to her assessment that he needed a haircut and agreed to let her do it.
With several bodyguard types following, she’d been escorted in to Bobby Polgar’s suite. When she entered, all kinds of people were milling about, giving him advice and making suggestions about the next chess match with the Russian. The moment Teri stepped into the fray, Bobby had lifted his hand and the room went silent. He’d stared at her, so she stared back. She’d told him to sit down, draped a towel over his shoulders and retrieved her scissors from one of the security people.
“Like I said, your hair is what’s distracting you,” Teri had told him. “You don’t need other people’s advice. You know what you’re doing better than anyone.” In retrospect, it was a bold statement and Teri couldn’t quite understand why she even cared about this man and his silly chess match. All she knew was that she had this compelling urge to go to him and cut his hair. Go figure. She was the impulsive type and…well, it’d worked. Didn’t matter if she couldn’t explain it.
Most everyone wanted to know what Bobby had said to her. This was the confusing part. A few minutes after she showed up, Bobby had asked everyone else to leave, and then it was just the two of them. She wished she had some fantastic story to tell, but she didn’t. She’d simply cut his hair and left. The entire time she was in that room, he probably didn’t say a dozen words to her. Not until she was back in Cedar Cove did she learn that he’d won the next match and the one after that.
“Have you heard from him since?” Justine asked.
Teri arranged the cape over Justine’s shoulders and fastened it. “Me? Nah. I didn’t even tell him my name.”
“He didn’t talk to you?”
“Not really. Nothing I’d consider a conversation, anyway.” In fact, Bobby Polgar hadn’t even bothered to pay her, which was a damn shame since she’d had to borrow twenty bucks to get to Seattle. But then, to be fair, Teri hadn’t asked for payment.
“What’s Bobby like?”
Teri held up a comb as she thought about Justine’s question. All week people had been asking her that and she was never sure what to tell them. “It’s hard to say, seeing he wasn’t all that communicative. He’s intense and…” She wanted to say “peculiar” but that didn’t seem quite right. “Strange,” she finished. “He’s just strange.”
“They say he’s one of the greatest chess minds of our time.”
“He is the greatest chess mind of our time,” Teri corrected. That much she’d garnered from Bobby himself, not to mention his handlers.
“So you’re a fan?”
“Not of Bobby, and not of chess, either. They don’t teach you much about the theory of chess in beauty school, you know?”
“So what interested you in Bobby?” Justine asked as they walked to the shampoo bowl.
“I don’t know,” Teri said slowly. “I saw him on television one morning and thought he was interesting looking. Then he lost that chess match. I knew what was wrong and that I could help him. I do stuff like that. People need something, and I do what I can. My mother’s the same way, God bless her.” Her mother also had a tendency to fall for the wrong guys, another trait Teri was afraid she’d inherited. At least Teri didn’t see any reason to marry them. She’d been through three or four rocky relationships, none of which had lasted more than six months. They’d all ended with her wanting to kick herself for being so stupid. Teri liked to think of herself as savvy and smart; life, however, had a way of proving her wrong.
Teri lowered Justine’s head into the shampoo bowl. Their eyes met, and Teri offered her a quick smile as she turned on the water.