“No,” he said, “and I’m still having trouble believing you.”
She fluffed her hair. “Well, I just touched it up last week, so it shouldn’t show, but if you look closely maybe you can see the roots.”
She leaned toward him, and he looked down into her hair. Was there some gray showing at the roots? He couldn’t really tell, it was hard to put the image into focus at that range, but what he did notice was the smell of her hair, all fresh and clean.
She straightened up, and her face looked a little flushed. All that coffee, he thought. She said, “You want to keep from being recognized, right? I have some ideas. Let me think about it, and tomorrow we’ll see what we can do.”
“All right.”
“Do you want any more coffee? Because I’ve already had more than I should.”
“I feel the same way.”
“I’ll show you to your room,” she said. “It’s a nice room. I think you’ll like it.”
24
In the morning he showered in the upstairs bathroom, then put on the same clothes and went downstairs. She had breakfast on the table, grapefruit halves and French toast with syrup, and after a second cup of coffee she got her Ford Taurus out of the garage and gave him a ride to where he’d parked the Sentra. There was a ticket on it, as she’d said there might be, but what would they do if it went unpaid? Send a summons to a broken-down farm in eastern Tennessee?
He followed her back home, and parked in her garage as instructed, while she left the Taurus in the driveway. “You’re going to stay here for a while,” she’d told him over breakfast, and he said he bet she was good at getting little kids to mind what she said. She said if she was being bossy that was just too bad. “I didn’t object when you saved my life,” she said. “So don’t give me grief when I return the favor, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s better,” she said. “It sounds funny, though. ‘Yes, ma’am.’”
“Whatever you say, chère. That better?”
“Now when did you turn into an Orleanean?”
“Huh?”
“Calling me chère.”
“That’s your name, isn’t it? It’s not? It’s what your father calls you.”
“It’s what everybody calls everybody,” she said. “In New Orleans. It’s French for dear. You order a po’boy for lunch, the old girl who brings it is apt to call you chère.”
“The waitress in the place I go in New York calls everybody hon.”
“Same idea,” she said.
But she didn’t say what her name was. Nor did he ask.
He sat at the round kitchen table in one of the oak captain’s chairs while she played barber. His shirt was off and she’d draped a bed-sheet over his shoulders. She was wearing faded jeans and a man’s white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and she looked a little like Rosie the Riveter in a patriotic World War II poster, only her rivet gun was the electric clippers from Walgreen’s.
Back in New York, Keller had gone to the same barber for almost fifteen years. The man’s name was Andy and he owned his own three-chair barbershop, and once a year he flew back to São Paulo to visit his relatives. That was all Keller knew about him, along with the fact that he was a heavy user of breath mints, and he didn’t suppose Andy knew very much about him, either, because his monthly visits were relatively silent affairs, and Keller almost always fell asleep in the chair and didn’t wake up until Andy cleared his throat and tapped the arm of the chair.
He didn’t expect to doze off now, but the next thing he knew she was telling him he could open his eyes. He did, and she steered him down the hall to the bathroom, where he looked long and hard at his reflection in the mirror. The face that gazed back at him was his face, that much was evident, but it looked very different from anything he’d ever seen in a mirror before.
His hair had been shaggy and now it was short, but not crew-cut short. It was just long enough to lie flat, and she’d shaped it in what had once been called an Ivy League style, or a Princeton. Add a tweed sport coat and a knit tie and a pipe and he might look almost professorial.
But she hadn’t just cut his hair, he realized. His forehead was higher, and his hairline indented at the temples. She’d used the clippers to create the illusion of a decade’s worth of male-pattern baldness, and added a good ten years to his appearance in the process. He tried different expressions, smiling and frowning, even glaring, and the effect was interesting. It seemed to him that he looked a good deal less dangerous, less like a man who could assassinate a governor and more like the trusted assistant who wrote his speeches.
He went back to the kitchen, where she was running a vacuum cleaner. She switched it off when she saw him and he told her he felt like Rip Van Winkle. “When I woke up,” he said, “I was ten years older. I looked like somebody’s lovable old uncle.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d like it. I have some ideas about the color, too, but what I’d like to do is wait a day or two so both of us can get used to it the way it is now, and then it’ll be easier to figure out what else to do.”
“That makes sense. But—”
“But it means staying here, is that what you were going to say? Last night you talked about how tired you were of running.”
“That’s true.”
“Don’t you think maybe it’s time to stop running, now that you’ve finally got a good chance? Your car’s parked off the street. No one can see it, but it’s there whenever you need it. You can have the room upstairs for as long as you want. No one else has any use for it and you’re not getting in anybody’s way up there. It’s no trouble at all cooking for one extra person, and if you start to feel guilty about imposing I’ll let you take me out for dinner every once in a while. I bet I know a restaurant or two you might like.”