Split Ends Read online

  splitends

  splitends

  kristin billerbeck

  Copyright © 2007 by Kristin Billerbeck

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other— except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc. books may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Billerbeck, Kristin.

  Split ends / Kristin Billerbeck.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59145-508-0 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 1-59145-508-1 (pbk.)

  1. Hairdressing—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.I44S65 2007

  813’.54—dc22

  2007005263

  Printed in the United States of America

  04 05 06 07 08 RRD 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Dedication

  To Rich and Christina Girerd: I don’t know how to explain friends like you. People who are there for others while facing terminal cancer together? I mean, what kind of people are those but incredibly-gifted-with-the-Spirit kind of people. I can say with the utmost certainty, there aren’t enough people like either one of you.

  Gosh, we have weathered single groups, weddings, and parenting together. My life is so much richer because of you both. Christina, thanks for the generous use of your husband when I needed a handyman or tech geek. Rich, thank you for all the organization and fun you brought into my family’s life. You will be greatly missed.

  There aren’t many friends willing to risk bodily harm to say what needs to be said. You’re both those kind of people, and may God bless you both for it. Rich, your legacy will remain.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Leslie Peterson, who got more than she bargained for in editing this manuscript, and to Jeana Ledbetter, my agent (the only agent I know willing to dine with four children, who aren’t hers, on a Disney high), who believed in me despite a few setbacks. I appreciate you both more than you can understand, more than I communicate.

  To my writing groups, ChiLibris and American Christian Fiction Writers, thank you for being there when I need to vent, ask questions, and just have a little human contact.

  And to Nancy Toback, who helped me find the voice of this book when it was lost in the wilderness that is my chaotic life. I love you, girl!

  To the ladies of Andrew James Salon—Heather, Vanessa, Natasha, and Dana—who gave me the first good hair days of my life. Talent is worth paying for! The best thing I ever did for my wild Italian hair is research this book.

  Lastly, thank you to Coffee Society in Cupertino and Red Rock in Mountain View, without which I very much doubt I would have been able to finish this manuscript.

  Prologue

  If I had known what success would cost me, I would have paid my fees for failure and called it a day. I thought my quest for financial solvency was a higher calling, a way to prove to my hometown that my mother and I had value and worth. In the end, I stand here with my feet in two separate worlds, belonging fully to neither.

  There are two engagement rings before me on the expansive, stainless steel countertop. One is from Tiffany’s, a classic platinum band and solitaire that I’m sure comes with all the proper GIA ratings. The other is from a mall jewelry store, miniscule and flawed, but sparkling with promise. This might give the impression that there’s a choice to make, but there isn’t. The sad truth is neither man would have made an offer of marriage had they known the truth.

  chapter 1

  Everyone wants to be Cary Grant.

  Even I want to be Cary Grant.

  ~ Cary Grant

  My entire life is strewn across the front yard, laid out for all to bear witness to my pathetic existence. I’m just glad I’m not dead yet. Can you imagine if this is what I had to show for my life?

  Bottles of professional-grade shampoo: $3

  “I’ll give you six for it,” Janey says.

  Lee Jeans, size 4: $5

  “Will you take ten?” Mrs. Rampas asks.

  Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but Mrs. Rampas hasn’t seen the likes of a 4 in, oh, at least a quarter century.

  “I’m having a garage sale!” I shout to my various neighbors. “Not passing the hat. You’re supposed to be jigging me down in price.”

  “Darling.” Eleanor Gentry, who is the epitome of what all good Christian women strive to be, strokes the back of my neck. “Darling, this town is so proud of you. We want to send you off in style. If we can help just a little, it makes us feel good.”

  “Don’t rob us of the blessing,” Mrs. Piper adds.

  “If we were young again, we’d go with you in a flash,” says Mrs. Rampas. “As it is, we’re brittle and on too many medications to stray far now.” They all cackle together. Truth be told, any one of them could probably run me into the ground on sheer strength.

  “Hollywood!” Mrs. Piper crows. “Can you imagine the excitement?” She drapes a summer dress of mine over her elbow.

  “You have to take a lot of pictures and stand on Clark Gable’s star for me, will you, dear?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll make it my Sunday outing. I hope to get to every star you introduced me to all those Saturday mornings.”

  I look up and see my friend Ryan, large and gentle (think the Baby Huey of men), huddled in between another group of church deaconesses. “Excuse me, ladies.”

  When I walk up the cracked driveway, Ryan flinches, stuffing a paper bag behind his back.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing,” he says with mock innocence.

  “What’s in your hands?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Let me see them, then?”

  A crackling of paper and then his palms appear. Ten-and twenty-dollar bills float down behind his feet.

  “What the heck? Can you produce men in that bag?” Inspired, I launch into song: “It’s raining men, hallelujah!”

  Ryan bends over and pecks at the bills until they’re all returned to the crunched paper bag. “We’re just having a good sales day. You asked me to help.”

  “Ryan, the sum total of my life is worth about forty-five dollars. I saw at least that there, and it doesn’t look like Furniture gets good prices at garage sales anything’s gone. If you want to help me—”

  “Furniture gets good prices at garage sales.” A broad smile covers his face. “I got twen
ty dollars for that computer desk alone.”

  “I didn’t pay that much more for it five years ago.” I look over at the desk, which is listing to one side, the keyboard drawer hanging miserably from underneath it. “If you sold it, why’s it still here?” I challenge him.

  “I offered to deliver it.”

  “To the dump, is that what you’re saying?”

  Ryan leans in close, pressing the paper bag full of cash into my stomach. He whispers into my ear (although all the townsfolk are watching us, so he might as well shout it.) “Take it, Sarah Claire. Think of it as a dollar donation for every pin curl you ever blessed this town with. It’s their way of giving you their blessing.”

  “Your wife’s going to be doing all those pin curls, you know.”

  Ryan’s fiancée and my best friend, Kate Halligan, is not here today. She’s at the Hideaway Hair Salon, working double time so all the ladies will be freshly curled, permed, and frosted for the church potluck tomorrow. Although it seems as if many of them are here, the truth is when social security checks are doled out, Sable is on fire with action.

  The salon is “base” in Sable, Wyoming. Home free. The only place I ever truly felt a part of something. For most people, I imagine that’s home. But most people don’t have to live with crazy rules and my mother. Even First Community Church, where many were warm to me, harbored the underlying current that I am my mother’s daughter and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. As the resident “bastard” in town, I didn’t belong among God-fearing people, especially if they had dateable sons.

  The church divided into camps, if you will. Those who fell into the “enemy” camp got their hair done elsewhere and left the Hideaway to me and those who offered the mothering and love I so craved. I imagine every church is that way to some extent. There are those who believe in blind truth (the law), those who believe in blind grace (forgiving everyone without thought to consequences), and those who combine the two and create a practical faith that actually translates.

  “She’s not going to be pin-curling for long,” Ryan says. “I nearly got enough saved for ten more head of cattle. She’s going to be the wife of a cattle baron one of these days.” He rattles his eyebrows, and inwardly I wince. Ryan’s a fabulous guy, but how realistic he is remains to be seen. He’s not exactly good with the cattle. One of his small herd actually died, and though the truth has never come out, rumor has it he let it feed on ragwort (poisonous to bovines). And then there was the rifle accident when he mistook one of his dad’s cows for a moose. So while I know that to be cattle is fatal by nature of the job, I think getting to the actual “beef ” portion of their fate is more difficult in the hands of Ryan the rancher.

  I smile at the thought of Kate in an apron, ringing a dinner bell. Naturally, she can’t cook. Nor has she ever picked up a can of cleaning spray. But for Ryan, she’ll try. She’ll fail miserably, but she’s so cute and such a “catch” for Sable that he’ll just laugh about it and hire her a maid. And a cook. And probably a nanny, too, when the time comes.

  She’ll be one of those women who stays cute until she's in the grave. She has that kind of sparkle. You know—the kind of girl who’s fifty and still flirting. Effectively. Kate will try to be the perfect wife until she gets bored with the role, and then she’ll have to do something more. She’ll lead up the town’s library fund-raiser or organize one thousand frozen turkeys being sent to the poverty stricken. Whatever it is, she’ll come out the hero, even if she is a complete failure at being a housewife.

  Need I mention Kate lives a charmed life?

  Opening the paper bag from Ryan, and sighting the fluttering cash within, I see the town probably agrees with me that it’s time to move on. Don’t let the Sable door kick you in the butt on the way out. And for once I’m grateful, and I hold the bag up as though it’s a first-place trophy.

  “Thank you, everyone!”

  I look up at Ryan. “I feel like Kate for a minute.” A look of horror crosses his face. “That wasn’t a pass, Ryan. I meant my life is charmed for the moment.”

  “No, I know that.” But it’s clear his star quarterback days aren’t far behind him—he still thinks he’s the envy of every girl within fifty miles. He needn’t worry; even if he wasn’t Kate’s beau, he’s not of interest to me. I like them smart, and God love him, Ryan’s sweet as pie, but the gate doesn’t quite latch all the way.

  Speaking of which, my mother takes this moment to slowly open the front door, scanning the yard and the crowd as if we can’t see her. Naturally, all movement stops. My mother is sort of like the haunted house up on Cooley Mountain—she holds an enticing fascination for the conservative town because she does whatever she pleases. There’s both a disgust and a bit of envy when it comes to her.

  Janey Winowski has lived a hard life and, I’m sorry to say, it shows. Though she’s only forty-three—having had me at the tender age of seventeen—her skin is singed red with broken blood vessels, and her store-bought, stringy blonde hair (with deep black and gray roots) resembles a “before” shot for any hair salon. I think it’s her way of telling the world she won’t acknowledge my single talent. That my mother would have the worst hair in town is a shame she makes me bear daily.

  But when I’m doing Reese Witherspoon’s hair, it’s going to be her who’s embarrassed.

  “You’re going to clean all this up,” she shouts, as though I’m a child. “The yard looks like a pigsty.”

  The yard always looks like a pigsty (I don’t think the lawn’s been mowed since 1973), but I’ll give her that it doesn’t look any better with all my crap out here. Still, it's not like we were in the running for HGTV to begin with.

  “I’ll clean it up, Mom, as soon as the yard sale is over.”

  This must be the magic signal, because people start to scramble for their cars. And now I’m left with fourteen bottles of shampoo.

  I sigh. Someday, somewhere, I’m going to matter. I’m going to walk this earth and people are going to Care! Someday soon. Perhaps hairstyling isn’t a divine calling, but I’m good at it, and so I’m going to a place where looks mean something: I’m going to shallow, impressionable California, where good, chunky highlights add value.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Mrs. Gentry says, patting my wrist. “She’s going to miss you. It’s her way of making her presence known and that she’s still your mother.”

  “I’ll miss her, too, believe it or not.” I look into Mrs. Gentry’s warm blue eyes. “It may be completely dysfunctional, but it’s our dysfunction.”

  “She did her best, Sarah Claire. We all do our best.”

  I’m sure she did do her best, but she didn’t exactly reach for the stars either. I just nod, rather than risk answering and sounding ungrateful. It is what it is, I suppose. But I’m ready for a transformation, and what better place than Hollywood! A place that made Norma Jean Baker into Marilyn Monroe and Archie Leach into Cary Grant. Why not Sarah Claire Winowski into “hairstylist to the stars”? Stranger things have happened. Paris Hilton happened.

  “I’ve been having dreams of styling hair, Mrs. Gentry. I heard on a doctor show that the surgeons practice the surgery in their minds the night before. That's exactly what I do with my styles. I can see my success, taste it. Maybe that sounds ridiculous to you, but I feel like I’m called there, like God has some kind of plan for me laid out in Hollywood.”

  “Why wouldn’t He?”

  She’s probably placating me, but since she’s all the support I’ve got, I’ll take it. “I guess maybe because I'm Sarah Claire Winowski, and where things can go wrong, they tend to explode fantastically. If there’s a cow patty in the middle of a football field, it’s my shoe that will find it”

  She laughs and pats my wrist again. “Without a vision, you’d just end up like us here, who never left the town. Which is fine for us. Enough for us. But you always were a special little girl, always dreaming of some magical gateway into a strange land.”

  “I think I want t
he magical gateway out of the strange land, actually. Even if things do blow up miserably, I’ll be in shorts at the beach and I won’t care as much. I won’t have to have that fake orange Wyoming tan from Tantastic. I can go for the real thing.”

  “Maybe you’ll have a beach wedding and invite all us old ladies to wrap the candied almonds in netting. Was that ever one of your dreams all those times you drifted off from us?” She smoothes my cheek.

  “Bless your heart, Mrs. Gentry. You’re the only one who thinks a Winowski will marry anyone. And on the beach, no less.”

  “Not only do I see you married and breaking the family curse—” she raises an eyebrow to tell me what she thinks of my beliefs, “—I see you marrying someone who makes your heart go pitter-patter and treats you like the princess you are. Just like in those books and old movies we use to lose you to.”

  Mrs. Gentry was the town librarian. If anyone knew about my strange romantic fetishes, it was her.

  I smile. “Pitter-patter like Mr. Gentry did for you?”

  Her smile dissipates. “I hope for much better for you.”

  “That’s cryptic. You two were always the envy of this town. Maybe you’ve forgotten that now because he’s been gone so long?” I ask this hopefully, because if Mrs. Gentry wasn’t the peak of marital bliss, then it just doesn’t happen.

  She smiles slightly. “You never know what goes on in people’s homes, Sarah Claire. Mr. Gentry worked a great deal when he was alive, and since we didn’t have children to come home to, he didn’t really see the need to spend much time at home. That’s why I liked to see you in the library at night. I knew you were safe when your mother worked, and I had some company while reshelving books.”

  “I think the library was open later than 7-Eleven sometimes.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me, Sarah Claire. It was a good life; I’m not complaining. But it was lonely for both of us for so many years because we misunderstood each other. You have the chance to start fresh, and I want you to do it right. I don’t want you to settle for anything less than the best.”