Supreme Cuts occupied the middle unit of a short brick shopping strip. Inside, the air smelled of hot shaving cream, disinfectant, and coffee that had been reheated more times than anyone wanted to admit. A basketball game played on the television above the mirror, while a ceiling fan stirred the warm air. Someone near the back was arguing about the Panthers' defensive line, and someone else was telling a story about a cousin who had attempted to repair a roof without measuring the ladder. Fletcher heard his name before he reached the counter.
"Fletch!" called Andre Benton, the owner and his barber for fifteen years. "Look who remembered that hair keeps growing while he's in London."
"You charging international rates now?" Fletcher asked, offering his hand.
"Only if you make me listen to another story about a board meeting. Chair's open. Sit down before the sun changes its mind."
Andre had cut Fletcher's hair when the first Pinnacle Dynamics office occupied two leased rooms above a printing shop. He had seen Fletcher arrive sleepless and worried, seen him celebrate his first contract over a plate of takeout chicken, and later seen strangers begin approaching the shop to ask for photographs. Andre had never treated him differently. If the television mentioned Pinnacle Dynamics while Fletcher sat in the chair, Andre simply turned up the clippers and continued talking about football.
That morning they discussed the game, the coming school year, and the roof incident, which turned out to involve a man falling through his own porch awning. Fletcher laughed hard enough to make Andre stop cutting for a moment. Then Andre asked about London, and Fletcher explained that the acquisition had closed after a long month of negotiations. It was the kind of conversation he enjoyed because the questions were honest and the answers did not need to be strategic. Nobody at Supreme Cuts waited for him to reveal his net worth before deciding whether his jokes were worth hearing.
When the haircut was finished, Fletcher paid and left the same fifty-dollar tip he always did. Andre returned to work without counting it in front of him. Near the door, an older customer asked Fletcher whether his mother was doing well, and Fletcher told him she was visiting family in Chicago. He thought briefly about calling her on the drive back. Then he remembered Brenda's request for peaches and headed for the roadside stand.
His mother, Evelyn Owens, had raised Fletcher and his two brothers in a small apartment on Chicago's South Side. She worked double shifts in the laundry department of a hospital, often coming home with swollen hands and a voice so tired that even ordinary conversation seemed costly. Fletcher remembered standing beside her at a grocery counter while she counted change into a cashier's palm. He remembered school lunches paid for through a public program and winter coats that moved from one brother to the next. What he remembered most clearly, however, was her insistence that the way someone treated a stranger revealed more than anything they claimed to believe.