Sal's Chair

Sal had been cutting hair on Ninth Street for thirty-four years and had, in that time, cut the hair of two mayors, a guy who'd later been on the news for the wrong reasons, and every male member of the DiNardo family going back three generations. He did not give financial advice. He wanted that understood. He just asked questions. "You got the 401k thing at the new job?" he said to Tony, who was twenty-nine and in the chair for the first time since the wedding. "Yeah. They got it." "You signed up?" "I'm gonna." Sal's scissors stopped. In the mirror Tony saw him look at the ceiling the way he looked at it when the Giants were losing. "I'm gonna," Sal repeated. "You know how many guys sit in this chair and say I'm gonna?" "A lot?" "A lot. I'm gonna is the most expensive sentence in the English language." The scissors started again. "They match it?" "Like, four percent?" "Four percent. So you put in four, they put in four. That's free money. You're leaving free money on the table because you're gonna." Tony had heard this before. His dad had said it. His dad, though, had also spent the nineties buying things that turned out to be nothing, so Tony's relationship with financial advice from older men was complicated. "Sal, no offense, but what do you know about it?" Sal put the scissors down. He turned Tony's chair, a quarter turn, to face the wall by the register. There were photos. There were always photos. But Tony had never really looked, and now he did: a boat. Not a yacht. A decent boat. Sal and a woman with white hair on the deck, both of them sunburned and grinning like teenagers. "Marie and me. Florida. Two months every winter. You know how a barber affords that?" "Tips?" "Tips." Sal snorted. "Nineteen seventy-eight, a guy in this chair, an accountant, he tells me put a little away every week and don't touch it. Every week. I did it with the tips. I put the tips in an envelope Friday and Monday I walked it to the bank and I did not look at it. Forty-six years. You know what I'd have if I'd said I'm gonna?"

"A smaller boat?" "No boat, Tony. No Florida. Marie and me in a two-room over the shop watching the weather channel." He turned the chair back. "Sign up. Tomorrow. Not Friday. Tomorrow. The four percent. And when you get a raise, you make it five. You won't feel it. That's the trick. You do it so you don't feel it." He finished the cut in silence, the good kind, and brushed Tony's neck off with the soft brush and held up the hand mirror. "Good?" "Good." Tony paid. He tipped. Sal took the tip and, while Tony watched, folded it once and put it in an envelope in the drawer under the register. "Still?" Tony said. "Still," said Sal. "I'm gonna retire one of these days."