Laura Caldwell - A Clean Slate

Laney shook her head and gave them a smile as if to say She’s kidding. “Kelly, it’s perfect on you. You have to have it. And who knows what will happen? Maybe there’ll be a black tie wedding.”

“Yeah, maybe Ben and Therese’s.” The thought almost made me fall off the heels.

Laney must have seen my stricken face because she jumped up, putting her arms around me from behind. “Look, this is a special dress. You probably won’t ever again find something this amazing. Think of it as a treat to yourself after everything you’ve gone through. And I’ll make you a deal. If after a year you haven’t found someplace to wear it, I’ll buy something fabulous, too, and we’ll take each other out for an outrageous night in our dresses.”

I looked at myself in the mirror again. I’d been so frugal for years, saving up to buy my town house, the one where Ben and I would start our lives together, and what did I have to show for it? Not a goddamn thing. I smoothed the dress over my stomach, although it hung perfectly. I watched the light glinting off the beads.

“Deal,” I said to Laney. I turned and hugged her back.

Fifteen minutes later, I was ready to go and wearing a new outfit—a silky, bronze sweater, a pair of dark jeans and tall, black leather boots. As I bent over to sign the credit card slip, I flipped my hair over my shoulder and got a rush of that damn-I-look-good feeling. It’d been a while. But then I got another rush, this one much more panicky, and my hand froze over the slip. What if Laney was wrong about how much money I had? What if I’d just rendered myself penniless?

“Everything all right?” Melanie said.

“Uh…” I tried not to focus on the grand total at the bottom. If Laney was wrong, if I was broke, I’d just have to return everything. “It’s fine,” I said, and I scrawled my signature with a flourish. “Thanks for everything.”

“Oh, it was a pleasure,” Melanie said. “A real pleasure.”

I’m sure it had been a great pleasure, since my whopping purchases had probably provided Melanie with her sales quota for the month, but I kept my mouth closed. Despite the moment of panic, I was entirely too pleased. I knew that this frivolous shopping spree couldn’t provide answers about my memory loss or stem the depression I feared might return; yet it had made me feel a hell of a lot better.

“May I make one more suggestion?” Melanie said.

She turned me around to the mirror and fingered my dull hair. “Can I send you to a friend of mine at Trevé?”

I knew what she was trying to say. My hair was hell. Something needed to be done. But Trevé was the hottest salon in the city.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to get in there anytime soon,” I said.

“Let me try.”

She whipped out a cell phone the size of a Tic Tac box and raised it to her ear. “Tommy,” she said. “It’s Melanie from Saks. Tell Lino I’m calling in my favor. I need an appointment today.”

She paused, listening.

“No, it’s not for me. A client. Kelly McGraw.” Another pause. “Perfect,” she said with a smile. “Kisses to Lino.”

She clicked her phone off and looked at her watch. “You’ll have to get a cab. Lino is expecting you at Trevé in twenty minutes.”

We could hear the music pumping even before we walked in the door. A huge doorman with a bald head held the glass door for us. “Welcome to Trevé, ladies.”

“You’d think they’d have somebody with hair,” I said as we muscled my Saks bags through the doorway.

Laney laughed, or at least I could see her laughing, although it was hard to hear her above the thumping music. The front desk was at least six feet tall and spray-painted with gold graffiti. I stood on my tiptoes and screamed my name to the collagen-lipped receptionist, who led us upstairs to the stylists’ stations, where the music was, thank God, being played at a much lower volume.

I was seated on a chrome-and-leather chair, my bags piled high in a closet, while a stool was pulled up for Laney, and two more glasses of champagne were delivered to us.

“Feel free to lose your memory every Saturday so we can do this once a week,” Laney said.

I knew she meant it in a kidding way, but it reminded me of my horrible morning, of that sheer fear I’d felt when Beth Maninsky opened my door.

“You okay?” Laney looked a little chagrined at her comment.

I shook my head, shaking off the thoughts at the same time. “I’m great.”

I was leaning forward, my glass outstretched to toast with Laney, when I heard a cry. I swung around to see a short, deeply tanned man with dark hair and at least two coats of mascara around his dark eyes.

“My God!” he said, before he rattled off a litany of what sounded like Italian words. “Melanie didn’t tell me it was this bad.”

He spun my chair around so that I faced the mirror, and began pulling up strands of my hair, studying the split ends in the light.

“I take it you’re Lino,” Laney said. She put her champagne glass down on his station with a clunk. She had that defensive tone in her voice, the one that said, I’ll break your legs if you mess with my friend, and I loved her for it.

“Signorina,” he said in a heavy Italian accent, “I mean no harm.” He squeezed my shoulders and I looked at him in the mirror. His long lashes batted a few times. “You’re gorgeous,” he said to me. “Bellisima. Look at your body, your clothes. Beautiful! But this hair! I have no time for this.” He shuddered and turned to a boy who looked all of seventeen. “Get her shampooed. Now.”

After my head was scrubbed and then massaged until I was in a near dreamlike state by the underage minion, I was caped and back in front of Lino, who began furiously working away with his scissors.

“Shouldn’t you ask her what she wants?” Laney said, the snippiness in her tone matching the sound of the scissors.

“No.” Lino gave my hair another decisive clip. “I have no time for talking. I decide. Clearly, she does not know what is right for her hair. We’ll do a little cut, molto bene, and then you two ladies will be gone.”

“But that’s ridiculous!” Laney said. “You have to take your time. This is her hair we’re talking about! You need to find out what she wants. She’s an adult, she should decide—”

“Lane,” I said, holding my hand out. I couldn’t actually see her, since Lino had my wet, wonderful-smelling hair hanging in front of my face like a curtain. “It’s fine.”

“You don’t care what he does?”

I considered her question for a second. Usually, I was concerned about what Ben would say if I did something nuts with my makeup or hair, of what they would say at work, but that didn’t matter now, and I found myself pleasantly surprised. I was in for a change, and I told Laney as much.

“Mmm-hmm,” Lino said.

“So where are you from in Italy?” Laney asked. She sounded like she was trying to be nice, which I appreciated, since this guy had both my head and his sharp silver blades in his hands, but I sensed something mischievous in her voice. Although “Laney Pendleton” might not sound Italian, she was. Her mother’s family came from Milan. Laney herself had been to Italy at least ten times.

“Napoli,” Lino said, the scissors flying furiously.

“Oh, so you’ve been to Ravello, right?” she said.

“Mmm-hmm.” This time there was no smugness to his tone.

“Have you been to that hotel—what’s it called—Palazzo Mazzo?”

“Of course.”

Laney kept peppering him with questions about the Amalfi coast, about Positano and Capri and Sorrento. Lino grew more terse with each query, his scissor-snipping growing faster and faster until I felt I had to put a stop to it.