CHAPTER1
Stacy Carbone was a grinch, and embraced it. At the sound of the first Christmas carol in November, her smile turned upside-down, her heart shriveled up, and she started counting the days until it was all over.
She hadn’t always hated Christmas. She’d loved it as a kid, and even through her teens and early twenties. And it wasn’t really that shehatedit. It was just so…relentless. All the shining happy faces, except for when they were sweaty stressed faces. All the noise, which was alwaysallthe noise: there wasn’t another option during the holidays as far as she could tell. All the decision-making and lights and people honking and running into each other at the store and—
And then they told her all about it. The good, the bad, and the ugly. When they sat down in Stacy’s chair at her hairdressing shop, she smiled at them in the mirror, asked what they wanted done with their hair and then—because you sort of had to—asked, “So how are you doing?”
And they told her. Lord, how they told her. They told her until all Stacy wanted was to hide under the bed from November through the end of December, except of course everybody wanted to look their best for the holidays, so she couldn’t exactly close up shop for two months during the busiest times of the year.
On top of it all, this year she had somehow gotten roped into doing a charity hair cutting event on a Saturday afternoon, the busiest afternoon of a busy week in a busy season.
Well, it hadn’t been ‘somehow.’ Stacy knew exactly how she’d gotten into this situation. Noah Brannigan, a cute little kid whose arrival in Virtue a few years ago had come with a splash of local scandal—nothing to do with him, obviously, but when he and his mom arrived in town, they’d discovered some shenanigans at the old Brannigan place—anyway, Noah had arrived on her shop’s doorstep two weeks earlier, his expression guilefully hopeful as he pitched a fundraising event to her. The huge town square was under redevelopment, and his dream—told in enthusiastic detail—was to have a massive spaceship-pirate-ship-carousel-jungle gym built as part of the redevelopment.
He had decided that the best way to accomplish this was to pitch it to the town council with an architectural plan and a substantial sum raised toward building it. And his stepdad was, if not an architect, at least a carpenter. Puffed up with enthusiasm and seriousness, Noah had laid out blueprints for the playground on Stacy’s salon floor and explained how good it would be for Virtue’s kids, and how it would, quote, “encourage an outdoors lifestyle and real world friendships in a generation prone to sedentary, indoor games and virtual relationships.”
Stacy assumed he hadn’t come up with that line—or most of the plan—on his own, but she’d met Noah before, so she wasn’tabsolutelysure of it.
He already had half the businesses around Virtue’s town square providing services for his fundraiser. His mom ran a massage therapy place, and people were donating outrageous amounts for fifteen minute chair massages. Stacy had heard the one hour-long back massage Mabs was offering had a current high bid of over three hundred dollars. You could get three and a half hour-long massages for that, normally!
So Noah had explained, sunnily, that all he needed was Stacy’stime. He’d already found six people—six, Ms. Carbone!—who were willing to have their long hair cut for a fundraiserandcharity. A double-whammy, Noah had said smugly. The long hair could be used for wigs,andpeople were donating money for every inch of hair cut.
Stacy wasn’tthatmuch of a grinch.
So now it was late Saturday afternoon and she’d cut nearly twelve feet of hair off seven heads. One woman in her forties had cried, and a girl in her late teens had gone from having hair down to her butt to a pixie cut, which Stacy thought was the bravest chop she’d ever done on anyone. That girl had left the salon almost floating, like she’d been weighed down by all that hair and was now free. The others had mostly looked nervous, both coming in and going out. Stacy had said, “Well, it’s hair, it’s not like a leg, it’ll grow back,” a lot this afternoon.
Noah burst in as she finished the seventh cut. “Ms.Carbone, Ms.Carbone! I know there was only going to be seven but I got another guy! He’s got a ginormous family and they’re all gonna give FIVE DOLLARS for every inch of hair he gets cut and his hair is a MILLION MILES LONG, MS. CARBONE! A MILLION! MILES! LONG!”
Even the woman in the salon chair, Molly, grinned, and Stacy had a hard time remembering she was a grinch in the face of the kid’s enthusiasm. He was about eight, she thought, with blue eyes and a mop of brown hair above a freckled nose in an impish face. “A million miles, huh? I’m not sure I can even fit a million miles of hair into my salon, Noah.” She could barely fit all the people who had come in to watch the charity cuts. Who came to watch strangers getting their hair cut? Lots of people, it turned out!
Although Stacy had to admit she’d gotten a lot of new clients from the stunt. A bunch of people had liked the work they’d seen so much that they’d taken her card, and several had made appointments before they even left. The shop was in a lull now, with only Molly’s kids and husband left to watch the last bits of her hair cut, but Stacy supposed there would be another rush with Mr. Million Miles Of Hair coming in.
Noah’s gaze slid around like he was trying to squirm his way out of his exaggerations. “Well maybe not amillion. But it’s really long! And he’s out there in the square making people give him more money! Us! The fundraiser! More money! He’s, uh, rallying the people!”
Stacy met Molly’s eyes in the mirror and said, “Well, if he’s rallying the people,” with as straight a face as she could manage.
“This I have to see,” Molly said. She got up, and Stacy went with her to the door so they could see what ‘rallying the people’ for a haircut looked like. Her family came to look, too, so for a moment they were all squished in the door and up against the plate glass windows, which Stacy had reluctantly put a small Christmas tree in, because people kept asking where her holiday decorations were. Somebody made a sound of disappointment, and Molly laughed. “I should have expected that.”
Stacy nodded. “Me, too, but somehow I imagined he’d be right in front of the salon.”
"He's in the bazaar," Noah said impatiently. "C'mon, I'll show you!" He rushed out, leaving Stacy, Molly, and Molly's kids still smooshed in the doors and windows.
From there, it was practically impossible to see a rally. Virtue’s town square was literal acres in size. The back of one row of the semi-permanent bazaar kiosks and booths that made up the market’s boundaries was visible from Stacy's salon, but she certainly couldn't see into its middle to watch a rally. From where they stood, the view was mostly kids playing in snow.
Of course, people came from all over the region to shop at Virtue’s bazaar, so obviously the place to rally them was inside it, not out in the square where there wasn’t a captive audience. Disappointed but amused at themselves, Stacy and Molly stepped away from the windows. Molly's kids chased after Noah, and her husband, making a faintly alarmed face at his wife, followed them.
Molly called, “It’s fine, I’ll be out in a minute,” after him, then smiled sympathetically at Stacy. “Your hands must be tired. I know you were looking forward to me being the last.”
Stacy flexed her hands absently. “Nah, they’re strong. I do this all day, after all. You want to sit back down for some hairspray?”
“No, I think I’m going to hurry out there and see what rallying the people looks like.” Molly touched her hair a little self-consciously. “And show off a little, I guess. Or maybe hide.”
“Honestly, I think shorter hair really suits you. It really frames your face.” Which was true. Molly had rather delicate features, and the heavy length of her long hair had almost overwhelmed them. Now, seventeen inches of chopped hair later, a chin-length, movable bob opened up her whole look.
“You have to say that,” Molly said dubiously as she got her coat. “You’re a hairdresser. You can’t really say ‘My God, you made a terrible mistake,’ to a client.”
Stacy coughed on a laugh. “Sometimes it’s really hard not to, though. People come in with a picture of hair that’s completely different in texture than their own and insist on getting the cut even if you explain why you don’t think it’ll work. And then some of them get really mad because you were right.”
“But it’s not like a leg,” Molly said wryly. “It’ll grow back. That’s what you said when I sat down, right?”
