The Friday Staff Meeting

The Friday staff meeting was our family's version of Sunday dinner. As soon as we closed the salon and everybody got there, my father called in the pizza order. That gave us about twenty minutes to tend to business before the food arrived.

Even if you weren't related, you stayed for at least a slice of pizza. And sometimes the stylists who weren't working arrived early, so they could experiment. Two of the newest stylists had been there for about an hour already today, practicing updos on each other. Now they both looked like they needed to find a prom fast.

"Woilà," one of them said, pinning down the other's final curl with a bobby pin.

Mario and I looked at each other. "Woilà?" we both mouthed.

My father came in through the breezeway door, wearing a long white tunic over bell-bottom jeans. This is a challenging look for a man to pull off, especially one over seventy, but he managed. He was flipping through the day's mail, separating the letters from Realtors and developers from the pack. "Barracudas," he said. "They're all a bunch of barracudas." He crumpled up the unopened letters and threw them into the wastebasket behind the reception counter.

He put the rest of the mail down on the counter and started snapping his fingers, alternating hands the way beatniks did when they heard a good poem in the '60s. "Hear ye, hear ye," my father said. "The court's in session and here comes da judge."

This was our signal to arrange our chairs in a semicircle around him. I put mine down as far away from Sophia's as I could get. My father stopped snapping so he could finger the cornicello that hung from a thick gold chain around his neck. It was made out of bright red coral capped in a gold crown, and it was shaped like a horn. Maybe if we were really Italian I'd know whether cornicello was actually even the word for horn.

I knew there were pedophiles and bibliophiles, even Francophiles. But my father was the only Italiophile I'd ever met. I thought it might be partly the businessman in him: an Italian hair salon just sounded way more glamorous than an Irish one would. I mean, how much money could you really charge at Salon de Seamus, especially if you lived in the part of Massachusetts everybody called the Irish Riviera? But he'd also spent his very first honeymoon with his very first wife in a borrowed house in Tuscany. The Lucky Larry Shaughnessy and Mary Margaret O'Neill Italy Experience had had an irrevocable impact on him, not to mention the first names of all his future children.

"Any more wedding news?" Angela asked Mario.

Mario turned to Todd. Todd was Mario's husband, our accountant-slash-business manager, and along with Mario, one of the two fathers of Andrew, my nephew and the groom-to-be. Ours was not an uncomplicated family.

They both shook their heads. "Just that Amy's parents are driving them crazy," Mario said. "They wanted a simple wedding, but things are getting more out of control every day. Apparently they like to do it up big in Atlanta. I still can't believe they're having it at the Margaret Mitchell House."

"Will you get to watch Gone With the Wind?" one of the stylists asked.

"Yeah," I said. "I think it's right before the vows."

To read the previous excerpt, click here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next feature book of the Getting Better All the Time group, Summer Blowout by Claire Cook is a hilarious and rambunctious story about a recently single woman who finds herself on a new path and hits all of the bumps life throws her along the way.

Join the group now!

Buy the book!