Shame

Caleb breathed through his mouth.
    She draped a plastic poncho over him and gave him a hand mirror. At first, they were about as comfortable together as two sixth-graders matched up on a dance floor. Caleb was rigid, had to force himself not to shy away from her touch, while Lola was tentative, still not sure if she was doing the right thing.
    She worked the hair coloring in with gloved hands. There was a stilted politeness to their conversation, their speech usually initiated by some stubborn tangle of hair, Lola offering high-pitched apologies while working at the clump, and Caleb assuring her it was fine. Gradually, both of them loosened up.
    Half an hour passed before Caleb was emboldened to look at himself with the mirror. He cringed at what he saw. “I thought I was going to be a blond,” he said. “I look more like a redhead.”
    “As one of the songs in my act goes, ‘We’ve only just begun.’ It’s going to take a few more applications.”
    “How did you happen to have blond dye?”
    “Could have made you red, white, or even blue. I used to change my hair color about as often as underwear. No more. Change my hair color, that is. I do change my underwear.”
    Caleb didn’t smile or respond in any way.
    “You always been this black hole?” Lola asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s like your mood sucks all the light out of the room.”
    “Under the circumstances, I don’t feel like Mr. Happy.”
    “Were you ever Mr. Happy?”
    “I was happier....”
    “That’s no answer.”
    “You’re right.”
    “When in doubt, be the sphinx—that it? I suppose you think you were being noble by not telling your wife about your past.”
    “Noble’s not the word. I just didn’t see any reason to burden her with it.”
    “You did, anyway.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “’Course it is. And don’t think you didn’t put the
mojo
on your children, either. You don’t think your family knew something was wrong? You don’t think they sensed your secrets? They knew the family curse, even if you never gave it form.”
    “It’s sure enough got form now,” Caleb said.
    Too much form. Thinking about his family made Caleb ache. He became restive in the chair, felt the need to act, to do something. The tick-tock of the damn cat clock was driving him crazy.
    “How much longer?” he asked.
    “An hour or so.”
    He sighed, started fiddling with the hand mirror for want of anything else to do. He held the mirror up, pretended to look at his hair, but really sneaked a few glances at Lola.
    “Maybe I should have just gotten a wig.”
    “Wigs are obvious. When I’m through here, you’ll look like a natural blond, especially with your baby blues. All you’ll need is a surfboard rack and everyone will think you’re a native.”
    “Better not make me look like a native,” he said. “They’re the real minority around here.”
    “Ain’t that the truth. I’ve been here a year, and just about everyone I’ve met is from somewhere else.”
    The transient nature of Southern California was what had made it easy for Caleb to settle in San Diego. He’d never had to work at being anonymous.
    “How long you lived here?” Lola asked.
    “Almost twenty years. I left Texas when I was eighteen and kept going west until the ocean stopped me.”
    “You don’t have a Texas accent.”
    “I got rid of it.”
    “Wasn’t that hard?”
    “Not for me. I’ve always been good at taking on other voices, so I just picked one I liked and copied it. I lost lots of things when I came to California.”
    “Such as?”
    “Lost my first name for good. Lost my accent, lost my history, lost my face, and I tried to lose my demons.”
    “How’d you lose your face?”
    “Covered it with a beard.”
    Lola frowned, removed one of her gloves, and then ran a long-nailed finger down his smooth cheek.
    To Caleb, the tingle didn’t run so much down his face as down his spine. He suppressed a shiver. “I shaved a month or two ago,” he said, “and got rid of a beard I’d had for around twenty years.”
    “Why?”
    He thought about not answering, but with a shrug of his shoulders did. “I wanted Anna to take notice of me. She’d never seen me without a beard.”
    “An attention-getting device?”
    “I suppose.”
    “Did it work?”
    “Not really.”
    Lola stopped working at his hair, waited for an explanation. Caleb wasn’t sure what had prompted his confession: his need to talk or his desire for her to finish with