Page 1 of Beck & Coll
I awakenedto the shrill ringing of my cell phone. As soon as I pushed the vestiges of sleep away and realized what had woken me up, my heart seized in my chest. I hated late-night phone calls. Nothing good had ever once come from a call during the early morning hours.
I picked up the phone from the nightstand and forced my eyes to focus on the screen. I wasn’t sure who the hell I was fooling by looking at the screen. Without my reading glasses, I couldn’t really see a damn thing, but I could see enough to know that the blurry numbers in front of me weren’t familiar.
“Hello.” I forced the words out past the lump in my throat.
“Hello. Is this Ms. Kingsley? Collins Kingsley?” The male voice on the other end sounded like it belonged to a Caucasian man.
Since I didn’t regularly speak to Caucasian men on my personal phone, my breathing became ragged with worry.
“Yes, this is she. What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
He ignored my question and countered with one of his own. “Do you own a property at 3606 Abbey Court in the Eastville neighborhood in Chicago?”
“I do. I own a hair salon there. What is going on?”
“There’s been an… incident?—”
I didn’t hear anything else the man said, as my ears were filled witha rushing sound, and the only thing I could make out was the over-zealous pounding of my heart.
It’s a total loss.
Twenty days later, and the words of the insurance adjustor still rang in my head on a continuous loop.
It’s a total loss.
The hair salon that I had dreamed of as a teenager, scrimped and saved for as a young adult, poured all of myself into to the exclusion of everything else, including but not limited to a romantic relationship, children, and family, vacations, was gone.
As a matter of fact, although it had taken more than 50 percent of my lifetime to build it, it had only taken a little more than an hour for the entire thing to succumb to the heat and flames. My little hair salon,Posh Moments, happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the laundromat threedoors down went up in smoke. Every business on my side of the street suffered fire and smoke damage. The laundromat, the Jamaican jerk restaurant, the tax accountant’s office, and my business were all burned to the proverbial ground.
Though they offered to stay with me and wait until I could bringPosh Momentsback to life, I had gone into my savings and given each of my five stylists, the floor manager, and the receptionist severance pay. I didn’t know what more I could do. I couldn’t leave them in limbo. I wasn’t even sure that I felt up to re-opening the salon. I wasn’t the same starry-eyed, go-getting twenty-one-year-old with a dream I had once been. I was now a tired and realistic thirty-six-year-old.
“We’ve talked about this before, Collins.” My therapist, Dr. Kyrah Shaw, was a kind and patient woman. I was thankful to have her. “You’re used to leaving things behind.”
That was the understatement of the millennium. If “you have to leave that behind” was a person, it would be me. My entire life was a study in leaving things behind—things, items, objects, situations, and even people. Familiar spaces were left behind. Friends were left behind. Young loves were left behind. Sometimes even treasured belongings that didn’t make it into the moving van were left behind. Missing things wasn’t something I generally dwelled on. I developed the belief that most things in life were temporary and only meant to be enjoyed for a finite amount of time.
It basically started from childhood. My mother was a single mom of four girls with four different dads—several of whom didn’t always support their children financially. Though my mom had a good-paying job working as a bus driver for the city’s public transportation company, we never had an abundance of money. Whenever my mother got in over her head with making rent or paying bills, our family would pick up andmove. We moved so frequently that my sisters, Perkins, Bailey, Church, and I had friends and acquaintances all across the city.
Dr. Shaw spent a great deal of time working to convince me that considering everything temporary was strictly a trauma response and a coping mechanism to stop myself from longing and hurting over the things I’d lost along the way. I didn’t care if it was a coping mechanism or not. All I knew was that it kept me sane and allowed me to accept the fact that I could miss things or people and still continue to live a happy and satisfied life.
“Well, I had no choice.”
“You didn’t,” she agreed. “As a child, if your mother told you that the family was moving, then you gathered your things and moved. But you’re no longer a child. Nobody is forcing you to move. Onlyyoucan decide if you’re going to rebuildPosh Momentsor take the insurance money and run.”
My eyes met hers, and we both gave small smiles. The insurance money was a nice sum. It was more than enough to rebuild the salon, build a new business from scratch, or have a modest retirement on a tropical island.
“I know that only I can decide to reopen the salon. I’m just not sure if a hair salon is still my passion. It was my passion when I was nineteen and even when I was twenty-five. Now, I’m thirty-six and I… I just don’t know.” I huffed out a heavy sigh. “I made a lot of sacrifices to makePosh Momentsa success. Relationships, building a family?—”
Dr. Shaw cut me off. “DidPosh Momentsdetract you from building a relationship with a man and starting a family, or did your mother’s history with men detract you?”
“I think it was a combination.”
“Was it a combination, or is it easiest to blame the salon as opposed to your fears and insecurities?”
I knew it was her job to ask me the tough questions, but I wasn’t in the mood.
“I haven’t taken a vacation since I opened my hair salon,” I said instead.
Dr. Shaw was gracious enough to let me change the subject. Her eyebrows furrowed. “Why not, Collins? Why have you not taken a vacation in what… nine years?”
