Mrs Devlin
by Maggie · 18 June 2026 · Short Stories
Mrs Devlin wants the same thing for twenty-three years. Then in June 2017 she sits down and says: I don't know what I want. They talk for an hour. Not about the hair. She cries in the chair — not from the hair. Maggie doesn't ask. First tip in 23 years.
Mrs Devlin came to me for the first time in 1994 and for twenty-three years she wanted the same thing: a trim, half an inch, same shape. I could have done it with my eyes closed by about 2003. I did do it with my eyes half closed on more than one occasion, which I'll admit to now that she's moved to Wicklow.
In June 2017 she sat down and said: I want something different. I said: different how? She said: I don't know. I'd never heard her say she didn't know anything. She was a woman who knew precisely what she wanted in every department.
We talked for about an hour before I picked up the scissors. Not about the hair — about her daughter who'd just left for Australia, her husband who'd retired and was now home all day, a holiday she'd been planning for fifteen years and hadn't taken. Then she said: right, let's do it. I took four inches off and gave her a completely different shape.
She cried a little in the chair. Not from the hair. I didn't ask. She left looking about six years younger and tipped me twenty euro, which in twenty-three years she had never once done.
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