My son filmed the giant biker who cut the hair off little dolls in my back booth every night at 2:40, posted it with “somebody check this freak’s basement” under it, and made $186 off it in four days. I laughed right along with him. Then an eight-year-old in frog pajamas walked in at 3:20 and stared at his phone.
Luke was twenty-four, working my grill because I begged the owner, and that $186 was the first money he’d made on his own since the DUI.
So I didn’t stop him.
The first night, the big man came through the door at the Hilltop Grill in Decatur at 2:40 and the whole room went quiet.
Somebody had left a crossword on the counter with exactly one word filled in.
He was around sixty, six-six, three hundred pounds easy, with a gray braid down his back and knuckles like walnuts.
His vest had patches too faded to read. His boots left puddles by the register.
He took the corner booth by the pie case, ordered black coffee, and put a plastic shopping bag on the table.
Out came a doll.
Then another.
Then a pair of long steel shears, the kind a barber keeps standing in a jar of blue water.
Both dolls had long yellow hair. He braided it first, five tight rows, with his tongue in the corner of his mouth like a man threading a needle.
Then he soaked the braids with a spray bottle and scrubbed them with a dish sponge until they knotted into felt.
Then he cut them out.
One braid at a time, close to the scalp, a quarter inch per snip.
Each braid went into its own zip bag. He wrote a date on every bag with a black marker.
Luke leaned through the pass window. “Mom. Are you seeing this?”
I was seeing it.
At 3:20 he paid, left two dollars on a $1.89 coffee, and carried the ruined dolls out with him.
He came back the next night. And the one after that.
By the second week Luke had a name for him. Uncle Snip.
By the third week Luke had his phone propped against the ketchup bottles.
The regulars turned him into a sport.
A trucker slid a dollar across the table and asked for a mullet. Two college kids wanted to know if the dolls owed him money.
He never once looked up.
That scared me more than if he’d put somebody through the front window.
On the twelfth night his hands started shaking halfway through a braid.
He laid the shears flat and sat with both palms on the table for six full minutes.
Then he picked them back up.
Luke posted the video that Thursday. Forty-one seconds of the big man, the shears, and a yellow braid dropping into a bag.
His caption said “somebody check this freak’s basement.” Under that, in capitals, WHO LETS THIS GUY NEAR KIDS.
By Sunday it had 41,000 views and 2,300 comments.
People wanted his plate number. People wanted his address. One woman said she knew the vest.
Luke held out the payout screen like a report card.
“One eighty-six, Mom,” he said. “For a guy who cuts doll hair.”
I laughed. God help me, I laughed.
Monday night I carried the coffee over myself.
“Who taught you to braid like that?” I said.
“Nobody,” he said. “That’s the trouble.”
“So why cut them out after?”
“Because she won’t let anybody else near them.”
“Who won’t?”
He flipped the zip bag over so the date faced the table. “Coffee’s cold, ma’am.”
It wasn’t.
Around 2:55 that same night, a deputy came in and asked him to step outside.
Deputy Deluca looked younger than Luke. He emptied the shopping bag across the hood of his cruiser while my son filmed through the glass.
Dolls. The shears. A wide-tooth comb. A shoebox packed with little bags of yellow braid.
And a photo the deputy held for a long time before he handed it back.
Then he shook the big man’s hand.
Luke lowered the phone.
The man came back in, sat down, and picked up the shears like nothing had happened.
“His name’s Booker,” the deputy said at the register. “Leave him be, Mrs. Luong. Please.”
That was all I got.
At 3:20 a minivan pulled in under the sign.
A woman in a gray hoodie with a rehab center lanyard got out of the driver’s side. Then the back door slid open.
The kid was eight, maybe. Frog pajama pants, rain boots on the wrong feet, and five fat braids gone flat and matted against her head.
The woman held the door. “Dad,” she said. “Somebody at her school sent it to her.”
The kid walked straight past the counter. Past the pie case. Past my son and his phone.
She looked at the row of hairless dolls by the napkin holder.
Then at Booker.
“YOU SAID NOBODY WOULD SEE,” she said.
Booker set the shears down slow, the way you’d set down something that might go off.
“I know, Sadie.”
“Grandma did these.” She put her hand on one braid. “They’re hers. You promised you’d practice first.”
The woman by the door had her fist against her mouth.
Thirty-seven days. That’s how long those braids had been in. I worked it out later from the first date on the first bag.
Booker turned and looked at the pass window.
At my son, who still had the phone up.
“Son,” he said. “You want a real video?”
Luke didn’t answer.
Booker slid to the end of the bench and patted the seat beside him, and Sadie climbed up and turned her back to him.
“Then keep it rolling,” he said. “And this time you post every second of it.”
And my son pressed record.
3:21
The red dot came on in the corner of Luke’s screen. I could see it from the register.
Booker wet the braid at the back of Sadie’s neck with the spray bottle. He worked the wide-tooth comb in at the bottom of it, one inch at a time, and held the braid up with two fingers so the comb couldn’t pull on her.
“Tell me if it pulls.”
“It doesn’t.”
He found where the felt started. Then he slid one blade of the shears under it, flat to her scalp, and cut.
A quarter inch. Then another one.
The braid came off whole in his hand. He held it up over her shoulder so she could see it hadn’t come apart, and she nodded, and he put it in a zip bag and gave her the bag to hold.
He wrote on it with the black marker. I could read the date upside down from where I stood with the pot. Thirty-seven days back.
“He did fifty-three dolls,” the woman by the door said. She wasn’t saying it to anybody. “So he wouldn’t lose any of it.”
Five braids took him twenty-two minutes. Nobody ate. The trucker who paid a dollar for a mullet two weeks before had his cap off in his lap.
Luke filmed every second. His arm had to be killing him by the fourth braid. He didn’t switch hands.
When the last one was bagged, Sadie’s hair stood up short and soft all over like a baby duck’s. She put both hands on her head. Then she put both hands on the five bags.
“Can Grandma still have them?”
“That’s the whole idea,” Booker said.
He paid at 3:44. Two dollars on a $1.89 coffee, same as every night. On his way out he stopped at the pass window.
“You post that one,” he said to Luke. “Then you take the other one down.”
Luke looked at me.
My mother’s sewing scissors
I cut Luke’s hair myself from the time he was two until he was seventeen. Kitchen chair. A dish towel around his neck, pinned with a clothespin. My mother’s sewing scissors, which lived in the drawer with the batteries and the soy sauce packets.
He wouldn’t let a barber near him. He screamed the one time his father tried. So it was me, every six weeks, and he’d sit with his eyes squeezed shut and tell me about whatever he was into. Dinosaurs, then wrestling, then a girl named Divya who sat in front of him in chemistry.
He quit letting me do it the year he got his license. That’s normal. I kept the scissors.
The license went four years later. He was coming home from a party out by the lake and put his Civic through the sign in front of the Casey’s on Pershing Road at a quarter to two in the morning. Nobody was hurt. He blew a .14.
Thirty days in county. Eighteen months of probation. $4,300 to Casey’s for the sign, and a lawyer I’m still paying a hundred dollars a month.
When he came home I gave him two rules. He worked. And I got the passcode to his phone, so I could check where he was.
It was 0417. My birthday. He picked it himself, and I took that as a good sign.
Nobody in Decatur wanted a 22-year-old with a DUI and a hole in his work history. I’d been on nights at the Hilltop eleven years by then. I went to Claudette, who owns it, and asked. She said no. I asked again. The third time I said I’d cover any shift he missed, myself, for free, and she gave him the grill.
He was good at it. That surprised both of us.
He was also on his phone every second the ticket rail was empty. Two accounts, one his and one he called “for work,” and he switched between them with his thumb so fast I couldn’t follow. I asked about it once. He said it was a strategy thing.
When Claudette complained about the phone against the ketchup bottles, I was the one who told her to leave it. “It’s harmless,” I said. “It keeps him here.”
In the third week there was a ticket stuck in the pass window rail with no order on it. Just letters and numbers in Luke’s writing and the word HARLEY underlined twice. I figured it was a part number. He was always going to buy a bike when he got his license back.
So when he held out that payout screen I didn’t see a boy laughing at an old man. I saw $186 nobody had handed him.
Now he was standing at the pass window with the phone still up, and the minivan was backing out under the sign.
I went to wipe down the booth. There was a yellow hair on the seat, short as an eyelash.
Tuesday
Luke posted the new one Tuesday at noon, when he woke up. Twenty-two minutes cut down to three and a half. His caption said “you will NOT guess why Uncle Snip was cutting doll hair.”
By the time I came in at ten that night it had 600,000 views.
The comments had turned all the way around. People were crying in them. People wanted to mail Sadie hair bows and wanted to know where the Hilltop was so they could come shake Booker’s hand.
A lot of them wanted to know who the cook was. The one who posted the first video.
Luke didn’t seem to mind. He read them to me between tickets, the mean ones too, in a voice like the man who does the high school football games.
“‘Whoever filmed the first one should get launched into the sun.’ That’s me, Mom. That’s my fans.”
“Take the first one down,” I said.
“I’m going to.”
“He asked you.”
“I said I’m going to.”
Booker didn’t come in that night. The booth by the pie case sat empty at 2:40. I poured a coffee anyway out of habit and drank it myself.
Three people came in after midnight asking which booth was his. One of them drove over from Springfield. He took a picture of the empty seat and left without ordering.
Claudette showed up at one to do the deposit, which she never does on a Tuesday. She stood by the register and read the comments on her own phone with her glasses pushed up on her head.
“Leave both of them up,” she said to Luke. “They see the first one, then they have to see the second one. That’s how it works. My nephew does this.”
“Claudette, the man asked him.”
“The man doesn’t pay my electric.” She put the deposit bag under her arm. “Put the name of the place in the next one. Big letters.”
Wednesday the first video was still up.
Thursday it was still up.
Thursday night Luke turned the phone around on the pass shelf so I could see the screen.
“Both of them together are at eleven forty,” he said. “You want me to take that down?”
The corn plant
Friday at 2:40 the bell on the door went, and I turned with the pot already up, and it was the woman with the lanyard. Same hoodie. Alone.
She sat at the counter, not the booth. She ordered black coffee.
“He’s not coming,” she said, before I could ask anything. “So you can quit setting that booth.”
Her name was Yasmin. She was Booker’s daughter, and she was a nursing assistant at the rehab center on the north side, the one where her mother was learning to hold a fork again.
The stroke was thirty-seven days ago. The morning of it, her mother had braided Sadie’s hair at the kitchen table before school. By supper she couldn’t lift her right arm.
Sadie wouldn’t let anybody wash those braids. Wouldn’t let anybody touch them. By week three the school nurse sent a note home.
“Dad couldn’t practice at the house,” Yasmin said. “Sadie lives with us. She’d have seen. So he did it on his lunch. Here.”
His lunch. He’d been on nights at the corn plant on the east side for twenty-six years, ten minutes down the road. His lunch was 2:40 to 3:20.
I set the pot down on the counter.
“Somebody in those comments put the plant,” Yasmin said. “His shift. His supervisor’s name. People called in. Sixty-some calls. They emailed that line, the one in capitals, to HR. They put him on leave Saturday. No pay, pending review.”
“Saturday,” I said.
“The center got calls too. We have a pediatric wing.” She turned her cup around by the handle. “They told him he can’t come in until it’s resolved. He hasn’t seen my mom in eight days. She won’t eat for anybody else.”
I got my phone out right there and reported the first video. Harassment. Then again, for sharing private information. Then I filled in the box with what she’d just told me, every word I could spell.
The answer came back while she was still drinking. It didn’t go against the community standards. Eleven minutes.
Yasmin didn’t ask what I was doing. She finished the coffee.
“Whoever put the plant in there knew his lunch,” she said. “Down to the minute.”
She left two dollars on a $1.89 coffee and went out the door.
Jillian
Sunday the bars let out at two and we were slammed until almost four.
Luke had his phone up on the shelf over the flat-top, propped on a can of the Pam we use on the griddle. He filmed everything now. Hash browns. Ajay washing the pans. A drunk girl in a Millikin sweatshirt trying to pay with a library card.
At ten to four he went into the walk-in for slaw.
The phone lit up on the shelf. A banner across the top.
jillian.d.217 · 14 new replies
I wiped my hands on my apron and picked it up. I put in 0417.
It opened on the work account. A blond woman with a coffee mug for a picture, the kind that comes with a picture frame. Nine followers. Every comment Jillian had ever made was under Luke’s two videos.
The first one was from the Thursday he posted.
I KNOW that vest. My cousin rides with a guy like this. Stay away from him.
Under that, from Friday: a plate number. And the word Harley.
The same letters and numbers that had been stuck in the pass window rail. I threw that ticket out myself.
Under that, from the next Sunday, a long one.
He works nights at the corn plant on the east side. Lunch at 2:40 every night like clockwork. His supervisor is Judah Naidu. Somebody call him. WHO LETS THIS GUY NEAR KIDS.
Four hundred and six likes. A phone number in the replies. A woman saying she’d called and they were looking into it.
The time on it said 4:12 a.m.
Luke clocks out at four.
The flat-top
I was still holding the phone when he came out with the slaw.
He saw it in my hand and stopped. He put the tub down on the prep table.
“Mom. Give me that.”
I took a picture of the screen with my own phone. Then scrolled up and took another.
“That’s not what it looks like,” he said. “Okay? Everybody does that. That’s how you get it going. You put a little gas on it in the comments or it sits at three hundred views and dies. That’s the whole thing. That’s the job.”
Ajay turned the water off at the sink.
“He’s a grown man. He’s got a pension. He’ll get his job back, they always give it back, there’s a union.” Luke wiped his hands on his pants. “And I didn’t make anybody call. I typed a name. Anybody could find that name. It’s on their website.”
I took a third picture.
“You laughed,” he said. “You sat right there at the counter and laughed. You told Claudette to leave my phone up. Harmless, you said. Your word.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Eleven forty, Mom. You know what that is? That’s the lawyer through March.” He was louder now. A man in the corner booth set his fork down. “Who do you think I was doing it for? You think I wanted to stand back here every night filming some old man’s dolls? I was paying you back.”
I opened the corn plant’s website on my phone. There was a contact page. Human resources had an email address.
I wrote it standing at the flat-top with the hash browns burning.
I put the three pictures in. I wrote the account name and the time on each comment. I wrote that the person behind the account was the cook at the Hilltop Grill on the night shift, Luke Luong, twenty-four, and that I was his mother and his co-worker and I had his passcode, and I would sign anything they needed me to sign.
I put my name at the bottom. Mai Luong. My phone number. Our address.
I sent the same email to the rehab center’s front desk.
Luke read it over my shoulder as I typed. He didn’t stop me. He was still talking.
“You’re going to get me fired. You know that? You’re going to get me put back. That’s probation, that’s harassment, they’ll call it something. You’re my mom.”
“Yes,” I said.
He took his apron off and hung it on the hook by the back door. He took the phone out of my hand and I let him.
He had to walk. He doesn’t have a license.
“Don’t wait up,” he said, and the back door shut behind him.
2:40
He’s sleeping on his friend Khoa’s couch. He texts me on Sundays. Mostly about the Bears.
Claudette took me off the deposit and put Ajay on the grill. The hundred for the lawyer goes out on the first, and I mail it myself again.
Three weeks after that Sunday the bell on the door went at 2:40.
Booker took the corner booth by the pie case. Same vest. Same boots, puddles by the register. No shopping bag.
The ketchup bottles were lined up against the wall where they always are. Nothing propped against them.
He’d been back on nights since the Wednesday. Yasmin told me that, the one time she came in. She told me her mother fed herself a whole cup of applesauce on Tuesday, left-handed, and made a mess, and wouldn’t let anyone clean her up until she’d finished.
I brought the coffee over myself.
He had a single zip bag on the table in front of him. One braid. Short, maybe an inch, and soft. Yellow. The date on it was from that week.
“Her first trim,” he said. “Her grandmother wants all of them.”
Somebody had left a crossword on the counter again. Nobody had filled in a word.
He picked up the cup and held it a second.
“Coffee’s cold, ma’am,” he said.
It wasn’t. I filled it to the top anyway.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who has ever laughed along with someone they love and wished they hadn’t.
For more family betrayals and jaw-dropping claims, read the mother-in-law who swore she’d bought into a $3.6 million jackpot and the mom who used the spare key after the hailstorm. And for one more family mystery with a hidden clue, check out Mom’s tape about where Dad kept the Christmas money.
