The Braid Nobody in Town Understood
The note came home in the Thursday folder, tucked between a spelling test and a yellow flyer for the spring concert.
It was typed on PTA letterhead. Somebody had centered a title at the top, in italics, the way you would on a church bulletin.
A Concern, Shared in Love.
I read it standing at the kitchen counter with my boots still on and feedlot dust on my forearms. Hailey was at the table behind me doing fractions, and her braid hung over the back of the chair and down past the seat, and the end of it rested on the linoleum like a rope somebody had dropped.
“Dear Travis,” it said.
“Several of us mothers have noticed Hailey having a hard time managing her hair at school. It was shut in the bus door on the third. It has been stepped on twice in the lunch line. In P.E. she sits out of anything with a ball.
“We understand that things have been difficult in your home without a woman’s guidance, and no one is judging you. But a girl her age needs somebody to tell her when a thing has gone on long enough.
“Donna has kindly agreed to open the shop on a Saturday morning. A few of us would be glad to take Hailey as a treat, at no cost to you. You would not even need to be there.
“We have also shared our concern with Miss Kim, so that the school can support your family.
“In Christian love,
“Pam Dunn, PTA President.”
Under her name were eight more. I knew every one of them. I had welded a trailer hitch for one of their husbands. One of them had brought a ham to my house the week we buried Jenny.
Nine signatures, in nine different pens. That meant it had gone around. It had sat on nine kitchen counters, and nine women had read it and reached for something to sign with.
“Daddy?”
I folded it in half. “Yes ma’am.”
“Is that the one about my hair?”
I turned around. She had not looked up from her fractions. She was eleven years old and she had her mother’s way of asking a thing without making you look at her while you answered.
“How did you know there was one?”
“Kaylee Dunn told me at recess. She said her mom wrote it at their table and she had to be quiet for an hour.” She erased something. “She said it wasn’t mean. She said it was nice.”
“It is nice,” I said. “It’s real nice.”
“Are you mad?”
“No ma’am.”
That was true. I had been tired for six years, and tired does not leave much room. What I felt, standing there with that folded paper, was closer to being weighed. Like the whole town had put me on the scale at the elevator and written down a number.
“Do you want to say anything back?” Hailey asked.
“Do you want me to?”
She thought about it.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
So I put the note in the drawer with the rubber bands and the dead batteries, and I started supper.
I should tell you what they saw, because in fairness to them, they saw plenty.
We live about twenty minutes outside of Canyon, in the flat part of the Texas Panhandle where the wind is a member of the family. Our town has a grain elevator, a co-op, a Baptist church, a Methodist church, a beauty shop with one sink, and an elementary school that goes through fifth grade. After that the bus takes them into Canyon.