The Braid Nobody in Town Understood

From the back seat, Hailey said, “I have it.”

She did. She was five, and she had never had more than a trim, and it was already to the middle of her back.

Jenny turned around in her seat. I remember she had to do it slowly.

“Baby, that’s a big thing.”

“She wants to sit on it,” Hailey said. Like that settled it.

They did not let it go. On a Sunday afternoon in March, with the wind howling and a roast in the oven, Jenny got the cloth tape out of her sewing basket and stood Hailey up on a kitchen chair.

“Seventeen inches past your shoulder,” she told Hailey. “That’s what Miss Brenda says makes a wig a little girl can sit on. And it has to be seventeen good inches, so we don’t cut it at all between now and then. Not a trim. Not bangs. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s years, Hailey. That’s a long time to brush.”

“Yes.”

Jenny looked at me over the top of our daughter’s head. Then she did the thing that I have thought about every day since.

“And we’re going to pick a day,” she said. “Not just a number. Your twelfth birthday.”

Hailey frowned. “Why so long? It’ll be seventeen way before that.”

“Because right now you’re five, and your mama is sick, and you would give me your shoes if I asked. I want it to be you that decides. A big girl. On that day, if you still want to, then it’s yours to give. And if you don’t,” she took Hailey’s face in her hands, “if you are eight years old and sick to death of it, you cut it off and go play, and that is fine with me. Do you hear me? That is fine.”

She wrote it on an index card in pencil.

17 inches past the shoulder. Hailey’s 12th birthday. Her choice.

She taped it to the inside of the pantry door, down low, where a child could read it.

That night, after Hailey was asleep, Jenny gave me my part.

“You don’t tell anybody,” she said.

“Why not? It’s a good thing. People would be proud of her.”

“That’s why.” She was so tired. She had her head on my chest and there was no hair on it at all. “The minute this town knows, it stops being hers. She’ll be the little girl growing her hair for the sick children. They’ll put her in the church newsletter. They’ll pat her on the head at the co-op. And then if she’s nine years old and wants to quit, she can’t, because she would be quitting in front of everybody.” She took a breath. “I want her to be able to quit, Travis. I want it to be a real choice the whole way. That only works if nobody is watching.”

“They’re going to ask.”

“Let them ask.”

“They’re going to think something.”

“Let them think it about you,” she said. “You can take it. She’s five.”

Jenny died eleven weeks later, in May, with the windows open.

The little girl in the pink cap got well. I am glad to be able to say that.

But Hailey did not quit at eight, or at nine. The summer she turned nine, I held the cloth tape to her shoulder and it read seventeen, and I said, “There’s your number.”

“It’s not my birthday,” she said, and went back outside.