The Braid Nobody in Town Understood
So I kept braiding. And I kept my mouth shut. And it grew.
The spring concert was on a Friday in the middle of April.
Our cafetorium is the lunchroom, with a stage built into one end and a curtain that only closes most of the way. They fold the tables against the walls and set out every chair the school owns, and it smells like floor wax and yeast rolls no matter the time of year.
The whole town comes, close to three hundred people. Grandparents down front. Daddies in the back, along the wall by the milk cooler with their caps in their hands. I was one of those.
Hailey had a speaking part. Fifth graders introduce their own songs, one child at the microphone for each. Her music teacher, Miss Carol, had given her one line. “Our next song is ‘This Land Is Your Land.'” She had practiced it in the truck for a week, which I thought was a lot of practice for eight words.
I had done her braid that morning as careful as I ever had. She asked me to put a ribbon at the bottom, a blue one, and I did, though my fingers are not made for bows.
Before the program, the fifth graders lined up in the hallway outside the side door. I had walked Hailey down and was about to go find my wall.
Pam Dunn was arranging children. She had her clipboard.
“Tall ones in the back. Kaylee, front and center, sugar. Hailey.” She stopped, and tilted her head, and did the smile. “Hailey, honey, let’s tuck you on the back riser, at the end. Miss Carol is taking pictures for the yearbook, and we don’t want that to be the only thing anybody sees.”
She did not say what “that” was. She did not have to. She moved my daughter by the shoulders, gently, like shifting a lamp.
Hailey went where she was put. She gathered the braid up in her arms to climb.
Pam turned to the mother next to her. She did not lower her voice.
“Six years,” she said. “Bless her heart. I have half a mind to take her to Donna’s one afternoon while he’s at work and have it done. It would be a kindness. That is not a hairstyle. That is a man who will not bury his wife.”
The other mother saw me first. Her eyes went wide.
Pam turned around. To her credit, she did not flinch. Her hand came up and found my arm.
“Travis. We were just saying how pretty she looks tonight.”
“I heard what you were saying.”
“Well.” She squeezed. “Then you know it comes from love. Every one of us in this hallway wants what’s best for that child.” She looked up at me, and her voice dropped to something soft and reasonable. “I do wish you would just tell us. What on earth are you waiting for?”
There were maybe fifteen people in that hallway. All of them had stopped moving.
I looked at her hand on my sleeve until she took it off.
“Have a good concert, Pam,” I said.
I walked to the back of the cafetorium and I stood against the wall by the milk cooler with my cap in my hands. They were not steady.
What I did not know, was that the side door to the stage was propped open with a chair. And that the back riser, at the end, was four feet from it.