The Braid I Learned for My Wife

How we got there

Carrie had her stroke on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, in front of twenty-two third graders. She was writing a spelling list on the whiteboard and the marker slid out of her hand and she could not make her mouth say the word she was trying to say.

A little boy named Owen ran down the hall for the principal. I will love that child until I die. They had her in the ambulance inside fifteen minutes, and the helicopter met it in a field outside of town and flew her to Columbia.

She was forty years old. The doctors said it was a clot, and that young people have them more than anybody wants to believe, and that she was lucky. It took me about a month to stop hating the word lucky.

She was in the hospital for a week and in inpatient rehab for two more. When she came home the week before Christmas she could walk with a quad cane and she could talk, and her right hand lay in her lap like it belonged to somebody else.

The therapists said months. Outpatient therapy three days a week at the hospital in Kirksville, forty minutes each way. Occupational therapy for the hand, physical therapy for the leg. Exercises at home every night with a ball of putty and a pegboard.

I weld for the implement dealer out on the highway. Planters, grain carts, the occasional combine head somebody backed into a light pole. It is good work and it is steady, but it is not the kind of place that holds your job open forever.

I had burned every vacation day I had and some I did not have sitting in that hospital in Columbia. My boss, Dale, had been more than fair. But by Christmas he needed me back, and I needed the paycheck worse than he needed me.

That was when Tonya called.

Tonya is Carrie’s big sister, four years older. Her divorce had gone through in the summer. She had been working at the bank branch in Chillicothe until it merged and closed in September, and she was staying in a friend’s spare room while she looked.

“I can come stay,” she said on the phone. “I can drive her to therapy and get her lunch and be there in case she falls. I’m between things anyway.”

“Tonya, that would be a lifesaver,” I said. I meant it.

There was a pause on the line. Then she said, “I’d have to stop looking for work, though, Matt. I’d be giving that up. I can’t do it for nothing.”

I asked her what she had in mind. She said three hundred a week. I said that was fair. We shook on it over the phone, which is a thing you can do in northern Missouri, and she came the Sunday after Christmas with two suitcases and her pillow.

Eight weeks. Three hundred a week. Twenty-four hundred dollars, which is real money in our house. I paid it every Friday in cash out of the envelope in my dresser, and I thanked her every single time.

The porch

The first two weeks Tonya did everything she said she would. She drove Carrie to Kirksville on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. She heated soup. She sat in the next room in case Carrie got up too fast.

Somewhere in the third week it started to slide. I did not see it at first because I was gone from six in the morning to five thirty at night. I saw the results without seeing the cause.

The dishes from lunch were still in the sink when I got home. Carrie had not done her putty exercises because nobody had set them out. The therapy appointments got made, but Carrie told me Tonya waited in the car on her phone instead of coming in.

And Carrie’s hair.

Carrie has had long hair her whole life. Light brown, past her shoulder blades, thick enough that it took two hair ties. She had worn it the same way since she was a girl: one braid down the back, done in front of the bathroom mirror in about four minutes flat.

She used to braid it while she talked to me about her day. I never once watched how. I wish I had. It is one of those things you see ten thousand times and never look at.

With her right hand the way it was, she could not braid it. She could not even put it in a ponytail. She could brush the front with her left hand if she took her time, and that was all.

So in the mornings before I left, I would run a brush through it as best I could and she would wear it down. And by evening it would be tangled again, because long hair does that, and by Wednesday it would look like this.

I had asked Tonya, once, in the second week, to help Carrie with her hair in the mornings. Tonya had said sure. I believe she did it twice.