The Braid I Learned for My Wife

Thursday night

I washed my hands at the kitchen sink and dried them on the towel and came around behind Carrie’s chair. I took the brush out of her left hand. She let me, which is how I knew how tired she was.

“Hold still,” I said.

I started at the bottom the way I had seen her do with Ella when Ella was little. It did not matter. My hands are big and there is not much feeling left in the tips of my fingers after twenty-two years of welding. The brush caught and I pulled, and Carrie sucked in her breath.

“Sorry. Sorry, babe.”

“It’s okay.”

It was not okay. I worked at it for twenty minutes with Ella holding the detangler spray, and I got most of it out, but I pulled some out too. There was a nest of her hair in the brush when I was done. Carrie looked at it and then she put her face in her left hand and cried.

She did not cry often. She had not cried when they told her about the hand. She had not cried in rehab when she fell trying to stand up from the toilet. She cried over a hairbrush on a Thursday night in February.

“I used to do it in four minutes,” she said. “Four minutes, Matt. I’m forty-one years old and I can’t do my own hair.”

Ella put her arms around her mother from the side, careful of the right arm. I stood there holding a brush full of hair and I have never felt so useless in my life, and I have been under a combine head when the jack slipped.

Out on the porch, Tonya laughed again.

I went out there. I did not plan what to say. I just opened the door and the cold came in around my ankles and she looked up from her phone with that look people get when they know they are about to hear something.

“Carrie’s hair hasn’t been brushed since Monday,” I said.

“I know. I was going to do it tonight.” She set the phone face down on her knee. “Matt, I’m not a nurse. I’m not a hairdresser. I’m here so she doesn’t fall and so she gets to therapy. That’s what we agreed on.”

“We agreed you’d help her.”

“I do help her.” Her voice went flat and cool. “You go off to work all day. You don’t know what it’s like in this house. I’m doing the best I can for three hundred dollars.”

I had a lot of things I could have said. I did not say any of them. I went back inside and shut the door and Carrie looked at my face and knew exactly what I wanted to do.

“Don’t,” she said.